This was pure imagination, but not all my own. My wife and I had been tasked to give some art instruction to a friend’s daughter as part of an independent study art class she was in at her local high school. You have to know one thing- I am not a very good teacher.

I had to wrack my brain to come up with teacherly things to have her work on, one of which was to come up with a painting with a clearly defined foreground, midground, and background. I’ve heard other artists talk about this and thought it sounded pretty legit. So she comes in with a simple sketch of a grassy foreground meadow with a dirt path and post-and-rail fence, a midground of a sloping headland, and a background of another distant sloping headland.

All I could think was how these points would be firing on the right swell. Long lefts forever! So being the not-so-great teacher that I was, I got all excited and had her watch while I painted and talked my way through my own version of her concept. I guess I straight up stole it? Depends on how you look at it I suppose. I could have been a good teacher and had her paint alongside me, but I kinda just wanted to paint the thing myself.

I hope she wasn’t bored off her mind, a solid hour of her and my wife sitting there chatting about the painting and asking questions while I painted and sorted out various academic solutions to achieving “atmospheric perspective” and such art teachery sounding things. Like a bad Bob Ross episode, only longer without the edits. But as with much of my art, I was mostly just daydreaming about the waves I wanted to see lining up down these points.

We finished up, I was stoked, everyone was relieved it was over, and the next week she came back to paint her own version. I really can’t say if watching me had helped her much or not.

Art is funny like that. I’ve mostly noticed artists just do what they do, how they do it, and while it’s interesting to see how others approach similar subjects, none of us really care all that much once we have a brush in our hand.