Plein Air Blog

Playing Studio Detective with a Monet Painting

2012-02-09T04:30:00Z

If there were any artist, past or present, into whose studio I could magically transport myself and observe him paint, it would be Claude Monet. I have always been intrigued by his painting style, especially his highly textured and complex surfaces. When I lived in New York, I spent many an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my face pressed close to the Monet canvases in an effort to comprehend his handling of paint. I even had a dream about him once in which I tried to pry some information...(read more)

The Cosmic Dance en Plein Air

2012-01-26T04:58:00Z

Spring in the Hills II by John Hulsey, 5 x 7, oil painting. Whenever we get to feeling that there is nothing really new to be discovered in art or the world, we have to keep in mind that the "undiscovered country" often lies in our own backyards. Recently, scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany discovered that cattle and other large animals tend to organize themselves toward the magnetic poles. They made this discovery by spending six months studying hundreds of Google...(read more)

Don't Let Your Plein-Air Skills Grow Cold

2012-01-10T04:37:00Z

Don't give up your plein air focus over the winter months. Try to paint from life indoors and keep sketching. ( Melting Snow by Ben Fenske, 60 x 75, oil on canvas.) For some of us, winter weather is just a bit too unpredictable and chilly to spend much time outdoor painting. But if you're like me, you don't want to go for several months without making art. So this is the time of the year when I look for art-making activities I can do indoors. Here are a couple of ideas to keep your plein...(read more)

Such a Diversity of Shapes in Her Landscape Paintings

2011-12-29T04:45:00Z

Turquoise Sky 3 , acrylic on panel, 5 x 5. All works by Lisa Snow Lady. I give a lot of credit to professional and semi-professional artists who seek out ongoing training or the advice of peers, even after their initial successes. I firmly believe that working in a vacuum can be hazardous to one's creative health. In my spring 2011 class at Gage Academy , Landscape: Essential Theory and Process , I was fortunate enough to work with such a painter—Lisa Snow Lady. Lisa works in acrylics and...(read more)

Free Video Lesson on Color Strategies in Plein Air Painting

2011-12-08T04:15:00Z

This short video is excerpted from a demonstration I gave at my annual plein air painting workshop in Skagit Valley, Washington. ( Gage Academy of Art , July, 2010.) The video talks about painting strategies in general and gives specific examples of the analogous harmony and complementary color methods. When working outdoors (and in the studio) landscape painters often treat color as a matching exercise. While it is certainly true that working from nature involves following nature's lead, and...(read more)

This One Is From the Heart

2011-11-17T04:32:00Z

Lake Tahoe by Albert Bierstadt, 1868. In their day, the Hudson River School landscape painters were so popular with the public that people would line up and pay a fair amount of money just to view a single painting. So I think it's safe to say that this is the group of artists who put America on the map of the art world. Starting somewhere in the 1830s, their exquisitely detailed, richly colored, often very large canvases attracted worldwide attention. People were fascinated by the world-class...(read more)

Paint the Place You Call Home

2011-11-03T03:30:00Z

We plein-air artists seem to put a lot of emphasis on traveling to far off places to paint, don't we? The fields of Tuscany, the rugged California coast, the farmhouses of the Cotswolds all seem to beckon. And heeding that call can be fantastic. I know from experience that traveling does wonders for providing a fresh dose of creative inspiration. Yet sometimes in our desire to seek out new vistas, we overlook the breadth of outdoor painting possibilities—many as close as our own back yards...(read more)

Don't Set Yourself Up for Failure from the Start

2011-10-28T16:56:00Z

Optimal Orientation of Subject and Artist in Plein Air Before the first daub of paint is squeezed out of the tube and brush is put to canvas, many plein air painters have already set themselves up for failure. How? By selecting a site that doesn't translate well into painting. Just because a scene is beautiful or interesting doesn't necessarily make it a good subject for painting. There are many conditions that can be met to help maximize your ability to translate the scene from the real...(read more)

Tricky Stuff--Limit Your Focus & Expand Your Painting Options

2011-10-25T16:35:00Z

Demonstration: Exploring Composition Through a Limited Focus A "limited focus" isn't limiting at all, but expands our options in composition The first compositional move any painter makes is to apply a limited focus. Whether it be a still life, an interior, a figure, or a landscape (which is the most all-inclusive of subjects), some portion of what we see must be excluded if we are to create a focused, effective composition. As Hans Hoffman put it, we must "eliminate the unnecessary...(read more)

Capturing a Sense of Place--What Does It Mean To You?

2011-10-20T03:32:00Z

When discussing landscape painting , we often hear the phrase "capturing a sense of place." What does that mean to you? To me, it means so much more than just recording the physical attributes of the location. It goes way beyond suggesting the time of day or weather conditions. If a plein air painting is going to give me a "sense" of the place, it has to tell me what the artist felt in being there. It has to give me emotion. It has to show me the head stuff and the heart stuff...(read more)

A Very Different Kind of Landscape Painting

2011-10-06T03:54:00Z

Ernest Lawson (1873 - 1939) came to maturity at the dawn of the 20th century, so his work was modern and gritty and real. His are not the idyllic landscape paintings of Corot , nor are they the dazzling light shows in Monet's plein air paintings . They are tough, and yet there is an elegance and beauty to them as well. Spring Night, Harlem River by Ernest Lawson, oil painting, 1913. Like many of the greats in history, Lawson's style was an amalgamation of what he learned from the artists...(read more)

Please Forgive Me If This Sounds a Little Harsh...

2011-09-22T03:18:00Z

But I think it's time for some straight talk. I've participated in many, many plein air painting critiques over the years, and I can't begin to tell you how often I've been faced with landscape paintings that are a little off. Perhaps it's an ugly red stop sign that distracts from the pastoral mood, or a stand of trees all the same height that deadens the rhythm, or a color palette that's just too dull to hold my interest. And time after time, when I or someone else says,...(read more)

Landscape Painting Lessons from the Masters: Inness

2011-09-08T03:34:00Z

These four oil paintings have something in common. Yes, of course, they were all painted by George Inness (1825-1894), one of the greatest American landscape painters of all time. But there's something else, an incredibly valuable lesson. Have you spotted it yet? Clearing Up by George Inness, oil painting, 1860. Landscape by George Inness, oil painting, c. 1885 Well, we could honor Inness for his decision to evolve over time. He started out as a tight, realistic painter of the Hudson River School...(read more)

Plein Air Paintings Created By Torchlight & Preserved Forever

2011-09-06T03:10:00Z

Drawings of horses in the Chauvet caves. We recently watched the Werner Herzog film, Chauvet: Cave of Forgotten Dreams . Herzog made the film about the prehistoric, 30,000- to 32,000 year-old cave art discovered in 1994 in the Ardeche region of France by three speleologists, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel, and Christiane Hillaire. Chauvet discovered faint air currents emanating from a rock wall near a popular hiking trail and decided to investigate with his team. After digging away rock debris...(read more)

Landscape Painting Lessons from the Masters: Corot

2011-08-30T03:39:00Z

Recollection of Mortefontaine by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, landscape oil painting, 1864. One of my great heroes in art is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), the world-famous French artist who is still considered one of the best landscape artists of all time. His poetic paintings stop me in my tracks and soothe my soul every time I come across one in a book or museum. Corot is often associated with the Barbizon School, but like many of the great artists in history, he was really his own man...(read more)