I have kept a flower garden since I was twelve years old.

That is not a metaphor. I grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky in the 1940s, and from the time I was old enough to tend a plot of ground myself, I had one. I planted it, watered it, and cared for it — a boy who could not have explained why beauty mattered to him, only that it did.

That instinct followed me everywhere. Through medical school. Through the Navy — where when I could not find painting materials, I did crewel embroidery instead, working hundreds of hours into large complex pieces because the creative impulse does not wait for perfect conditions. Through Vietnam and residency and a fifty-year surgical career.

In Louisville I built a greenhouse onto my home. At one point I was raising and caring for three thousand orchid plants simultaneously. My current yard grows two palm trees in a climate that has no business supporting them. They are, against all reasonable expectation, thriving.

I tell you this because it is directly relevant to painting — and to what I teach.

Raising orchids at any serious level requires exactly the skill that painting requires: the ability to truly see what is in front of you without assumption.

You cannot tend three thousand orchid plants by thinking about them generically. Each plant has its own condition, its own response to the light and humidity of the day, its own color signals that tell you whether it is thriving or struggling. The leaves of a healthy orchid have a particular quality of green — a certain luminosity, a specific texture, a way of holding the light. When that quality changes, even subtly, something needs attention.

Reading that change requires seeing — not naming. Not checking a checklist. Not assuming. Looking at what is actually there, in this light, on this day, and responding to what you find.

This is identical to what a painter does standing in front of a landscape.

The tree is not green. It is warm yellow in the sun, cool blue in the shade, violet in the darkest shadows. The mountain is not gray. It shifts toward blue and violet with distance. The shadow is not dark. It is full of reflected color from the sky and the surrounding ground.

A gardener who has truly learned to see plants — to read their color and condition without assumption — has already developed the perceptual foundation of a painter. They may not know it yet. But it is there.

If you have spent time with a garden, with plants, with anything living that requires your careful attention — you are further along than you think. The eye you have developed tending the things you love is the same eye that will serve you at the easel.

We simply learn, together, to point it at a landscape and trust what it sees.

My course 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]