Favorite Plein Air Sites. A Friend Share His

Mark Collins of Charlottesville, VA (www.markcollinswatercolors.com) introduced me to one of his favorite outdoor painting sites today, private property at the top of a mountain above Crozet, VA. The temperature was about 15-degrees cooler than in the valley and the flowering trees were about two weeks behind those in lower elevations. There were spectacular views in all directions, but we set up down hill from top of the mountain so there would be less wind, and we both focused on the Blue Ridge Mountains that were dramatically lit by the light breaking through the clouds.

Mark is primarily a watercolorist, but he enjoys plein air painting in oil and often paints on the mountain, especially when a friend travels and asks him to take care of her place. He enjoys being alone with nothing much to do except paint the many views on the mountain, some intimate and some expansive. I'm looking forward to joining him again as the location is inspiring and give me a better sense of how vast and magnificent the landscape is in the Shenandoah Valley.

Mark Collins (left) and me painting on a mountain above Crozet, Virginia

My 16" x 20" oil painting of the Blue Ridge Mountains

When Plein Air Is a Start, Not a Finish

As I've been challenging myself to work larger on location -- up to 16" x 20" -- I get home with the paintings and immediately notice somethings that are obviously wrong or incomplete. The issues are usually about the range of values and their ability to convey the sense of space, or they relate to areas that aren't sufficiently developed. I find that I get so involved in covering the canvas it 2-3 hours, that I lose the ability to see the pictures objectivily. As I work on resolving those pictures in my studio, I remind myself there is nothing sacred about completing paintings on location. Plein air is a process of gaining inspiration and information from nature, but it isn't the only path to expressing what is observed.

Here's a sequential set of photographs of a painting I did recently on a hill overlooking Fishersville, VA. I'm still trying to decide how I want to resolve the lack of spatial separation and the awkward change of scale in the middle of the canvas, as well as the lack of harmony in the depiction of the houses.

Risking Change

We all talk about risking a change in painting materials & techniques, but to actually make those kinds of significant changes can be daunting. I've decided to take those risks now that I have a new home, studio, and landscape; I can devote more time to my own painting; and I have ideas to work on that were suggested by artists I have interviewed or watched demonstrate.

Among the changes I want to make are the composition of values in my plein air landscape paintings and the palette of colors I use to create those images. Specifically, I want to lighten the value of the shapes in the distance, and I want my color choices to be less dependent on exactly what I observe in nature.

Here are a few of the paintings I've created since establishing these objectives. When working on the first painting (Blue Ridge View, 2013, oil, 16" x 20"), I made an effort to lighten all the values in the distant spaces and darken the foreground shapes in order to project a deeper sense of space. I also pushed the colors in the background towards light purples and blues while pumping up the grays, browns, and purples in the foreground.

When working on the second painting (Road to Charlottesville, 2013, oil, 12" x 12"), I reversed the value composition by making the background shapes dark and those on the right-hand side much lighter than they actually appeared. I also moved the colors toward warmer tones using the new Gamblin Warm White oil paint, as well as warm pigments like yellow ochre, cadmium red, and ultramarine blue.

Finally, the view through the trees (View From Wayne Baptist Church, 2013, 11" x 14"), is also one in which I lightened the background, darkened the foreground, used thicker mixtures of oil color, and pushed the color mixtures towards warm purples, yellows, greens, and browns. By the way, I painted a 9" x 12" snow scene in March from the same parking lot.

Painting New Landscapes in Virginia

New Landscape, New Approaches to Painting in Virginia

I moved from New York to Virginia in December, 2012 after months of not doing any plein air painting. The planning and physical labor of moving out of a house we occupied for 34 years was just too overwhelming to allow time for painting. But that hiatus gave me an opportunity to think about where I wanted to go with my landscape painting and how I might approach a completely new range of scenes. As I switched from painting the Hudson River to the Blue Ridge Mountains, I thought about the advice I passed on from artists featured in PleinAir magazine to the publication's subscribers.

Many of those featured artists recommended painting what one wants to see rather than the details of what one actually sees. That is, they suggested using the landscape as inspiration for paintings that captured the emotional aspects of nature as well as her specific markings. For example, artists like Michael Godfrey and Bryan Mark Taylor talked about the spiritual side of painting; and painters like Gil Dellinger talked about exaggerating what one sees in order to convey what one feels.

I also considered how changing the way I worked with a palette of colors might a significant impact on my paintings, and in particular how a color like ultramarine blue might add more warmth and vibrancy to a picture that a cool blue like cerulean or Prussian blue. In addition, accents of purple made by combining ultramarine blue with alizarin crimson or perylene red could enliven a shadow; and grays made from titanium white, ultramarine blue, and touches of red iron oxide might add clarity and harmony to a painting.

What I wanted to explore was an approach to landscape painting based on somewhat unexpected color combinations that might actually do a better job of expressing what I found to be beautiful about a location. Instead of painting a field of grasses with the tan color I observed, for example, I might be better off starting with a cadmium orange or yellow ochre rather than with titanium white and burnt sienna. And when I thought I saw a light green in the trees, I might achieve more harmony by painting that portion of the landscape with a gray tinted with permanent green light.

I'm including photographs of me with some of my first attempts at painting the Virginia landscape with this new set of objectives. I should also add that in the photographs of me beside the fence I am wearing my most prized possession, the apron my granddaughter, Amanda Deyo, made for me as a Christmas present.

Quick 5" x 7" Sketches

Morning Paintings 

 Boating Scenes 

Wooded Areas Near the Water

I was just in Door County, Wisconsin where I judged the annual plein air festival hosted by the Peninsula School of Art, and I traveled with the 5" x 7" Guerilla Box I bought from Judson's Art Outfitters. It's perfect for travel when there isn't going to be enough time available to justify hauling a big tripod, pochade box, brushes, paints, etc. Like most people who do quick studies, I found that I didn't feel obligated to spend a lot of time planning the paintings or laboring over them. They were just fast, immediate responses to the changing scene. I did two within the space of about 90 minutes.

Summer Hudson River Paintings

It's been a while since I've posted anything, so I thought I would recap what I have been doing this summer. I like painting in series as it helps me quickly decide where to go each time I go out to with my supplies, and I can pick up on the ideas that concerned me during the past couple of sessions. In the spring the theme was woodland streams, and once the warm weather arrived I turned my attention to cloud formations above the Hudson River. Here are a few of the 9" x 12" oil plein air paintings I've done over past couple of months.

And here's one I photographed while I painted it:

Favorite Paintings Back at The Metropolitan Museum

“Heart of the Andes,” by Frederic E. Church (1826-1900), 1859, oil on canvas, 66 1/8 x 119 1/4. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. On the right, three or Church's plein air sketches.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently reopened the American Wing of 26 renovated and enlarged galleries. On display are some of my favorite paintings by Frederic E. Church, Worthington Whittredge, John Singer Sargent, and Thomas Cole. For the first time, those masterpieces are hung next to related plein air studies, sculptures, and period furniture.

For almost a decade, iconic paintings like “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent, “The Heart of the Andes” by Frederic E. Church, and “The Oxbow” by Thomas Cole have been in storage or tucked away in corridors while The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York prepared a new 30,000 square foot group of 26 connected galleries in which to display the masterworks. Now the paintings are presented in galleries devoted to subjects, themes, and periods such as the Hudson River School, the West, American Impressionism, and the Cosmopolitan Sprit. In addition, the museum decided to hang plein air sketches, compositional studies, and sculptural portraits of the artists in close proximity to the studio paintings. 

The centerpiece of the new installation is one of the best-known works in all of American art, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s 1851 painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware”. The renovated galleries afford a dramatic vista toward this monumental canvas. This double-sized gallery showcases Leutze’s iconic work alongside two other masterpieces—Church’s “Heart of the Andes” and Albert Bierstadt’s “Rocky Mountains”— just as they were displayed at the famous 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. These three paintings have been beautifully restored as part of the renovation project.

A special area of the Museum’s website dedicated to the new galleries—including

descriptions of each of the rooms, a floor plan, details about the related programming

and publications, highlighted works of art, and more—can be found at

www.metmuseum.org/americanwing.

"Madame X" (1884), "The Wyndham Sisters" (1899), and "Mr & Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes" (1897)

 by John Singer Sargent back on display at the The Met Museum. 

A sculpture of Thomas Eakins painting that is on display in a gallery devoted to paintings & sculptures of artists' studios. 

“A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), Kaugerskill Clove,” by Sanford Gifford (1823-1880), 1862, oil on canvas. 48 x 39 7/8. On display next to the plein air painting used as a study for the large studio painting.