Archive for the ‘Plein Air Art’ Category
Cape Charles Plein Air Event
Cape Charles, VA, is a small town on the southern end of the Eastern Shore of MD and VA. It is only about 5 miles from the tunnel-bridge that crosses the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and connects the Eastern Shore with Newport News, Virginia Beach and Norfolk.
This past weekend Cape Charles had its annual plein air paint out. Probably a dozen artists painted on Saturday during a rain that poured 2 ¼” of water on the town. Fortunately, Sunday was at least dry, although cloudy. There was a reception Sunday from 5-7 PM and many locals and visitors came. In spite of the rain, I enjoyed the time I spent in Cape Charles and met many new artists and visitors.
Landscape Painters in Studio
Mitchell Albala in his book, “Landscape Painting,” says that “Although the indoor studio is more convenient and comfortable than working on location, it has its own set of challenges. There are many practices that can make the work flow smoother.” Then he mentions a few.
First, good lighting provides two things: enough light and a balanced light between canvas and palette. The best lights are those that produce a bright diffused light. Daylight balanced fluorescent bulbs are an economical and efficient way to create natural, diffuse light throughout your workspace. Otherwise, a pair of tall floor lamps with reflectors facing the ceiling can work well. The room needs to have light or neutral colored walls.
Professional grades of paint have a consistency appropriate for most applications; however, many are too soft for building texture that really holds its shape. You can make a paint stiffer by extracting some of the oil. Spread the paint thinly onto cardboard. In 10 or 15 minutes the excess oil will be absorbed by the board. Then, scrape the paint off the cardboard with your palette knife and place it on your palette. (Thanks, Jenni)
Hudson River School
The Hudson River School was a mid 19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The artist Thomas Cole is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School. Cole took a steamship up the Hudson in the autumn of 1825 and traveled into the eastern Catskill Mountains to paint the first landscapes of the area.
The Hudson River paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration and settlement. The landscapes are characterized by their realistic, detailed and sometimes idealized portrayal of nature. In gathering data for their paintings, the artists would travel to extraordinary and extreme environments which would not permit the act of painting. Sketches and memories would be recorded and the paintings created later in the comfort of the studio.
Comings and Goings
Yesterday I went to Berlin, MD, and picked up the two paintings I did at that Paint Out two weeks ago or so. The Worcester County Arts Council sponsored that event and kindly displayed those paintings for the past two weeks. Then on to Ocean City where I picked up paintings that Betty, Suzanne and I left a month ago for display.
Next week is the Chincoteague, VA, plein air Paint Out. My friend, Val, and I will go on Thursday and paint through Saturday. We’ll have the paintings framed by about 4:30 PM on Saturday and the sale will be from 6-9 PM. The public will have been given notice of the sale and many will attend. This is about the sixth year of the Paint Out and in past years, more than $10,000 in paintings has been realized in those three hours! This is such a fun event! I get to visit with the friends I haven’t seen for a while and meet new ones. I look forward to this plein air event each year.
Drawing
Drawing is an essential foundation skill because it trains your eye to render things accurately. It gives you the ability to place shapes and lines where you want. Don’t forget the keys to drawing: gesture, line, measuring, proportion and negative space. All are essential for the landscape painter.
If you find that your drawing skills are holding you back, take time to get the necessary training. Classes are a great way to improve drawing skills with the one-on-one guidance of an instructor. There are also two excellent books I recommend: Betty Edwards’ classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Brian Curtis’ Drawing from Observation. If you practice drawing 15 minutes each day, in about 6 months you will see a dramatic improvement!
Art is a Language
In his book, Plein Air Painting in Watercolor and Oil, Frank LaLuna states his philosophy that is the foundation of his art. First is the concept that art is a language albeit a nonverbal one. We, the artists, study the grammar of this language so that we may communicate more effectively. But like any language, the ultimate purpose lies in the content of the expression, not in the mastery of its usage.
Second is the concept that art is biographical. A body of work should reflect the life of the artist. When you draw upon your personal experiences, it naturally follows that you will have something meaningful to say in the language of art.
Third is the concept that working from life is the great teacher. Plein air painting teaches artists how to see, which is the foundation of an individual painting technique. Nature gives up her secrets reluctantly and only to those most determined to crack open the mystery. As the great artist-teacher Charles Hawthorne once said, “The artist must show people more – more than they already see, and he must show them with so much understanding that they will recognize it as if they themselves had seen the beauty and the glory.”
The School of Life
According to Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, every year about 900,000 North Americans buy paints and brushes for the first time, and every year 800,000 of them decide that painting is not for them. It seems that at any given time 3% of the population is trying to paint.
On the surface, painting looks easy, satisfying and possibly lucrative. However, after trying it, reality shows that not to be true.
Genn included a little test. He made a list of 12 personality characteristics: curious, philosophical, passionate, energetic, obsessive-compulsive, self motivated/entrepreneurial, loner/non joiner/outsider, hard worker, patient, exhibitionistic, egoist/egotist, individualistic/resistant to prior programming. To test yourself against his findings, give yourself a score of one to ten on each of those characteristics. If you score over 70 out of 120, you’ll be a likely candidate for a life in art. You’ll notice these traits all sidestep the possibility of innate talent. Talent only completes the equation.
Elements of Design – Part 3
Texture is the last fundamental element of visual design. A surface might be smooth or rough. We might represent a rough surface with thick brush strokes of paint, use of a palette knife or even by adding objects to our painting.
Other principles of design that the landscape painter uses are motion, balance, proportion, unity, variety, harmony, pattern, rhythm and emphasis – the focal point. To have a successful painting, the painter needs to be aware of all these elements of design and see that his/her painting observes them.
Information for this article came from Landscape Painting by Mitchell Albala. Published in 2009.
Plein Air Workshop at McCann – Part 2
On Thursday afternoon we went out doors to paint. I found a grove of 6 or 8 hemlock trees to paint. Hemlocks are a kind of evergreen tree: the upper branches have needles, but all the in-between and lower branches are small, barren and grow horizontally, bending downward at the ends. I painted on my square canvas and almost finished the painting.
On Friday, Joanna and I were the only students and we are both oil painters. We went to a creek area with large hemlocks on each side. It took me most of the day to finish my painting, but it is attached.
The under painting shows through somewhat in the brown area at the bottom of the painting, but I’m not sure about the iridescent copper in the under painting. Perhaps I painted over it too thickly. It’s purpose was to make the painting glow.
Simplification
When I decide to do a landscape painting, after I have selected the general scene and cropped it to fit my purpose, my next challenge is to find a way to translate the vast amount of detail in that scene into a coherent statement that makes sense not only to me, but also to a viewer. Copying nature is not possible. The challenge is finding the most essential elements of the landscape and organizing them into a coherent whole.
A landscape painter must find a way to translate a living and complex scene into a set of simpler shapes and patterns that stand for the original scene. The strokes the painter chooses can communicate the same emotion as the actual landscape and serve as an analogy. Simplification is a way of seeing the world at every stage of the painting, not just the beginning stage.
Learning to simplify is not easy. It is a process that evolves through conscious observation and practice. If we follow our essential maxim that “Less is more” then we must learn to see the world in a new way – in its most basic, essential forms.