How learning to paint is like learning to play golf.

Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated. — Arnold Palmer

I used to play a lot of golf when I was younger. I followed all the pros at the time. Arnold Palmer was my favorite. He seemed so genuine and humble. He played back in the days when the top prize for winning a professional tournament was $3,000. I remember reading an interview with Palmer. The interviewer asked Arnie if he had any bitterness toward the younger golfers who, at the time, won $100,000 purses. Arnie’s response was what I would have expected from him. He said he didn’t have any regrets or bitterness. He said that if he had won that much money all at once, he probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it. It seems he was right when you look at a lot of golfers today. They win multi-hundred thousand dollar purses and then disappear into a morass of drugs, women, and depression. I think Arnie was on to something.

Learning to paint

It strikes me golf is a lot like learning to paint. We’ve written before that painting is not rocket science. You can learn the rudiments of art in a few lessons. With apologies to Arnie, “Painting is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.”

In one of our recent emails, we mentioned how we, as artists, tend to critique our work while we are creating. That can be terribly destructive to the creative process. We are our worst critic. In our Master Class, often our students overlook the parts of their paintings that they do extremely well. They tend to overemphasize those areas in which they think they failed.

Comments vs Critiques

We start our Master Class comments with a lesson I learned as a graduate assistant for Dale Carnegie. It’s only then that we begin commenting on our students’ paintings. (We also hate the term critique. It sounds too much like criticize, and we never criticize our students.)

We’ve written before how easy it is to learn Bill’s system, but it takes years to master. Many folks stop learning as soon as they can paint a mountain. They figure that’s all they need to know to begin teaching. Unfortunately, they are wrong, and the people they hurt the most are new painters.

A better way

We think we have a better way to teach folks how to create great art. We have archived some of the best teachings from some of the greatest artists who ever lived. You can not only learn how to paint mountains, but you can take your art skills as far as you want to go with them.

We don’t have one mentor for you; we have seven of them (and more on the way). We also have a support system second to none. Your success as an artist is important to us. We do everything in our power to help you succeed.

“If you have the desire…”

Like golf, painting is easy to learn. The principles are simple, the techniques learnable. It takes years, though, to master the medium and separate yourself from the rest of the artists. That’s what we think is the beauty of this style of oil painting. You can learn a skill that few people possess. As Alexander Master Artist Tom Anderson says, “If you have the desire, we can teach you to paint.”