"Grapefruit Tree and Rooted Honeysuckle" - Progression of my Own Style, Academic to Impressionistic.

  I had some beautiful sunlight to paint this afternoon!  It's been so rainy the past few days, I was started to go crazy; I even thought about setting up my paints outside in the rain!
  This painting below is another painting that I've wanted to do for a few weeks now.  I'm really falling more and more in love with painting en plein air in almost an impressionist style.  I used to paint very academically, which gave me a solid foundation in drawing and proportion, but it left me feeling like I couldn't make a mistake in my paintings.  I'm still very inspired by my academic heroes, such as Bouguereau, but I'm moving in my own direction and trying to paint my own pictures.
 What always interested me about painting was being able to capture a moment in a way that a photograph never could.   From a technical point of view, I'm very impressed with photo-realism and even my new paintings have a photographic feel, but my own goal is never to compete with a photo.  Even when I do my commissioned portraits, where I have to work from photo references, I try and infuse the final painting with something more in terms of color, like and emotion.
​  What I'm saying is that the colors of real life and the atmosphere of everything is just magical and you can't capture it in a photo.  There's also a big difference between painting from life and painting from photos, but that's a topic for another blog post...