I am John Doe North. I paint the layer nobody photographs. Not the mountain, not the sunset, but the forty feet of green between the trail and the trunk, where the light has already been filtered twice before it reaches anything. I work out of a garage studio in a northern city, mostly in oil and watercolor, with charcoal when the shape matters more than the color. Half of what I make starts as a sketchbook page and sits for a season before it earns a panel. If you have been trying to paint a forest and it keeps closing into one flat wall of green, come sit down. That is most of what I teach.