Daily Painting - Feb 6, 2026

I think I'll use this blog post to start talking about my actual process of creating art and specifically the piece shown above for any given day. This piece reiterated a fact about myself that I've known but for some reason haven't really taken the lesson to heart yet. I'll explain the process and then describe what issue I'm talking about when attempting paintings like these.

For Christmas, my younger brother and his wife sent a package containing some local products like toffee and tea, some homemade goodies like biscuit sausage balls, and a couple of books that they thought I would find inspirational for my art practice. One was about Paris, France, and the other about the Olympic mountains in Washington. I do love landscapes, and have tried a few times in various ways to create them, some attempts being better than others in my opinion. So, knowing I had some good reference material, I poked through the Olympic Mountains book, found a suitable image, and did my best to use it as a reference while still trying to use familiar elements from the image.

The shade of green for the grass, the darker green for the trees, a deep blue for shadowed snow, a little white for the snow lit by the sun... I had it all figured out, and for the most part I think I was successful in recreating the image but still in an abstract form. For all intents and purposes, I accomplished my mission. However, I'm not very thrilled with it, and I'll tell you why.

Whenever I try to do any amount of art that is representational of a real place or thing, my brain latches too heavily on the fine details that make that thing what it is. The dark green conifer trees didn't quite resemble trees, which I didn't like. The layering of the dark green and the blue I didn't quite like. The brown bits of exposed dirt I just didn't quite like. The only thing that saved it from being totally painted over was doing a little bit of white over the dark green, to hint at snow stuck to the branches, I guess. All in all, it's fine.

Now, perhaps later I'll look at it and be more content with it; this usually happens with pieces I'm not terribly thrilled about in the moment. Letting it out of my mind for a while and revisiting it helps reframe the piece differently in my mind and I can find the redeeming qualities in it I was somewhat blind to it immediately after its creation. As a creative person, I know all too well the error of seeing something for the fault that only I am aware of and privy to, and not the final finished product everyone else who isn't me gets to see. Much like a chef and his recipes, the restaurant patron doesn't taste how many iterations a recipe went through; they don't know how much time was spent tweaking the ratios of seasonings and spices, nor could they truly be aware of it as they taste the dish. All they know is what they experience between the waiter setting it down in before them, and when the waiter comes to take the (hopefully) empty plate away.

Same with music, the listener doesn't hear how many takes a guitar solo needed before the perfect one was captured. They aren't aware of the late nights spent hashing out lyrics, getting the meter and rhyme scheme perfect, or as close to perfect as possible. They don't hear what tools were used to shape each individual sound so they can all sit together cohesively, and frankly they don't care. As long as what they hear sounds good and fills them with energy or emotion, none of the aforementioned really matters to them. It matters, but only to a few people involved in the song's creation.

Knowing all of this is still a difficult pill to swallow when creating art, but it has come up time and time again over the course of this indefinite project. Sometimes a piece I don't really care for becomes someone's favorite, and the piece I could never part with is never inquired about. So it goes.

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Feb 6, 2026

4" x 4"

Acrylic on Canvas