The First Daily Painting

This is my first daily painting, from August 23, 2012 (6x8" on Raymar panel), and it is bad.  This is a perfect illustration of the principle that being a competent draftsman does not make one a competent painter.  Underneath all this, there is a decent rough sketch of a landscape, which is covered in the paint equivalent of  mud.  This makes me think of Kevin McPherson’s statement in one of his books (and I paraphrase, due to the frailty of memory) that artists do not need to worry about value (lights and darks), they just need to use the right colors and that will take care of value.  Obviously, in this painting I did not use the right colors, because it’s all dark.  The amazing thing is that when I was doing this, I couldn’t see that it was all dark.  Despite a lifetime of doing black-and-white work with a full range of grey values (etchings, drawings, linocuts), my eye was not trained to see value in the form of color.  Daily painting has helped me with this, although a landscape or scene with colors in similar midtone values is still a challenge.