Painting 101 Paint what you see NOT what you know.

Like Edward Hopper said, paint what you see. I’ve often painted scenes, just focusing on the colors and values, only to realize later some of the details that I was actually painting.

A good technique for training yourself to paint or draw what you see is to copy images that are upside down.

I’ve always appreciated a remark attributed to John Singer Sargent on painting en plein air; “I look for a comfortable place to sit,…then I look up.”

There’s another about the landscape that I’ve lost the exacting wording of, but in essence; “You can move or omit an inconvenient tree or fence, but you must be truthful about the hills, mountains, water and landmarks.”

I place reference photos in three degrees of experience and gesalt;
1. The photograph you took yourself standing in that place.
2. The photogragh of a place you’ve been-to and experienced yourself, but someone else framed and shot. Perhaps a historial view, or a different season.
3. The photograph of an unknown place to you.

There is no one right answer or approach. The “draw what you see, not what you know” approach is intuitively understood by beginners to mean that they should focus on patterns of light and dark rather than higher order knowledge of the subject, but it’s advice that many realistic artists will eventually reverse, at least to some extent. Michelangelo couldn’t have accomplished the things he did if he hadn’t studied anatomy in order to better know what he was seeing. Generally speaking, the more we know about the subject, the better we can represent it in a traditional realistic manner.

I’ve done some paintings based on old snapshots where all I have for reference is a small photograph. Blowing it up into a realistic larger image can’t be done simply by trying to copy exactly the patterns of light and dark. This can be problematic when the photograph doesn’t actually provide you enough information to know what some small detail is. I ultimately have to decide what it is I’m seeing so that I’ll know how to best represent it.

In any case, we don’t actually see in 2D images so we’re never actually drawing what we see when working from life. We’re always taking what we know and converting it to an image, but we can choose to focus on different aspects of what we know.

I subscribe to the “paint what you know, not what you see” school.
To me it’s the obvious and correct approach.

I heard a saying once. At first it made no sense to me. It sounded backwards.
“You can’t see something until you know what it is.”

The truth of this statement can be seen easily, if you give some text to copy, to a speaker of a foreign language. The letters will be recognizable, but poorly formed. The letter and word spacing will be off. It will take a long time to do it, as the writer is essentially drawing pictures of letters. Not knowing what the words actually mean, and just copying what they see, results in barely legible writing.

On the other hand, a native speaker can dash off a note in seconds, with hurried and inconsistent letter forms, and it can usually be read by any other native speaker, easily.

Just an example. Not to be taken as 100% true, as some people’s scrawl is readable to nobody but themselves. But you can still see the difference between their writing and the writing of someone copying letters.

If I don’t know what something is, I can’t accurately see – or paint it.

You know, I’ve run into problems of this sort fairly often. For whatever reason, I’ve done a number of paintings based on 19th century photographs — and I’m the kind of painter who likes to get lost in all the fussy details, not the kind who deals in broad brushstrokes and bold gestures.

Just about every old photo will have a passage that will set you to wondering: Just what the hell IS that thing?

Take peasant costume, for example. Old photos don’t have the resolution to show that the shawls are held in place by shawl pins, but you can tell that a pin must be there by the way the material hangs. So there’s nothing for it but to research what those pins looked like.

Realistic 19th century paintings often have details that you can’t see in the photos. So they serve as good reference material. Bouguereau has been of particular aid to me.

In short: You have to try to paint BOTH what you see and what you know (through deduction and research) to be there.