Archive for the ‘Plein Air Art’ Category
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.
Selection and Composition
When I decide to do a landscape painting, one of my first challenges is to decide what I want to paint. Selecting the scene and composing the painting present real challenges. The landscape painter has no control over the lighting or the arrangement of the scene. The color of the light and density of the atmosphere change from minute to minute. Shadows are never fixed.
To create an illusion of depth on a two dimensional surface, artists work with certain visual cues: light and shadow, volume, scale, overlap and perspective. These are not always easy to find in the out of doors. Therefore, one of the essential skills of a landscape painter is selection – the ability to evaluate a scene beforehand and decide if it contains the visual cues which can be translated into an effective painting.
Selection and composition also are concerned with the amount of information in the landscape. In attempting to paint the landscape for the first time, the student is overwhelmed. The maxim “Less is more” comes to mind. We must narrow our field of vision and limit our focus.
Complementary Colors
Complementary colors are two colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. Red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and purple are complements.
If complementary colors are placed side by side, they heighten the visual intensity of each other, especially if they are close in value. When bright red flowers are seen in a field of green, they appear to be even more brilliant.
Neutrals are created when the complement of a color is added, as when yellow is added to purple. Adding the complement to a color reduces the intensity of the color, and it becomes more and more close to neutral. Neutrals also affect how colors advance or recede. If high intensity colors are painted next to neutrals, the neutrals recede and the high intensity colors come forward. Neutrals can also make pure colors appear brighter. Contrast of intensity – bright versus dull – lends greater interest in an oil painting.
The Relativity of Color
If you place two small squares of yellow color on a canvas a few inches apart and surround one with a square of red and the other with a square of green, the two yellows will appear to be different. The one within the red square will appear to be lighter and brighter than the one within the green square.
This illustrates a fundamental truth about color: Color is relative. A color choice can never be evaluated in isolation, but only in the context of the surrounding colors. Each color affects the adjacent color as well as the painting as a whole. In a landscape painting myriad colors can be assigned to the trees and fields, but it is a consistent color strategy that binds them all together.
Working Wet-Into-Wet
Probably one of the greatest challenges for the artist who does oil paintings is working wet-into-wet. Because oil paint dries slowly, the artist must often apply paint over areas that are not dry – thus, wet-into-wet. Imagine drawing the scene with thin paint, then applying a heavier coat on top. Too much blending overworks the colors and creates “mud”.
Two things can help: Start with thinner layers and gradually work to thicker layers. “Thin” does not mean thinned with solvent or medium. Oils straight from the tube are considered lean or thin. If too much solvent or medium is used, the paint becomes slippery and it is harder to get a fresh stroke to stick to it.
Also, don’t overwork the brushstrokes. If you do not want the colors to blend, apply the stroke and leave it. Only a single stroke or two is permitted before the new color will blend with the under layer. It also helps to use a softer brush with a lighter touch.