I think one of the things I love the most about oil painting is that you are always learning and I don’t think you could ever know everything there is to know about oil painting. That’s why this is called What I Learned while Teaching Landscape Painting.
Every ten weeks I teach a new session of Oil Painting Lessons with a new theme. During the Winter Term we focused on Landscape painting as we digested the lessons by Edgar Payne and worked through value, atmosphere, composition, and the challenge of simplifying what we see.
What I didn’t expect was how much it would shift my own work.
Teaching has a way of clarifying things. You say something out loud enough times—about edges softening in the distance, or how light defines form—and eventually you start to see it more clearly yourself.
I always do demonstrations during class – I don’t know how you can teach painting without actually painting. In addition, I worked on some new landscapes at home.
Some of the pieces came directly from those ideas—reducing a scene down to its essential shapes, paying closer attention to temperature shifts, letting light do more of the work.
Others came from places closer to home—familiar roads, open spaces, moments that felt different once I slowed down enough to notice them.
There’s something about landscape painting that resists being rushed. It asks you to look longer than you think you need to.
That might be the biggest thing I took away from this session—not just how to paint a landscape, but how to stay with it a little longer.
Here are some of the paintings I completed. As always, I feel so lucky to spend my days creating,
