This week I focused my studies more on landscapes. It was a real struggle at the beginning, but on the last one I big realization. Just like when you start painting you suddenly see a lot more than before. Your mind interprets what you see and puts in a lot of work to remove things from your perception. For normal people it's best to know that this ball you see is red, but when you start painting realistic, then you might find out that the red ball is desaturated green. And with today's study I had a moment where I saw the reference for what my eyes picked up in it without anything that I recognize in it. The ball was no longer under green lighting, instead it was a soft gradient with a hard edge on one side and a soft edge on the other. It wasn't actually a ball of course. That was just an analogy. I was trying to paint trees and rocks. And I kept running out of time because I tried to paint rocks and leaves. But at the very end things broke. I stopped looking at rocks. I looked at how I saw them instead. There where edges and shapes. Colors and patterns. The rocks had fine edges between them that through ambient occlusion created very dark vertical lines. But that did not matter. I realized that the physics and how the world looks in a photo does not matter. For a moment I looked at how I knew that there are rocks. There was no need for a shadow of a rock to sit on it's edge. All that mattered was that my paint told the eye what the eye needs to know. This feels like a glimpse at how much better of an artist I could be.