Too much information?

For a while now I've been carrying a small sketchbook with me on my frequent walks around town.   I've wanted to draw lately, and this has been a natural way to get started.  Over the past year I've filled a 5" x 7" sketchbook and am now halfway through an even smaller one, measuring 3.5" x 5".  I take almost the same walk every time - a mile down the hill to a little rocky beach, around a small loop, and back up the hill toward home.  And the changes and events I take note of often astound me.  A house burns, a white pine falls on an apple tree, a field is mowed, neighbors get sheep, a flock of ducks visits the cove, the tide is brimming full and then low as low can be.  Having a pocket sketchbook keeps me looking and observing and feeling.  It also has me thinking about how much information I actually need to make a painting.  Maybe 75% of my paintings are made on-site, outside, but I almost always get down the bare bones of the composition, and indications of color, and then ignore the details (the sensory overload) of the scene and concentrate on the painting itself and what it needs, which often has very little to do with what I am looking at in nature.

Here is a sketch from last spring, of one of the oldest houses in the village.   A fire destroyed most of it, and it was boarded up for several months.  I thought about drawing or painting it for a long time.

On one of my walks I finally sat down by the side of the road and did this quick sketch.  Less than a week later the house was demolished.  I loved that old house, and it reminded me very much of the house I grew up in, so I decided to do a painting based only on the sketch and my memory - the clean white of the clapboards, the dark hole in the roof, and the chimneys out there in space, all surrounded by intense spring greens and blue sky.  Here is what I came up with, on a 12" x 18" canvas:

So much of this painting is pure invention, and wild simplification, but I still feel that I got what I was after.  Wreckage and beauty!  How I love them!  What drew me most to the house, besides its obvious and potent symbolism, was this one chimney and the way I could see it going straight down through the attic into the first story:

Even though the house looked fairly stable from the outside, this said otherwise.  It was really just a shell.  Since making this painting, I've gone on to do several others using more pages from my sketchbooks, and it's been a joy.  The results remind me of this, from painter Leon Kroll's book "A Spoken Memoir" (p.104) :

"I never copy nature, although my things are representational.  I always pick what I need out of nature and use it in the design.  But that doesn't interfere with the fact that the representation can be quite plausible."

That really gets me thinking about what I am representing when I paint - what is outside and what is inside.  Both seem so important, and if one is absent the painting falls flat.  The filter of a brief sketch is helping me focus on both, on getting the essential information from both arenas.  And, as winter approaches and the window of time in which I am willing to paint outside firmly closes, it is wonderful to be able to bundle up, grab my sketchbook, head outside, and keep learning to see.