Cheating art!

"Towards Bridlington from Dane's Dyke"
Original watercolour
by
Glenn Marshall
http://glenn-marshall.artistwebsites.com/featured/towards-bridlington-from-danes-dyke-glenn-marshall.html

"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist."
Do you know who said that? All will be revealed....
.......I am very fortunate to live where I do,with just a five minute walk to the beach. We have wonderful beaches here on the east coast, and the ones around Bridlington are among the best!
This is a view towards the town from the beach where Dane's Dyke meets the sea. I remember the first time I visited this wonderful beach at low tide and just how inspired I was (and still am) by this amazing vista. This is painted in  tea time light which makes it a crepuscular painting (go on - look it up).
One of the chief joys of being a painter as opposed to a photographer is that we can change things at will to improve composition, tone or even colour to make our painting more beautiful. For example - the chief attraction here is the light all pointing to and centered upon the distinctive Bridlington skyline but ..was the scene just like this? Of course not. These days anyone can capture exactitude with the modern wonders of digital photography, so the painter must do something more than faithfully reproduce a scene..he must enhance it by putting 'feeling' into it. Every painting contains something of the painter and this is what makes it special and unique. This also explains why no painter ever paints the same scene in the same way as, of course, we are all different.
So do we cheat for the sake of beauty...of course!
And the author of the above quote...David Hockney, Bridlington's most famous resident.