ColetteWatercolours

Capturing the "Heart" of Landscape

Oh, the elusive and fleeting image that my mind sees.​

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Point of view or POV is all the rage now online. Videos taken from the "first person" perspective. But videos or photos do not accurately capture the author’s perception - because point of view is the seeing through the "lens" of the narrator and to understand this view requires understanding how the visual data is interpreted. It is shaped by the author’s life - experiences, biases, knowledge, personality and emotions.

In art there is heart - the heart of the artist or author - even the most photorealistic artist's point of view affects the outcome of the work. 

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Point of view when expressed - in art, in literature, in videography - will be altered by each person’s own experiences, biases, knowledge and personality (even with knowledge of the author’s perception) changing the way that that item is ultimately perceived. It makes chatting to you about what you see in my paintings so fun and interesting.  It's why I sometimes blog, encouraging that conversation to continue.

 

In June I had the opportunity to attend a watercolour course offered by an internationally known local artist, Angela Fehr. The event was offered at Opus on Grandville Island in Vancouver, so here I was traveling approximately 1200 kilometers to take a course with someone who lived under 100 kilometers away from me!  And I would do it again - the course was wonderful and opened my eyes to so many possibilities.

We were reminded that a photograph "sees everything the same" without the lens of point of view even when taken from the same exact spot that our eyes are looking at. 

 

We were all given the same reference photo, an image very familiar to Angela but not necessarily familiar to people from outside of the South Peace of BC. So, the paintings created were unique, each person related to the photograph in their own way, focusing on different things that their heart saw.

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See that's the thing about our eyes and our brain. The eye focuses on what we are directly looking at, and the brain focuses on what our mind’s eyes thinks is important and what we know about the scene. And that my friends is what I try to capture in my paintings - what my mind’s eye has seen and remembered. And holding on to the essence of what the heart sees is the focus of both impressionism and expressionism. While the former captures the fleeting visual sensations of a landscape through loose brushwork, light and colour choices; expressionism is capturing the mental and emotional sensations through the same means. Yet for the most part these two styles are considered opposite - expressionism is the rejection of impressionism, the rejection of portraying things as they really are. But not everyone agrees. I don't, and contemporary artist Erin Hanson doesn't either. You can see her work here. You can see the start of my work below.