Losses and wins

How to become a better painter? That’s an interesting question, and to me perhaps one of the most important ones. You learn more from your losses than your wins.

I was lucky to attend at a very young age the drawing classes of Beatus Nijs. I’ve written about him before. As a painter I am self-taught. Autodidactism has pros and cons. A con might be the slow progress. When I was starting there was no internet yet! I bought dozens of books; good and bad ones. I visited “real” painters, some of them gave useful hints while others were too stingy to share. I saw thousands of paintings in numerous museums and I copied some old masters from time to time. An advantage of self-education however is that you never stop learning! You become, so to speak, your own teacher. You´re on your way to develop a personal method of learning. Through trial and error. I will give you an example. In the past I invented and applied this method: serial recordings.

Sometimes after finishing a portrait, I wondered if a previous stage looked better than the final result. So I started to make every fifteen minutes a snapshot. In hindsight I was able to judge better the whole process. More than once I came to the conclusion that, especially in the final phase, I drove into the ground a lively portrait with good brushwork, by trying to make it “nicer” or more “realistic”. The pitfall of superfluous blending. I tried to avoid that in my next portraits, and so taught myself something.