The painting I want to show you today has never been photographed anywhere on earth. There is no reference photograph. No location that inspired it. No place where this scene actually exists.

I sat down with a sketchpad and a pencil and I drew it from imagination. A rocky coastline opening onto still water. Jagged outcroppings framing a corridor that recedes toward the horizon. A large moon sitting low in a pale sky, its light fracturing across the surface of the water below.

The sketch took twenty minutes.

I titled it The Beauty of Our Sister World.

Then I transferred the sketch lightly to a 24 by 36 inch canvas and painted it. No photograph to consult. No reference to check, only years of carefully seeing what I was looking at. Just the understanding of how moonlight behaves on water, how rock faces catch and lose light depending on their angle, how color temperature shifts from the warm glow near the moon to the cool blue of the upper sky.

Twenty hours of painting time in total. Twenty minutes to find the vision. Twenty hours to realize it.

I share this because I know what beginning painters believe about where paintings come from. They believe that accomplished painters sit down with a clear image already formed in their minds — that the vision arrives whole and the execution follows naturally.

None of that is true, at least not for me.

The twenty minutes I spent sketching this composition was not effortless inspiration. It was over 100 paintings worth of asking the same questions: Where does the eye enter? Where does it travel? Where does it come to rest? What creates depth? What creates mood?

Those questions have become fluent through practice. The answers arrive faster than they used to. But they are still decisions — made one at a time, on a sketchpad, before a single stroke of paint.

I have experienced this kind of creative certainty in three other disciplines across my life. As a microsurgeon — where fifty years of practice made complex procedures feel almost effortless once the preparation was complete. On ski slopes — where forty years of conditioned reflexes took over the moment I pushed off down the hill. And in my greenhouse, where three thousand orchid plants taught me to read the needs of living things through patient, non-assuming observation.

In every case the same thing was true: the preparation creates the conditions for flow. The sketch is the door. Everything after it is flow.

This is what I want every student I work with to understand: the imagination that produced this painting is not a mysterious gift. It is trained observation — applied to something that does not exist yet.

You learn to see what is in front of you. And eventually, when the seeing is deep enough, you can close your eyes and see what has never been there at all.

That is where this journey leads. It begins July 25, 2026. Visit gordensoilpainting.com.

Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Oil Painter·Landscape Painting Instructor·Ear Surgeon (Retired)

Kore Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky

gordensoilpainting.com·[email protected]