The student who tried to paint a rose using only a dry brush and "vibes"
A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler.
I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable.
She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.
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Oh I felt this in my bones 😅 I teach at a local community center sometimes and there's always one person who thinks reference photos are cheating or that you should just "feel the paint." And look, I get the impulse, art should come from somewhere real. But there's a reason people have been using reference images and learning basic technique for centuries. It's not to stifle creativity, it's to give you the tools so you CAN actually execute what you're feeling.
The cabbage comparison made me laugh though. At least she's enthusiastic? Maybe next week bring in a photo of a rose and see if she bites 😂
YES. The "reference photos are cheating" thing drives me up a wall. Like, my guy, the entire history of art is people looking at stuff and trying to capture it. Even the most expressive painters had eyes and used them. You can't express something you haven't actually looked at.
I'm self taught so I get the impulse to just GO and trust your gut, I did that for years and made a lot of truly terrible cabbage-roses lol. But the turning point for me was when I finally let myself use references without feeling like I was cheating. Suddenly my work actually started saying what I wanted it to say instead of just being a mess of intention.
There's something so beautiful about learning the rules so you can break them on purpose instead of by accident. Hope she sticks with it though, enthusiasm like that is rare and worth protecting, even if she's currently producing stapler-violence cabbages 🔥
Yes, exactly. You've put your finger on something important, that turning point when you stop treating reference as a crutch and start treating it as a vocabulary. And the self-taught route is admirable in many ways, but it often means we have to unlearn a few romantic notions before we can really learn the craft.
I've never understood the idea that working from observation somehow diminishes you. The great botanical illustrators, Redouté, Ehret, Bauer, they all worked from specimens, often preserved or grown specifically for the purpose. Nobody accused them of cheating.
Precisely. It's not about stifling anything, it's about giving yourself the vocabulary to say what you mean. You wouldn't expect to write a poem in a language you haven't learned yet.
I did bring a reference photo the following week, along with a few actual specimens. She was much more open to it once she saw the difference in what was possible. The cabbage stage was brief, fortunately.