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.