Overlooking the Mt. Desert Narrows of Frenchman’s Bay (as we have been this week at my Schoodic workshop), the temptation is to simply copy what’s in front of us. That’s understandable. The scene is sublime, the birds are warbling, the ocean rolls ceaselessly towards us. Surely Nature is in charge of what to paint.
Nope. Nature is giving us raw material, not a finished composition. What’s there is too vast to capture in any one landscape painting. (That’s why your vacation snapshots are often so disappointing, by the way.) We must edit and compose ruthlessly, or our viewers will be left starved of the feeling of the place.
When I teach plein air workshops, students often ask whether they can change something. They’re tentative about moving a tree, eliminating a line of spruces or shifting Cadillac Mountain a little to the left. This is especially true of new painters.
A quick note on weekly classes before we get into it
Claim your spot in Painting Nocturnes, Tuesday evenings or Painting Water, Monday evenings. Both are 6-9 PM, starting the week of August 17, 2026, and they’re filling up.
I upload videos of these online classes and you have access to them for as long as there’s YouTube. That means you can review them if you need a refresher or have to cut out early.
There are two answers to this question.
- Even people intimately familiar with the place won’t notice the edits in your landscape painting. They react to the sense of place, not the details.
- The sun is going to rearrange everything in your composition anyway, so why worry about moving a tree?
The landscape is not static. Shadows march across fields. Clouds drift overhead. Tide rises. Wind whistles. Boats glide through your carefully composed picture. The color temperature changes as the day winds through its courses.
Even photography isn’t objective. Every camera lens has a different focal length and field of view, and is set for different apertures and exposures. This changes how the camera records a scene as much as the painter’s eye does.
Your job is to organize visual chaos into something coherent.
How you organize your landscape painting is far more important than whether you’ve placed the rocks in exactly the same place that Nature did. You’ll hold the viewer’s eye when he or she can move naturally through the picture. That depends on the value structure, whether the color relationships feel convincing and whether the painting captures the experience of standing there. I’ve written extensively on the science behind this, starting here and here.
How do we do that?
Sometimes that means simplifying, sometimes it means exaggerating, sometimes it means leaving things out altogether.
The great landscape painters have always edited reality. The Impressionists used optical mixing to simulate the real glitter of light. The Hudson River School rearranged mountains and rivers to strengthen composition and make their point about America’s destiny. Even painstakingly realistic landscape painters like Rackstraw Downes are constantly deciding what deserves attention and what doesn’t.
Is this dishonest?
Of course not. It’s the very essence of painting.
Imagine reading a novel that recorded every conversation, every meal, every minute of every day exactly as it happened. That’s À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, and it’s excruciatingly dull. Writers edit to reveal meaning, and painters should do exactly the same thing.
Instead of asking, “How do I paint what I see?” ask what attracted you to this scene in the first place. That’s the painting; everything else is just border work.
Once painters stop trying to copy every leaf and stone their work becomes more believable. The painting has structure, intention and a clear visual hierarchy that viewers can enter into.
Your job is to interpret the landscape, not copy it.
I have just two workshops left in 2026! Reserve your spot:
- New! Color Clinic 2026 | Rockport, ME, October 3-4, 2026
- New! Composition Week 2026 | Rockport, ME, October 5-9, 2026
- High-Desert Light & Monumental Form | Sedona, AZ, Apr 26, 2027 – Apr 30, 2027
Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:
This is definitely something I need to develop. I think the fact that at one time I planned to double major in journalism and art leads me to think I need to paint what I see. I think it was you who said about a month ago that we need to remember we are not journalists, but artists. Becoming more confident in my ability to take artistic license is in my future.
I hope you get something from Monday’s blog post, which is about why we value loose brushwork.