Need of going to any outdoor location

For a long while, ever since I became serious about on location landscape, one question was always back of the mind. WHY? Why we go to any location, rather than paint in studio from photos or plain imagination? Or memory? Is this insistence due to blind following of impressionists?

Not entirely, though it has a part. Impressionists revolutionized art world, but after some time, revolution stagnates in being establishment. Like communists! So it has been a while that landscape painters, especially in India, have not questioned themselves, on the need or compulsion of going  to a location. And irony is, even the contemporary artist, who look down upon old genres like landscape, insist that going to a spot is a 'must'. So let us ask, why we go to a certain spot and why that particular spot.

Many artists and groups of landscape artists, who go regularly for on location painting, some even weekly, think a lot about bringing in variety while choosing the spots.'Lets go to some hill station; enough of these sea shores'... etc etc. It brings different challenges and questions as a study of different scenes' flora n fauna; and change of architecture style with in city. Fair enough for a beginner. But what about people who have worked for years? Those artists, who are full timers, giving full dedication to landscape; do they also think on these lines? May be not. Yet they do seek different scenes and locations, to bring about variety and induce experiment.

So the question becomes clear. The variety and experiment depend on change of spot or change of vision of the artist? When I travel thousands of miles away from my big city Mumbai, to Himalayas, am I looking for that change in my work in that location? Or going to a river bank will change my work and make it very radically different from my painting of a city road? So what is the creativity of an artist? All these years I have been firm on one principle. That landscape is not an imitation of the nature or architecture . It is an interpretation, borne out of artist's inner search and vision she has acquired over the years of thinking. In essence, the scene in front is just a reference from which the artist has to deviate 'asap' and create her own visual.

But if this need of finding different and suitable locations is justified for the sake of bringing about change and new impetus, then what is all the talk of vision and inner search was about? Is it not the artist's yearning to create his own visual world away from the one already around? 

I think answer is somewhere in the middle.

Go around the world. Not to bring change, but for just refreshing your vision. How I will paint this particular scene, which will not only show some new thought in comparison to my previous works, but also nothing like I have seen before, of this locale by any other artist!

And more importantly, when I am a somewhat prolific painter in water colours and am going to stay at one location for a long time... what new inputs I have brought in my way of thinking? Mind you, way of thinking and vision. Common refrain, of working for few continuous days, of polishing the skills, does not apply to full timers. It should not apply to them as they must be painting full time; hence their skills are already polished and not rusted obviously!

So go around I will say.... keeping in mind that search is always inside and in thoughts. What we see outside is just a reference point!