Sometimes I feel that painting from my imagination is more real than painting from reality.
In the past few years, I have increasingly painted from my imagination more than photographs or life. Painting from my imagination is more real to me because it reflects something deep in my soul — and yours. Here’s why.
Painting from photographs — or better, from life — is good practice for an artist who is learning their craft. It teaches proportion, depth, line, color, value, all that good stuff. Any artist worth their salt needs to know these things to produce good art. And they need to know these rules in order to break them, also to produce good art.
The value in painting from life is that it teaches the artist how to see.

“Boot Country,” 2007. Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.
The artist begins to see color and light and proportion and form like never before. She discovers colors that weren’t there a moment ago because two colors have been put side by side. There are new ways of presenting forms. And new surfaces to touch. New harmonies and discords that evoke a mood.
Once an artist gets to a certain skill level, it’s not enough to present what simply is, but what it means. What’s beneath the surface? What do these colors mean? Why is this figure here and not there?
This is how traditional art techniques have conveyed meaning for centuries. Some artists still work in traditional, “realistic” methods and convey a great deal of meaning. A good artist can arrange a still life, or compose a scene with a sitter and certain objects, or imagine certain objects that aren’t actually in the room, in order to express something they feel is important.
The artist has employed their imagination to make their vision appear on the canvas.
The internal world and the external world are linked: how science says imagination may be more real than you think.
The internal world can have as much an impact on a person as the external. After all, internal things such as our emotions and moods can have a strong effect on our physical well-being.
I took a psychology class in my Freshman year of college. There was a case we studied where research compared the brain patterns of depressed people versus healthy people. While wired up to the equipment that measured brain activity, an otherwise healthy woman was talking about her recent breakup, and she momentarily showed the same patterns as a depressed person.
This may be anecdotal evidence at best, but for me, it confirms that “internal” emotions can have a definite physical effect. Internal pain is just as real as physical pain.
I think at some point, what the artist sees or imagines internally is more real than the external world.
The imagined can be brought forth into reality, because for the artist it was real all along.
For a while, I took photos with my smartphone, edited them digitally, and then painted them. This approach creates some wonderful results. But after a while, I felt like I was simply copying my photographs and painting them. So I have tended toward creating new, imaginary scenes lately. Sometimes what I want to express just isn’t in a photograph that I’ve taken. I might combine several photographs, or let the canvas intuitively guide me to something.
What’s my soul guiding me toward? Is it real? Is it abstract? I can’t always say. For me, it is real the minute I put it onto the canvas. What I do know is that’s what I’m supposed to be doing at that moment. I feel like it’s my job to just watch and listen. I’m just a vessel.

Imaginary landscape, a work in progress – where imagination is more real than any real thing.
What does the artist see when he or she closes their eyes?
By doing this, the artist sees, and asks what is possible: what could happen? What wants to happen?
It’s important to realize that prospettiva isn’t just perspective, but pro-spective, a seeing forth. Your vision is very much informed by who you are, so you see through your own lens of experience and attitude and mindset. True vision is seeing forward. And often that seeing forward happens by first looking inward. Look inward, see what is there. Then look outward, and make that a reality.
What I see inwardly is all the possibility of what can be.