Many artists insist that landscapes be done directly on site, known as "plein air" painting as the French Impressionists did it. You must take your oil or acrylic paints in a box easel, or nowadays Photoshop on your laptop running on battery power, and sit out there having a direct experience with your subject matter. I have tried this many times, with varying results. It is no coincidence that most of the famous "plein air" painters of the nineteenth and twentieth century lived in mild climates such as California or the South of France. And if your painter had the misfortune to live in a chilly climate, it is equally interesting that most of his "plein air" efforts depict summer or tropical scenes.

In other words, art outside is a luxury of the climate and a favorable place to sit. I have tried to do art in the blazing sun, and also in chilly fall dampness, and I just don't see the worth of roasting or being bitten by bugs or freezing my creative butt. There is also the problem of painting outside in the twenty-first century: your lovely landscape or picturesque street is filled with traffic and you are at risk of being rendered non-artistic by a speeding car.

Therefore I, like most other artists who want to depict things outdoors, snap pictures with a little camera, of course a digital one nowadays, and download them into my computer. I have always felt guilty about doing this, traditionalist that I am, because photographs are supposed to destroy the freshness and immediacy of a scene. But for me it's either take a photo or not get the picture at all. All I can hope for is that I can use the photo combined with memories of the scene to compose something which could have been painted outdoors, if it weren't so bloody cold.

"Shenandoah Winter," Acrylic on board, 8" x 10"

I could paint any number of these, since I took lots of photos not only on my recent tour but on previous tours of the same area. I could put cows in if someone asked for them. I could paint pastoral scenes and little houses with porches, and barns, and then go out for real in the summer and paint green trees and soft meadows. I could move to a quaint town in the hills and disappear from the urban world, selling nostalgic scenes to tourists at craft fairs and local galleries. I'd forget about hard stuff like trigonometry, calculus, and physics, and sit in a rocking chair on the porch, fading away in homely obscurity. Is this what I want?….WHOA! Watch out for that pickup truck!

Posted at 3:00 am | link