CAPTURING A FEELING - STEVE GIANNETTI'S PAINTING PROCESS

As you walk through life, some moments stop you in your tracks. Whether it’s something simple—like the sun breaking through scattered clouds on a dewy morning—or something more momentous, like your child’s first steps, we are inclined to pull out our cameras to capture the fleeting and stow it away for safekeeping.

So we snap the picture or capture the clip, and continue forward until something calls us back to it again—this time, as a memory. Looking at the image or video, we realize it wasn’t solely the physical appearance of the moment that made us want to hold on—it was the feeling that welled up inside us, the desire to grasp onto that emotion for a little while longer.

The detail-oriented eye of a camera lens can never fully capture feeling; it’s too focused on the focal point. My dad, Steve, works to find that lost emotion in his paintings.

Photos by Leila Giannetti

“I’m much less interested in doing a painting of a thing; it’s much more about capturing the feeling of a thing,” he says.

One of Steve's paintings, now available for purchase!

On a morning walk, he stumbles upon a scene that holds his attention—our sheep grazing on a hillside, seen through the soft filter of early morning light seeping through the dew. He studies how the light moves through the landscape and how the composition comes together. He takes out his phone and snaps as many photos as he can, hoping that at least one will capture it in its entirety. He then stows the moment away to revisit when he is seated behind his easel.

Once the availability of time and the creative spark overlap, he warms up with a sketch of the scene and then picks a small, square canvas from his collection, pulls it from its plastic, and secures it to the stand. Since he began painting over ten years ago, he has learned that smaller canvases allow him to paint in less time and feel less pressure. This helps him steer clear of an overly analytical mindset that could replace the emotion of the image with the pursuit of perfection.

Water-based oil paints are squeezed from their tubes onto a glass palette. He picks up his brush and mixes the shades into complementary tones to bring his remembered emotion to the canvas.

He starts with an underpainting—a foundational layer of paint that will ground the rest of the composition and add depth to the finished scene. One by one, he builds layers over the top, beginning with the sense of light—the sky and the mist. Around a third of the way through, he is convinced it is a disaster. The colors feel all wrong, and the sense of light is lost. But he has come to expect this pang of discomfort during the creative process.

He moves to the trees and the hillside.

As he transitions from background to foreground, the colors he mixes become more vibrant, just as they do in our field of vision.

The finishing touch is the small sheep nibbling on the grassy slope. Each one is only two lines. His goal isn’t to be photographic; it is to be perceptual—to capture the human experience of the landscape rather than the exact scene itself.

He pops the finished piece into a frame and displays his simplified, preferred version of reality on the shelf next to the rest of his collection.

Watch Steve's process.

If you would like to add one of my dad's paintings to your collection, you can now order one of his original pieces here.

You can also shop all his painting favorites here if you’d like to explore your creativity through paint and a brush.

Love,

Leila