I don’t particularly like landscapes done in acrylic pouring techniques. It’s hard to breath life into them. How do you create the illusion of light and shadows by flipping a cup filled with layered paints? It also requires an understanding of drawing and perspective–something I don’t possess at all–in case that some details need to be tweaked later, and they usually do. Most of all, it implies a bit of preliminary planning: what will be in the foreground, the background, where to put the horizon line, etc.

And I’m not god at that. I don’t plan much when I write–I plant seeds and let them grow. When I paint, I rarely go beyond choosing the color palette, the canvas size and the technique. My best paintings–those that made me happiest, that is–were created without much more that that.

Nonetheless, there is one artist, Chris Schneider, whose acrylic abstract landscapes are astonishing. She has inspired me to try, so I did some light planning and came up with this… seascape? riverscape? marsh?

If I had any talent for drawing, now it would come in handy.

Oh, well. The dark blue part in the middle looks kinda Castle Mountain. What is in the foreground is anyone’s guess, but I like the sky. My Instagram buddies seemed to appreciate it, though. One of them commented, “It looks like somewhere I would want to go”. One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever been graced by.

An observation, while I’m here. As much as the art of (amateur) painting is different from the art of (amateur) writing, so much is the painting community different from the writing community. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare them since they’re so dissimilar, but I belong to the both and, in my experience, the former often tends to be clicquey and elitist, competitive, obsessed with rules and prone to criticism; the latter is indefinitely more open, accepting and supportive. Interesting, isn’t it?