The Biggest Lie in Painting

Why “paint what you see” might be the worst advice you’ll ever follow.

All figural painting is also Abstraction

Advanced Oils – Flat Earthers and Illusionists

A Lesson from How Painters Think

Today’s lesson in Advanced Oils takes its cue from one of the big chapters in my forthcoming book How Painters Think—a deep dive into the single biggest, most obvious fact about painting that most painters manage to ignore:

Paintings are flat. The world isn’t.

That simple, awkward truth is the point where all painters, throughout history, have had to make a choice. Do you try to make your painting look as if it’s not flat (hello, illusionists)? Or do you accept it, lean into it, and make the flatness part of the point (welcome, flat earthers—not the conspiracy kind, I promise).

This is not just a technical question; it’s a philosophical one. It decides whether you’ll spend your career gently lying to people in the service of realism, or gleefully showing your hand and saying, “Yes, it’s paint. Get over it.”

The Folly of Observation

The temptation, especially for realists, is to believe that if you copy what you see exactly, you’ll end up with truth. But in painting, accuracy is rarely the same as reality. John Constable discovered this when he painted the grass in Suffolk summer green instead of the conventionally approved “olivey brown” foreground of his time. He was right—he painted what he saw—but he was also wrong, because those greens, unadjusted, rocketed forward in the composition like broccoli on a trampoline.

That’s the realist’s paradox: to make something look real, you often have to paint it wrong.

And if that sounds suspiciously like cheating, you’re starting to see why the whole “realism” thing is trickier than it appears.

The Illusionists and the Flat Earthers

On one side, the illusionists use shading, perspective, aerial perspective, and colour temperature shifts to trick your eye into believing a flat surface is a 3D world. On the other side, the flat earthers paint flat pictures on purpose. Not because they can’t do realism, but because they’re more interested in what paint can say than what it can pretend to be.

Many great painters—Titian, Velázquez, Richter—have danced between both approaches. Because once you understand that seeing isn’t passive (the brain is editing, filtering, and lying to you constantly), you stop treating observation as gospel and start treating it as material.

And that, really, is what today’s lesson is about: how to decide whether to serve the illusion or celebrate the flatness—and how to make that choice intentionally, rather than by habit.

Out soon, my new book on thinking yourself towards better paintings

From Lesson to Book

This is just a taste of the territory How Painters Think will cover. When it’s finished, the book will run to 50–80,000 words and tackle all the big questions:

• Why you paint the way you do

• How to make conscious, deliberate stylistic choices

• What observation is really for in painting

• And why the most interesting paintings aren’t always the most accurate

The book will be available exclusively from the Martin Kinnear Studio as an eBook—and if you’ve enjoyed today’s lesson, you’ll find the whole book works the same way: a mix of art history, practical insight, and the kind of big-picture thinking that can change the way you paint forever.

Advanced Oils Prep for the New School Year ....

For now, in the studio, we’ll take this idea of flatness vs illusion and put it straight to work. You’ll learn to recognise when you’re making something convincing, when you’re making something felt, and when you’re doing both. Because the real skill is not picking a camp—it’s knowing when to switch sides.

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