Originality in art is not something we learn; it’s something we are. Your originality is with you from the very beginning, and you couldn’t change it or get rid of it, even if you wanted to. It’s as much a part of you as your signature, the sound of your voice, or the way you think. That uniqueness is your greatest artistic asset.

We call what we do Fine Art because it is, literally, a refining process. Our human minds can only think about one thing at a time, and our eyes can only focus on one thing at a time. Because of the vastness, profusion, diversity, and complexity of nature, for example, it would be humanly impossible to actually depict it “just like it is.”

The word composition refers to refining and making choices about what to include in our depiction of the subject. No one else can decide for you what you find most important, beautiful, or dramatic. What you select will be the beginning of your original concept. Where you decide to depict your chosen objects on your painting surface and how they will appear will produce a design and reveal your unique, innovative, original thinking. Every brush stroke represents a choice and decision you’ve made, good or bad.

The layman may believe that the function of art is limited to the recording of a ready-made natural beauty or the imitation of reality as accurately as manual skills permit. The artist and critic oppose this view. They are concerned with realism of a different kind. They are interested in the underlying importance as communicated through the language of art, rather than only surface appearances.

Art is, and always has been, a means of communication. Cave drawings done eons ago depict images and tell stories. Those primitive illustrations were first in the mind of the artist. They are imbued with expressions of awe, fear, and respect. They convey information about the hunt or traumatic experiences The painters portrayed their impressions through a system of visual descriptions. And that, in essence, is the purpose and merit of all representation in art even today. Only the means have changed.

We artists point the finger of discovery. Our work is a show and tell process, and the telling is far more important than the showing. In other words, it’s not the end result in itself that is evaluated; it’s how well that end result communicates what the artist had to “say” and the compositional relationships that produce the effective communication.

Goethe said, “Art is art because it is not nature.” He meant that art begins where the artist departs from a strict imitation of nature and begins to depict things, not necessarily as they are, but as he wants them to be. In other words, as I like to say about my own work, “There’s more Don Foster than authenticity.”

We are all unique in our approach, and there is no one correct way to depict anything that automatically eliminates all other possibilities. In fact, there are as many ways to paint a picture as there are people to paint them. Becoming infected with the copy-habit virus and being limited to poor imitations of another’s choices, decisions and How -To methods have nothing to do with creativity or originality.

It’s a time-consuming mistake to think that you cannot be creative or original until you learn how to draw or paint. Artistic merit is not possible until we begin doing our own thing, and we can do that with our first attempt.

This is what our web site, www.artistsworkshop.com, and our CD-ROM art course are all about.