Thanks. This one actually looks fairly impressionist-ish irl. Kinda the further back you stand, the more it looks like it could be a photo. I am referencing a photo, however. Mike took the pic, and commissioned me to paint it. I charged him 1ETH. I'm considering always charging 1ETH. :) I don't think I have a direction yet, or that I have painted enough to develop one. I'm still learning some serious basics IMO, and I think I'd be fooling myself to consider style/direction much yet. I definitely try to put feeling into it, but that's more about my process than the end product. I just want to have what it takes. I don't yet, and that's where my focus is. It doesn't take much searching to find contemporary painters that kick my ass. To improve, when I go to a museum, I'm paying attention to Bierstadt, Inness, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, John Henry Twatchman, JMW Turner, Monet, and always Singer Sargent. Ideally, I think what should happen, is that you put brush to canvas (wood for me), and people can't help but give time to what you've done. I feel like every painting is a step towards that, which is one reason I enjoy it so much.
Your note reminds me a little of what Richard Feynman, Noble-winning physicist, said about art:I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.