Why Can’t I Quit ’em?

Every time I try to paint a landscape, I absolutely hate it. It never looks good, interesting, full of depth and/or life, or anything else I might hope for it to have. So every time I despair and say: “No more landscapes for me. Fuck landscapes. Who says a painter has to be able to do landscapes anyway?”

But for some reason, I keep trying. It doesn’t help that 45% of the tutorials on YouTube show how to paint landscapes. (Another 45% show portraits. Only the last 10% show still life paintings. Source: Mary’s Instant Statistics.)

Plus, somewhere down deep, I would really like to be able to paint en plein aire, out in the wild, painting the view of nature in front of me.

Anyway, today I watched a video from The Danish Painter and got inspired by her take on a Van Gogh painting, so I decided to give it a shot. I didn’t try to copy what she did or what Van Gogh did… I just borrowed some of Erickson’s techniques and made a stormy sky over a yellow field.

It’s not the worse thing I ever painted. 🤣