Painting Larger Canvases Outdoors

Among the challenges I set for myself this summer is to paint larger plein air landscapes -- 16" x 20" and 20" x 20". I wanted to find out if I would be satisfied with pieces that were more loosely brushed and suggestive, to hopefully satisfy collector looking to fill more wall space, and to have a few paintings that would be focal points of an exhibition. As a result doing 6-8 larger paintings, I have established a way of covering more canvas real estate in 3-4 hours on location, balanced detail with gestured brush strokes, and overcome the intimidation of a large white surface.

The 20" x 20" painting of the waterfall in Shenandoah National Park was a greater challenge than I anticipated, mostly because I stupidly took the wrong trail and wound up hauling about 40 pounds of gear for several miles down to the falls. Nevertheless my stupidity could be excused by the sequence of photographs showing its development and by the success of completing the painting. To make me feel better, a woman who lives and works inside the park said I painted her favorite location. At least I stumbled into a picturesque setting.

The completed 20" x 20" painting oil painting

The painting of the path through the trees was painted near the first parking area going north into Shenandoah National Park. The scene called for a clear separation between the cool greens on the left and in the background and the warm trees leading diagonally into the space. I would have worked on this a bit longer, but as often happens at that elevation a storm moved in quickly, thunder demanded my attention, and heavy rains forced me to pack up and head for cover.

Working on a 16" x 20" painting of Blenheim Vineyard

A 16" x 20" painting created in Shenandoah National Park

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 Waterfalls No. 1

The subject in a state park on the border of Massachusetts and New York.

Step 1: The major shapes blocked in in shades of purple and gray

Step 2: Adding a poster-like display of the local colors.

The completed painting: Bash Bish Falls in May, oil, 14 x 11.

I've started painting a series of waterfalls because there is something so appealing about the subject, and because I want a more romantic, atmospheric look to the finished paintings I'm softening edges before the paint dries. I'll add hard edges as I get close to finishing the paintings while leaving some areas soft and gestured. I'm adding linseed oil to the paint mixtures to slow the drying time and therefore allow me to blend the edges after I've blocked in the major shapes.

I did a plein air sketch at one of the most popular waterfalls in the region, Bash Bish Falls, a natural phenomenon on the border of Massachusetts and New York that was drawn and painted dozens of times by the likes of John F. Kensett. I mixed M. Graham's walnut alkyd medium into the oil colors because it is a high-gloss medium that dries more slowly than other alkyd mediums. I wanted to be able to blend the oil colors throughout the painting process and mediums like Galkyd would have caused the paint to dry too quickly. I finished the sketch in about 90 minutes and took photographs I can use to develop a larger studio painting of the scene.

I'm also working on waterfall paintings in my studio that are based on photographs I took in Hawaii and at the New York Botanical Gardens. I'll post those when they are finished.

Painting Winter Landscapes

I don't like painting when the temperature is below50 degrees, but we recently had a warming trend and I was able to get out and spend 90 minutes developing an 8" x 10" plein air sketch. I made sure to work close to the back of my car with all my supplies close at hand, and I positioned myself in the warm sunlight so my fingers wouldn't freeze.

My objective was to capture the range of values and colors in the scene, balancing the dark shapes of the evergreen trees with the light stand of trees and sweeping snow formations. I didn't add a lot of detail because I just wanted a sketch I could later use for a more carefully considered studio painting.

In addition to painting this scene of FDR State Park in Yorktown Heights, New York, I painted two winter scenes based on memories established during trips along the Taconic Parkway on an 8" x 10" Gessobord panel.

Paint Landscapes From Sketches, Memory & Photos

9" x 12" oil sketch done on location near Ste. Stai church in Venice, Italy

Photograph of the location I painted.

The preliminary sketch done with diluted transparent oxide red oil paint on a 20" x 20" canvas.



The initial block-in of the local colors


The finished painting done from the plein air sketch, the photograph, and my memory.

Ever since my trip to Venice in May, 2009, I have been looking at paintings of the city by 19th century artists like Sargent and Whistler, as well as contemporary artists like Steve Rogers (http://www.watercolorsbyrogers.com/) and Len Mizerek (http://www.leonardmizerek.com/). I've become more aware of how those artists exaggerated the color relationships, simplified the complicated spaces, and composed the shapes and values. I decided to respond to that new awareness by painting a studio picture using the oil sketch I did on location, a photograph I took at the same time, and my imagination. I did the oil sketch near Ste. Stai, one of the many Venetian churches that Sargent painted.

In order to emphasize the abstract relationship of shapes, I changed the format of my painting from the horizontal shape of the plein air sketch to a square, increased the contrast between the cool and warm colors, heightened the bright colors, muted the dark- and middle-value colors, and used a palette knife to apply thick layers of paint that would emulate the textures of the ancient walls. Using the palette knife really transformed the painting and I'm sure I will use that technique again in other paintings. My friend Urania Christy Tarbet (http://www.uraniachristytarbet.com/) is sending me a set of palette knives she is now marketing because I told her how much I liked the effects one can get.

Fall Landscape: Composition & Neutral Colors

Here's a attempt to use neutral colors to emphasize strong sunlight on a fall afternoon, and an effort to compose a landscape painting as my friend Jack Beal would recommend. The location is the lake at Teatown Reservation near my home in Westchester County, New York.

Jack always talks about dynamic compositions -- arrangements that move the viewer's eye around and through a picture, and ones that provide areas of energy and rest. He points out that artists used shapes, patterns, and colors to create that kind of dynamism for most of the history of art, but especially in the 16th century when the great Venetian artists Tiepolo and Tintoretto were creating dramatic paintings of biblical and mythological subjects. In this painting I made a deliberate attempt to bend the pathway from the foreground into the middle ground, and then to use the shoreline in the distance as a continuation of that motion. The tree trunks were likewise painted to emphasize that circular motion around the rectangular panel. The row boat mimics the dominant shapes and provides a place of rest for the viewer's eyes (while also suggesting the beginning of a dormant season).

You can see that in the early stages of the painting I neutralized the colors in the background so that the curving shape of the pathway (painted with bright red iron oxide) immediately became the focal area of the composition, and the space where I would paint the brightly colored leaves would first be a contrasting dull background. I added Galkyd medium to the paint so it would quickly dry and I would have no trouble applying the clean bright colors over those neutral gray shapes.

I finished the plein air sketch in about 2 - 1/2 hours, stopping occasionally to talk to the children walking along the path with their parents. As always happens, passersby assumed I was something of an information service and asked me questions about the course of the pathways, whether friends had recently passed by, and if I knew who owned the canoe. They also told me my painting was "charming," "pretty," "almost as good as what Bob Ross would have painted," "just like the actual scene," "similar to Aunt Minnie's watercolors," and "cool."

Painting Venice

What better place to begin talking about painting than Venice, Italy. It's a location that has interested artists for centuries, and there are probably more drawings, prints, and paintings of the floating city than almost any other place. During the 19th century, James A.M.Whistler and Thomas Moran may have sold more prints and paintings of Venice than the other subjects for which they are well known.

One of most popular buildings to paint in Venice is the Ca D'Oro which happened to be directly across from the hotel where I was staying in early June, 2009. A good friend, Peter Carey, took me there for my first visit, and he napped in the afternoons while I wandered through the alleys and along the Grand Canal with my pochade box, 9" x 12" panels, and oil paints.

A good friend, Sondra Freckelton, observed that I always set challenges for myself when I paint, and in Venice the challenge was to separate the drawing process from the application of local colors. That is, instead of following my usual procedure of blocking in large shapes of color and gradually breaking those down into smaller details, I decided the more appropriate method would be to draw the complicated architectural structures with a warm neutral color (red iron oxide, titanium white, and black) thinned with Galkyd fast-drying medium and then brush the colors over the drawing. That allowed me to resolve the design of the buildings before dealing with the actual colors in the scene.

Since that painting trip, I have been trying to take advantage of the power that neutrals have in bringing emphasis to the colors in a painting. That is, mixing complementary colors (red with green, purple with orange, etc.) or adding blacks and grays to color mixtures to lower the intensity (chroma) while maintaining the relative value. The benefit of this is that when I want to bring attention to an area of strong color, I "neutralize" the areas around that color. It goes back to the idea that when you want to make one thing important, you have to reduce the importance of everything around it.

Portrait painter understand this idea and will often refuse to "correct" a painting in front of a client. When the client asks for the cheeks to be more pronounced, for example, the painter knows to darken the area below the cheek bone. If the client actually saw that happening, he or she would think the artist was correcting the wrong thing. That's why I darked the shapes around the columns of the Ca D'Oro so the pink-white walls would appear brighter.

This is only a rough sketch and I intend to create a larger, more finished painting using my oil sketch and photographs to come up with something that captures the experience of Venice more completely. That should keep me busy through the cold winter months.