As summer progresses I always feel mildly ashamed that I do not pick up my art tools and dash out to some beautiful country place to portray attractive pastoral scenes. In another, slower-paced area, perhaps I could do that. But I live in the big city, and it's just not that easy to get out to Pastoralia to sketch. It's at least an hour's drive before you get to real countryside. The ideal for artists since the Impressionists has been to get out into the "plein air," and engage the real world directly. It's an ideal that is probably more praised than done. The last time I actually tried to draw outdoors (this April, in Pennsylvania) large bees kept flying at me, and the bright sun over-illuminated my drawing.

But I am lucky in that I am gifted with what I call my "inner video camera." That is, I can remember a lot about a scene just from looking at it intently. This is especially true with colors, where I can match things from memory. I don't rely completely on memory, of course, since I have plenty of cameras to record what I want to depict. During the era when "plein air" was so romantically recommended, plenty of artists even in the nineteenth century were using photographs as references. These weren't just lower-level daubers; famous luminaries such as Cezanne, Degas, and Van Gogh all used photos in their work.

My landscape art, then, is a compromise between what I actually observe and what I refer to in my photographs. But I can also reproduce things from memory without using photographs, as long as I don't try to copy exact details. I am fascinated by trees and clouds, both their colors and their shapes. I am constantly looking above and around the city buildings and streets to observe how the trees and sky appear at all times of day and night. There is a certain shade of purple-grey in the clouds which I find enchanting; it's not just the artist's pigment "Payne's Grey" (a blue-grey color often used to depict clouds) but a changing variation on the theme of vapor and shadow. Summer haze gives a creamy warmth to the white of sunlit clouds. And foliage offers endless shades of green. I especially love the greyed-out greens of a hot summer day, or the blackish green of leaves in twilight. These are colors which a camera won't always be able to reproduce literally. They are in my mind, recorded with my inner camera. Or perhaps, though I am not outdoors, they are in my "plein air head."

Here are two studies, done from memory, acrylic on paper. Each is about 8.5" x 11".

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