On the Road Back After Art Atrophe

Because I am a glutton for punishment and self-evaluation, I revisited the site of my first plein air painting today. The first took place on 7/6/2013. Let's be clear: my first attempt was a complete disaster. Complete. Utter failure. Have you ever had a moment when your opinion of your skills hits the hard wall that is reality? Ouch. It is like putting on skis after not skiing for 30 years and expecting to traverse the moguls just like the good old days. My first plein air attempt was a brutal wake up call that 30 years of very little artistic endeavor had taken its toll. So, I decided to give it my all for a year and revisit the site a year later to see if I've been able to breathe any life into my dormant artistic skills.

Here's my painting from today on the easel from the field where I was 'out standing'.

I am fairly happy with the barn and the foreground and think that maybe the concerted effort over the last year have awakened my artistic perceptions. However, I'm not back yet: why I got lazy on the tree and phoned it in I'll never know! You can't see it it in the photo above because the umbrella is in the way, but the tree is gnarled and interesting and would have been a nice if I'd done a better job of rendering it. Next time I'll rough in a more interesting shape with darks and then carve out the lights and sky. In fact, I just may revisit that tree again sometime soon...

All in all, I'm pleased with where I'm at after 15 months, and still having a blast knocking the rust off my painting. I've been trying some 6x6 daily paintings this week too and am finding the small size and focused subject matter very liberating. Here are a couple attempts from this week:

I know you're curious, but I'm not emotionally ready to show you my first plein air attempt. However, I think my delicate phsyche can handle showing you 25% of the whole and let you extrapolate the awesomeness of the complete painting....Ouch.

Barn From Wyngrove Cemetery

It is October and I am starting my "30 Days of Painting" that Jan mentioned in her last post. Like her, I have some travel dates planned but will paint every day I am home. I may not complete a painting but I will paint.

So, I had 90 minutes at lunch yesterday to complete a painting and hopped in my car and drove to an old pioneer cemetery from 1850 with gravestones memorializing some of the first settlers in northern Illinois. Nearby is a barn I've admired every morning driving to work and was glad to have an opportunity to paint it. Since I was strapped for time, I had a plan to be very efficient: 1) Simple drawing. 2) Put in darks first. 3) Put in lightest lights next. 4) Every other value should fall in between.

Here's the barn.

This shot above is looking northwest. Looking directly west (below) is a nice view of what those settlers back in 1850 might have seen and I thought it would be fitting to add it to my painting.

I finished the painting below in about 75 minutes so with set up and clean up I was done in 90 minutes.

Barn from Wyngrove Cemetery, Oil on Canvasboard 8"x10"

I have finally arrived!

Hey there!!!   The long lost sibling has finally joined her brother in this awesome painting blog!

Like Ric, I love to paint.   I like to look at art, think about art and fiddle with a paint brush, pastel stick or pencil when ever possible!  I have for the past 30 years!

I particularly enjoy portraiture.  With a portrait commission, one gets an assignment of sorts, which makes the first question of "what do I paint" answered right off the bat!  It is a very structured process, starting with a drawing and slowing working toward more and more detail.   Accuracy is imperative if you want to acheive a likeness to the subject, so they take some time!  I do portraits in pastel and oil and each one can take between 20 and 30 hours to complete.

To hone this craft, a few years back, I attended the Academy of Realist Art in Boston, an atelier which teaches the French academic method of drawing and painting.  This is the instruction which many of the great 19th century masters received,  Having never gone to art school I was thrilled to fill in my gaps of knowledge with the classical training that I had always wanted.  The figure below is done in carbon pencil and took 16 hours a week for a full semester!

Having studied to tighten up my work to achieve mastery of control and precision, I found an unfortunate side effect ensued.  With all that labored scrutiny and attention to detail,  I had beaten down the passionate and intuitive side of painting which was my end desire!   It actually created a bit of an artistic crisis for me as I realized this.  I am now needing to recapture the freedom to paint with less caution and more intuition.  This is hard to do. My brain was asking me to make up my mind!!!  

Enter brother Ric at a family gathering this summer.  Ric was very excited to be attending a Plein Air workshop  taught by one of his favorite artists, Tim Horn.   He jokingly mentioned that there was still space in the class if I wanted to join him!   Long story short, I went and received just the medicine that I needed to start shifting some mental gears.  Change is good!  And laughter is the best medicine of all.   Boy did we laugh!  We yucked it up together as we stumbled and bumbled along the plein air adventure,  loving every minute!

Here is a short list of how my brain was stretched:  Instead of hours and hours spent in front of a portrait, in the plein air workshop, we spent 2 or 4 hours on a painting.  Instead of the controlled lighting of the studio, we were painting outside in the ever changing sunlight.  Instead of needing to narrow my focus to a face or figure, and the little details therein,  outside I needed to observe the whole horizon in front of me and select large shapes and few details! Instead of my pastel box of 600 colors, I was mixing colors from 7 or  8 tubes.   Instead of working on at least a 16"x 20" surface, we worked on 8x10 or smaller.  Wow!  Talk about a brain shift.

But it was just what the doctor ordered.  I loved the boldness and freedom of painting this way and I want to work at getting more proficient.  Painting often is the only way to improve so I intend to join Ric and attempt to do a painting a day for 30 days. I admit, I will have trouble on weekends when we are away, but every day possible I will do a small painting.  I will start out in my studio with a bit more controlled lighting until I gain more mastery of my materials and technique.  

I decided that I would start by selecting white objects and place them on different colored surfaces to learn better how to identify all the colors that comprise what we see as "white"!  I am trying to stay simple.   I am not worried about the end result  - I just want to do one each day.  Friday I did my first painting of a white cup on a brown table, Today I did my second painting.  I white bird house with slate roof on blue fabric.  I did it and I don't hate it.  That is a win/win for me!  

Bird house reference photo

cup reference photo!

Plein Air Do-Over

Two weeks ago I painted a barn and silos on a beautiful day on a sunny day with great clouds. The scene had everything I look for: nice depth, enough contrast and some good compositional possibilities. Here is the scene,

Here is my first attempt. The color and the contrast are okay, but there is more about the painting that I don't much care for like the drawing (leaning silos) and the over worked clouds that distract from everything else.

 I spent the last two weeks thinking about the painting and couldn't help feeling like I blew a good opportunity on a beautiful day. So today when I woke up to a spectacular sunny morning, I decided to try again and revisit the site. Below is my second attempt.

I simplified the scene by removing the clouds and the little tree on the right, and generally ignored the little voice in my head screaming to add more detail. I also worked hard on the value relationships. Overall, I like my second attempt more than the first, and I think it was a valuable experience to paint a scene again after thinking about the things I wish I had done differently for two weeks.

Red, White and...Blue Smoke.

I had a turkey in the smoker today so I needed to stay around and not paint offsite. So I pulled another couple onions out of the garden, one white and one red, and set up next to the smoker. I sometimes had to squint to see the onions through the blue apple wood smoke, but enjoyed the smell of roasting turkey. The sun was hot and I was not too displeased when it occasionally went behind the clouds.

I like the rich reds and purples of the red onion and the subtle creams of the white onion. Both were throwing long shadows. I got so into painting that I forgot about the turkey...it was a bit dry.

Plein Air Easel

Today I tried out my new plein air palette and tripod on the deck. When my sister and I painted together last month, she was using a Coulter Easel, an ingenious folding wooden palette that hooks on to a photographer’s tripod. I had recently made a folding palette so I just bought the same tripod (Slik F740, on eBay) and added the braces that hold the palette to the easel. I also copied the canvas holder too. The picture below is cluttered but hopefully you get the idea.

I’ve also been toying with the idea of making some colored blocks to paint in the sun when I don’t have the time to pack up the car and drive to a location. Several master painters like Tim Horn, Kevin Macpherson and Camille Przewodek suggest painting the value relationships and sunlight on colored blocks is good preparation for painting buildings and other organic shapes found in nature. Expect to see some colored block paintings in future posts.

In the meantime, I’m painting colorful shapes that come out of my garden, like the tomatoes from my previous post. Today I tried to paint ‘Salsa!’ a tomato, jalapeno peppers and a red onion. I didn’t finish, because the subtle purples, reds and blues on the skin of the red onion intrigued me and I found them challenging to mix. I will paint the red onion again soon because I think it can stand all on its own.

Tomatoes

Today I picked a couple tomatoes from the garden. They looked so good on the cutting board I decided to paint them.  The bright August sun made for high contrast and I had to be careful not to overload the color. I wish I had lightened up the foremost tomato's shadow and added the stem to it! Otherwise, it was a great way to spend a lunch hour.

Siblings Paint

In July, my sister Jan flew from Boston to Green Bay to attend a plein air workshop with me. There are more insights and benefits from that workshop than I can begin to list here; suffice it to say the end result of the three day workshop is this blog.

Jan and I have been artistic souls our whole lives. She was the talented older sister I followed into AP Art classes in high school. I can still hear Mr. Milan’s thick Boston accent on the first day in his studio class Sophomore year, “Mr. Lahhson, I hope you’re half as talented as your sistah!” We both took art classes in college, she getting a degree in English with an Art minor and me a degree in Art Education. She’s been the more faithful artist in the intervening years becoming an accomplished portrait artist in oils and she also worked with pastel landscapes.  An art teacher surplus meant I couldn’t find a teaching job so I took another job, and drifted away from art. I would paint a canvas a year, sometime not even that, as other interests and parenthood sent me in opposite directions. I admired Jan’s artwork online and we’d talk about it when we visited, but there was nothing inspiring me the way her portrait work and her studio inspired Jan. That is, until I found myself in Door County WI the week of the Plein Air Festival in 2012. Watching the plein air artists working solely outdoors, and starting and finishing a painting in 2 hours inspired me. I spent the next two years reading, following a few of the artists and broke out the oil paints. Ouch. The years have not been kind (more on that later). Lastly, my wife Maureen surprised me with a workshop in Door County held by my favorite plein air artist (more on him later too) .
 

Jan was in Chicago for a wedding in June and I told her about the workshop and how excited I was for the opportunity to watch an accomplished painter work, to ask questions, and to have him critique my painting.  Much to my delight, Jan signed up too! We both learned a lot over the three days, but so much more than if we had attended alone. Long story short, each day’s insights were made more significant by talking it over with someone else who not only understands art, but understands me. Trying new techniques and talking it over with Jan was huge! Answers became more evident and future direction more clear.  So, we decided to inspire, inform, encourage, and hold each other accountable from afar, using Plein Air Siblinks as our canvas. 

In future posts we will show our most current painting, we’ll explain our thought processes and the reasons behind what we’re working on and our next steps. I have a list a mile long of the ideas I want to try, the articles I want to read, and the paintings I want to paint. Plein Air Siblinks is where I’ll tell Jan, and you, about it all. She’ll be doing the same, and maybe we’ll bring each other a little closer to being better plein air painters.