Posts Tagged ‘en plein air’
Painting the Soy Beans
Suzanne asked me to come to her home to paint en plein air today. Her husband, Carl, plants soy beans and about this time of year they turn a gorgeous orange color. Last year, I painted the soy beans also, so today I tried a different angle.
I arrived about 10 AM and Suzanne had already started on her painting. We visited a short while, then I decided on my location, set up and began. In no time at all my watch said 1 PM and Suzanne brought out sandwiches. We visited again under the shade of a tree at a picnic table in her back yard. If that isn’t a wonderful way to spend a day, I don’t know what is!
Ulrike Arnold
In the June 2010 issue of the Artist’s Magazine there is an article about German artist Ulrike Arnold. She paints with the outdoors. In the past 20 years she has traveled to 5 continents and many countries and paints en plein air with the elements she finds.
She tries to capture the essence of a place by using the pigments from the earth she finds in rock, sand, mud and clay. She crushes them into a fine powder and mixes them with a transparent binder and uses them as her painting pigments.
Recently, she met Marvin Killgore, a meteorite expert who had collected meteorites from Argentina and Greenland. When he sliced the meteorites for study under a microscope, he also had dust which he had kept. He gladly gave Arnold the dust and now she paints with the material from the cosmos as well, creating abstracts with a little bit of heaven right here on earth. Her website is http://www.ulrikearnold.com
Calusa: The Shell Indians
The sun has again smiled on us in SW Florida after many days of rain and/or cold weather. (That’s a relative term). So tomorrow my friend and I plan to paint en plein air at the Randell Research Center at Pineland on Pine Island, northwest of Fort Myers, where the Calusa (kah-LOOS-ah) Indians once lived.
The population of this tribe may have been as many as 50,000 and they controlled most of south Florida from Tampa to Miami for 1500 years. Calusa means “fierce people” and they were the first ones the Spanish wrote home about in 1513.
The Calusa lived along the coast and inner waterways, built homes on stilts and made roofs from Palmetto leaves. They fished for food, used spears to catch eels and turtles and made fish bone arrowheads to hunt for animals such as deer. They used shells for tools and utensils, jewelry and ornaments. Shell spears were made for hunting and fishing, and shell mounds (garbage dumps) are still found on Pine Island. The Calusa died out in the late 1700s due to enemies and diseases brought by Spanish and French explorers.
Morisot: The Independent One
Berthe Morisot (1845-95) was the great granddaughter of Fragonard, an 18th century painter of beautiful women. She refused to study with her stuffy drawing teacher and, instead, painted en plein air with Corot. While copying a Rubens at the Louve, she met Manet, who greatly influenced her work. She, in turn, persuaded him to try open-air painting and brighter colors. She later married his younger brother and put down her brushes to care for the family.
She was treated as an equal by the other Impressionists, receiving her share of condemnation from the critics, to which she just laughed. Like Cassatt, she painted mostly women and children.
She used no outlines, only color to indicate form and volume and her style was even freer than the other Impressionists. In 1875 her works brought higher prices than those of her male colleagues. Her pictures were as pretty as Renoir’s but always had a brooding sadness.