A Painter's Journey - Creating a Vision

In this seven-part series, artist John Hulsey takes you on a visual journey through his outdoor and studio painting processes.

- By John Hulsey

It seems to me that I have spent my life learning to see, both as an individual and an artist. I have found that the process is much more complicated, nuanced and individualistic than simply looking at the world around me. It takes focused attention to really see anything in any meaningful way, and that takes time. However, our modern lives don’t encourage us to spend time just observing the world around us, and this can lead to a kind of myopia. The biological foundations of our visual system evolved in forests and then on the savannas of Africa when our primary attention was either finding food or avoiding becoming it. This is still how most of us process the world—either for danger or for survival success, or because we are personally interested in something particular around us. In the mental hierarchy of attention, all other visual material takes second or third priority or is just ignored. It is why eye witnesses often provide unreliable information to the police. It really depends on the individual. I learned how important this fact is while teaching art students to paint plein air in my Aix-en-Provence workshop more than a decade ago.