Getting good at art is like getting good at a musical instrument.
It's one of those things that you have to practice, and if you don't put in the hours,
you don't get better and better at it.
When people start off in art, they often have the illusion that if they simply have the
inspiration and the talent, it will happen.
If they're not creating great art, they must not have been inspired properly.
Well, you've got to learn to play the instrument.
This episode of Beyond the Gallery is brought to you by Fintana Fine Art, Santa Fe, New
Mexico.
My name is Doug Dawson.
I live in Wheatridge, Colorado, which is just outside Denver.
I'm known primarily as a pastel painter, but I work in pastel and in oil.
For me, I knew from the time I was little that art was an area I had a talent for.
It was about the only positive thing that my teachers and my parents could talk about
that say, well, I don't know what else we can say, but he can draw.
I knew from an early age I had a talent for art, but I rejected it.
I really put it on hold for a long time, partly because it seemed to come so easy for me.
So it was later in life, actually, when I was in college that I came back to art, and
it was more of a compulsion.
I decided that it really gave me more pleasure in life than anything else I could do, and
I made a decision to try to figure out how to make my living as an artist.
When I first started out, it was more about just expressing raw emotion.
I started off as a figure painter.
There's themes involving night theme or setting sun theme or traditional landscape theme.
There are all themes that I've done work in.
I don't really start off, for the most part, with a drawing.
I just start in by blocking in shapes, by shading, as it were, and build up layers of
shading.
In that way, painting is more like sculpture.
It's more about shape and less about the edges of things.
I also get a great deal of pleasure out of just the design aspect of it.
That wasn't as important an element for me when I started.
The longer I've worked, more and more of my pleasure is in just the love of the material
and how it goes down, and in the love of the underlying abstractions of shapes and colors
and values and edge quality and things like that.
Sometimes some of the things that inspire me are other artists work from the past.
I might see somebody who has painted a particular subject, and I think I really like that.
I'll try my hand at that.
Maybe they did it in oil, maybe I'll try my hand at it in pastel.
What somebody did when they first created the banjo, they sort of combined the idea
of a guitar and a drum, and they came up with something that was new and different.
That is part of what I do, but probably most of my painting has to do with simply taking
an idea and exploring a little variation on it.
I found myself in recent years occasionally stopping with a piece and walking away and
leaving it and going on to other pieces.
It's sort of like being able to come back to a crossword puzzle where I still have a
few words that I can fill in, and therefore I'm still involved in it.
Once I've finished off everything, it's no longer part of me.
So I was finding myself just sort of leaving it at a stage where I could still come back
and enjoy being involved with solving a problem.
I want my art to express a feeling.
What I'm after is I would like a painting of mine to evoke a response in the viewer.
That is probably the most confirming thing for me that I've been successful.
If somebody tells me they were really moved by a painting they saw, I look for the visual
melody that will leave somebody humming.
Art that fails to communicate fails, it needs to communicate on some level.
That is the greatest compliment to me is when somebody simply responds on an emotional level
that they see one of my paintings and it causes them to feel something.
This episode of Beyond the Gallery is brought to you by Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, New
Mexico.
For more about Doug Dawson and to see some of his work, please visit ventanafineart.com.
