SCRIBBLE AND DOODLE - A BEAR ON SITE

With mountains reaching to 9000 feet, there is bound to be water somewhere.
Water abounds in Yosemite National Park. Streams, waterfalls, a paradise for hikers, fishermen, and painters. Hubby and kids ( before they were on their own) did the hiking, while I mostly parked after half an hour to paint.

Sorry, I was not able to find the pic of the scene that I am posting for the Scribble and Doodle Window. I am apparently not organized enough with my non-digital pics, LOL!
What I did find, was this pic in one of my albums.





I don't know who had this idea that plein are painting was boring???

This is what we saw when we came to the painting site. This brown bear liked to do painting too! He was anesthetized, and lifted up with a crane.
Then they transported him in a metal cylinder, and let him out in the woods.
That same week, someone was whisked away, on a stretcher hanging below the helicopter.
With all this hoopla I don't know if I can even concentrate on which colors to use!

9 x 12, Watercolor, St.Germain
As you see, this watercolor is very close in approach to the one I posted last week.

For watercolors I mostly use 140 lb. cold pressed Arches watercolor paper. If I make a mistake, this paper can take a scrub of a brush with filbert hair.
For the background and the water in this painting I worked wet-in wet. This means that I wet the paper with a sponge or a plant mister, then I immediately paint with diluted paint on the wet paper.
To blur the edges in the background, I may use paper towel to soak up some of the paint,
or go over the edges with a clean wet paint brush. As you can see, I kept things minimal on details.

Do you see that large scar on the tree trunk?
That reminds me to say something about my job. Part of a psychologist's job is to evaluate people's abilities or aptitude, disabilities in learning, or abnormal behavior. They may give a battery of tests, including drawings that they interpret. However, most of them do not have a basic knowledge of drawing.

There is no standardization on a random sample of people of certain details, such as a cut-off branch in a tree trunk. Or the scar that a cutoff branch leaves in a tree trunk.Crosshatching, for example is a technique, much used in pastel paintings. Yet I have known professionals making an interpretation about the crosshatching!

So, they don't have any foundation for their interpretation of drawings, other than their own notions. Nor do psychologists know enough about the creative mind (still a vast open field for researchers) to make an interpretation.

In case they refer to "many case studies", be well advised that a case study is a case of one individual. Only with a random sample one can rule out skewed findings, due to individual idiosyncrasies, as well as characteristics all these case studies might have in common!

So, if you know or discover a psychologist or psychiatrist who is into this (meaning someone with a doc degree; an MFT has a Masters Degree, and should even less fiddle with this), I hope you print out this little blurb for them to read.

In my opinion, a psychologist needs to be an artist as well, to make any interpretation about people's drawings until standardized tests appear on the horizon. In any case, drawings should be used as a confirmation or illustration, not as a piece of evidence to make one's case for a certain diagnosis in a test report.

Back to the painting. I find it so much more fun to paint, than to make interpretations, LOL.