There is a painting in my home that most people admire without knowing what they are actually looking at.

It is a large cityscape of Prague — the Vltava River in the foreground, a stone bridge crossing to the far bank, grand domed buildings catching warm golden light against a dramatic brooding sky. A lone figure in a small boat on the dark water below. It is moody, atmospheric, and the sky in particular has a quality that is difficult to describe — turbulent and luminous at the same time, as if something significant is about to happen.

I painted it in 1974 from a period photograph of the city. But it is not what the photograph showed. Not exactly.

The first thing I changed was a building. One of the structures on the far bank needed to move — the composition required it. The photograph placed it in a position that created the wrong visual weight, drew the eye to the wrong place, flattened the sense of depth I was after. So I moved it. Painters are allowed to do that. A photograph records what is there. A painting creates what ought to be there.

The second thing I changed was the sky.

The sky in that painting did not come from the photograph of Prague. It came from a photograph I took myself — standing on the fantail of the aircraft carrier I was serving on as a Navy flight surgeon, somewhere in the Pacific, on the voyage home from Vietnam.

I had watched that sunset and photographed it because I knew, with the certainty that painters develop for these things, that I would need it someday. The colors, the cloud formations, the particular quality of light over open water as the sun drops toward the horizon — it was extraordinary. And when I sat down to paint Prague two or three years later, I knew that sky belonged over that river.

The result is a painting that never existed anywhere in the world except on my canvas. Prague's buildings. A composition rearranged for visual truth rather than geographic accuracy. A sky from the Pacific, observed from a ship coming home from a war.

That is what painting actually is.

Not copying. Not documenting. Not reproducing what a camera already captured perfectly well.

Painting is the act of assembling the world as it ought to be seen — drawing from observation, memory, instinct, and the accumulated understanding of how light and color and composition work together to create an emotional truth that no single photograph can contain.

This is what I teach in my landscape painting course. Not how to copy a reference photo faithfully. But how to see — really see — and then how to make decisions. What to move. What to change. What sky belongs over what landscape.

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]