Poetry in watercolor

I've been thinking a lot about a watercolor one of my students did in class on Monday. She sketched a scene from New Mexico, where she had taken a vacation not so long ago. The subject was Pedernal Mountain, the iconic peak painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. The student worked from memory, with no reference photos in sight. I was astonished at her painting at the end of class. In my opinion it was the best she has ever done: transparent washes, luminous color, spontaneous, and fresh. In a word, poetic. To me the painting illustrates what artists can do when they trust their intuition instead of laboring over details in a photograph. What's in your mind's eye?