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Category: plein air

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Daydreaming

Canoeing with Shirley and Carol at Adirondack workshop. Life can’t all be fun and games.
I set out this morning to write something deep and serious, but events overtook me. (It’s a temporarily rocky road I’m on.)
Sue and Brad painting in my front garden during roses-and-peony season.
What I really want is to think about painting outdoors in the summer, so here are some scenes from previous seasons. I’ve painted at 10°F—indeed, I’ve painted at 0°F—but not this year.
These are just a small sample of the many people I’ve been privileged to paint with and/or teach over the year, but just looking at good weather and good company reminds me that Spring is—indeed—right around the corner.
Teressa at the swing bridge, Rochester side.
Catherine in my garden.

Kamillah at Lock 32 on the Erie Canal.
Jake and Sam at the Pont de Rennes bridge in downtown Rochester. Can you tell they’re related?
Cindy at her own farm.
Painting on the porch at the Irondequoit Inn.
Quick draw on the floating dock at Camden.

Nancy, Matt and Pamela painting on Monhegan.
Shirley painting at Owl’s Head Light.

A break with Lynne and John at Owl’s Head, ME.
Resting on the Monhegan ferry.
Break time at Camden harbor.
Matt in Highland Park in Rochester.
Painting with Brad at Rye.
Garrett at Port Clyde, ME.

And Kamillah freezing in a late Spring snowstorm in the Adirondacks. A good place to finish this up!
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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The artist in winter

I asked four of my summer workshop students how they’re coping with this unusually cold winter, and what they’re working on.
SUE LEO
“My typography class all semester long thought the angry feminist featured in the movie Helvetica was absurd, as she blamed all the wars and strife in life on this typeface. There are actually hate sites for this font. This woman became a running joke all semester in class and the phrase ‘what the Helvetica’ became a saying. In our last class this week, somehow inspiration struck us,” wrote Sue Leo.

I am currently teaching graphic design, motion graphics and web design at Roberts Wesleyan College as well as managing the Davison Gallery. I recently developed an Art Educators Exhibition at the Gallery to showcase artwork by art educator working in K-12 settings. The goal is for this show to become an annual event. We attracted a wide variety of work and had an opening reception last Friday. The show is up in the Davison Gallery until February 14th. Happily the event was a success for our school and also for the teachers who participated.

LOREN BROWN

Loren Brown working on an abstraction.
For my sixtieth birthday my wife suggested that I take a course with Carol Douglas in the Adirondacks. Having no art training since the age of six, I balked while secretly edging closer to working on my bucket list. Carol’s encouragement and patience fostered a no fear environment for an introduction to “seeing” in a new way.  Experiencing light and color in my familiar, natural scenery and  reflecting that through the medium was at once a technical challenge and a great thrill.
 I have been rambling through efforts in watercolor, acrylic, oil and tempera all lacking much discipline, but much delight. One of my greatest joys was sharing several classes with my youngest daughter who has much talent and has not been actively painting for many years. Carol encouraged her to try oils and in her first attempt created a frame-worthy seascape which she gave to me.
The sheer joy of moments spent contemplating beautiful landscapes, composing a setting to share with fellow students and indeed the internal process of creating art is sublime and wonderful. I spend a lot of time just observing nature in its dance through the seasons, watching the light play an unfolding beauty and majesty. I have asked Carol to endure several more attempts at training me this year in coastal Maine settings. I look forward to the opportunity.
NANCY WOOGEN

Sky oil painting by Nancy Woogen
There are such fond memories I have of my workshop with Carol this past summer in Maine. The surroundings were beautiful but so was our amazing instructor in many ways. Her encouragement and expertise greatly inspired me. I always take a few things away from each workshop. In Carol’s workshop I took more than a few.
Since taking Carol’s workshop, I have been on a roll for sure with my oil painting. I do my watercolors, acrylics and pastels still, but I seem to thrive on oils.
After a glorious and colorful autumn season of plein air painting in oils, I am on a roll with my sky oil painting series in my studio.
Prearranging and premixing tints and shades on my pallet as taught by Carol, I take my pallet box from freezer to studio and paint my heart out. This has made my oil painting more accessible and allowed me more freedom in utilizing colors.
PAMELA CASPER

Nest tornado by Pamela Casper
Winter is a good reason to work inside my studio in Manhattan without having to justify why I am not outside painting.  Over the years I have developed an approach to working indoors which internalizes my outdoor observations of nature and mixes them with my imagination and the worries and concerns I have about the future of the planet.
The first work which employed this approach, in water color on paper, began with the “Tornado series.” This utilized the leitmotif of a tornado as a central formal element. The themes riffed on the metaphor of the tornado as life force, both positive and negative, within the natural world. The subjects went from the disappearance of the bees, fracking and global warming to the natural cycles of death and rebirth.
Recently my work has branched out to include sculptures made of found materials such as barbed wire. Inspired from one of my ‘Nest Tornado’ paintings, I focused on the circular form of the nest and its meaning as a place of life and nurture which is instinctively created by the animal or bird.  I began to wonder what would happen if a species would continue to create nests even if they no longer found wood and grass.  I surmised that yes they would; but the species would not necessarily thrive.  These sculptures are more a warning to safe guard and protect our natural resources.  A bleak outlook; perhaps, that is the effect of winter on the artist.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Romanticizing the familiar

Niagara, 1857, by Frederic Edwin Church
Yesterday, I talked about the differences between what is actually present in a landscape and what an artist paints. This morning I thought I’d look at a subject I know intimately: Niagara Falls.
Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830, Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, the patriarch of the Hudson River School, was interested in celebrating the untamed American wilderness. In Distant View of Niagara Falls, he presses the forest up against the cataracts. Two noble savages observe the view; other figures are distantly present on the Canadian shore.
Although this picture was taken in 1858, it probably better represents what Niagara Falls looked like in 1830 than Cole’s painting does. It’s exactly contemporary with Church’s Niagara.
By 1830, Niagara Falls had been host to white settlement and exploration for almost two centuries. The cataracts themselves were surrounded by factories, thriving towns, and the hotels, shops and other businesses serving the tourist trade. A band of Tuscarora lived in a village on Goat Island (that bit between the cataracts), selling their handicrafts to tourists.
Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867, by Frederic Edwin Church. This view is so accurate to reality that it is no surprise to learn that he had a sepia photograph to use as reference.
In editing the real into the sublime, Cole made the forests and the sky his primary subject. He sets the viewer so far back from the Falls that the grandeur of the scene lies in its setting, not in the cataracts themselves.
Frederic Church’s most well-known canvas of Niagara takes an entirely different approach: he strips out the inconsequential, focusing on the rim of water. This corresponds so exactly to our psychological reaction that we locals think it’s triggering memory. In fact, a hundred thousand viewers flocked to see it in the first two weeks of its debut; most of them had probably never visited Niagara, but they all felt the roar of the Falls. From a strictly visual standpoint, however, it doesn’t reflect reality any more than Cole’s painting did, because Goat Island is much closer than he represented it to be. 
The view (approximately) which Church painted in 1857.
Both Cole and Church sought to eliminate man’s touch on the landscape; both succeeded. Niagara Falls has been painted so many times, by so many first-rate artists, and they almost all share that goal. Here is Bierstadt’s painting, and here is William Morris Hunt’s. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Painting a cold, dark land

Henry Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch  (better known as The Skating Minister) manages to romanticize both the landscape and the Scottish character.
The rise of Romanticism meant that the Scots were no longer defined (by themselves or others) as a marginal, occupied people; they were now dramatic, rugged primitives. What then to do with their landscape, which might be considered by any objective person as intimidating, cold, dark and empty? Romanticize it, of course!
The Falls of Clyde (Corra Linn), by Jacob More (c. 1771)
The actual Corra Linn. Bears a remarkable resemblance to Letchworth, doesn’t it?
Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) is generally considered the founder of the Scottish romantic landscape tradition. Trained under Allen Ramsey as a portrait painter, he abandoned that genre entirely for landscape painting. The generation of landscape painters that followed popularized the romantic view of Scotland. These included Horatio McCulloch, William McTaggart, and Joseph Farquharson. McCullogh’s images of the Scottish highlands, in particular, were reproduced and displayed in homes throughout Great Britain.
Loch Lomond, Horatio McCulloch, 1861
The actual Loch Lomond.
When Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral Castle in 1848, she was operating within a growing fashion for things Scottish. A Scottish Grand Tour developed, with large numbers of English artists flocking to the Highlands to paint and draw. A whole series of seashore artists’ colonies developed in Scotland to cater to that new fad, plein airpainting.
There are obvious aesthetic similarities between the Scottish romantics and their Hudson River counterparts. There are also ideological parallels between the Scots, the Canadian Group of Seven and the Australian Heidelberg School. All three helped define and champion nationalist self-image and goals. And the gap between what was real and what they painted is well worth considering.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Two books I keep recommending that people buy, over and over…

Trouble is, I never remember their titles when I’m asked. 

The first is Kevin Macpherson’s Landscape Painting Inside & Out, which is a nice introduction to plein air painting by an extremely competent teacher and painter. If you like this book, you might also try his Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light &Color.
I was teaching in a small town in New Mexico when the dusty little square suddenly filled with painting students and their teacher, Kevin Macpherson. To me, that was the equivalent of a provincial singer suddenly confronted by Maria Callas, and I was quite unnerved. But he was extremely gracious.

The second book is The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson by David Silcox. If you want to understand the northern landscape, you must study the Group of Seven. However, painters from any region can benefit from studying how they paint into traps, see landscape mosaics, and use stylish design. And their ideology—the power of the Great White North—ain’t bad, either.
Daughter getting married in two days! Hanging on by a thread.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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That mysterious synergy between artists

Pokeweed and ferns set off those florist flowers.
When the creative process is working well between two people, there’s what a friend calls “flow.” Solutions seem to flow naturally into the openings created by problems.
Jennifer Jones makes smashing statement jewelry out of repurposed buttons, gems, earrings, brooches (and the occasional tiny hot sauce bottle). She spends most of her days arranging enamel flowers; who better than to help me arrange fresh ones for my kid’s wedding on Saturday?
Jennifer Jones, hard at work arranging baskets.
We chose the flower colors weeks ago (with the bride’s connivance, of course) and were quite smug about them. And they worked fine in the bouquets. But when we got to the flowers for the church, they were, frankly, boring.
Jennifer stood back, eyeballing her creation, and asked, “You got any pokeweed in your back garden?” The chances of someone deliberately leaving pokeweed in one of our highly-manicured, postage-stamp gardens are nil. But I’ve kept one for two years, ever since costume clothier Gail Kellogg Hope and I had a chat about its dyeing properties.
The florist flowers. Yes, that’s goldenrod in the back, and yes, I paid actual money for it (since it’s already passed here in WNY).
Pokeweed has flashy bright-pink stems, large lance-shaped leaves and grape-like clusters of dark purple berries. (Evidently it is used in folk medicine and food in some cultures, but since it also contains plant toxins, I steer clear of it as a food source.)
I went out with a flashlight and clipped several stems of pokeweed and a few ferns, which are now turning gold. The result was far better than anything I could have expected from the florist blooms alone.
My cousins run a fantastic flower shop called Flowerflower. They specialize in using native plants, but since they’re in Australia, that tends to run to crazy-looking banksias and other things suited to their topsy-turvy continent. Yet somehow the pokeweed seems just as exotic, even though it’s as common as dirt in American farmyards.
The final count—27 vases, two baskets, seven bouquets, four corsages, 11 boutonnieres. Oh, and there will be no painting class on Saturday! â˜ş

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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It was a gorgeous summer in Rochester, too…

Clouds over Barben Farm in Honeoye Falls.
This week, I’m taking a look back at my summer, both in Maine and in Rochester. 
Catherine, Sandy and Carol at Powder Mills Park in Pittsford.
We often light on a place here in Rochester and paint there through a season, but this year we were gypsies.
Perhaps the nicest thing about this summer was the opportunity to work with so many new artists. In particular, I loved the challenge of starting to teach Amy Vail to draw.
The weather in Rochester seemed to be perfect more often than not—clear and bright, and never too hot. We would head for shelters on the threat of rain, but it usually didn’t materialize.

There are many good options at Schoen Place. This one provides some cover.

Another option at Schoen Place is looking north over one of Pittsford’s remaining working farms.

Isabelle Ekeze watercoloring at High Falls.

Sam Horowitz paints to an audience during the Lilac Festival.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

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Oh, the places we went!

Rocks off Port Clyde.
“It’s opener, out there, in the wide, open air.”
(Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss)
This week, I’m taking a look back at my summer, both in Maine and in Rochester. 
There are more places to paint in the Rockland area than we can ever explore in a single week, but here are a few of the ones we visited.
Painting among the trees. (Photo courtesy of Christine Haley)

Beautiful Camden harbor, with its fleet of schooners.

Chickens on Monhegan. (Photo courtesy of Nancy Woogen)

Owl’s Head view.

Tennant’s Harbor view.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Little Ol’ Me

New York Catskill Farm, pastel. I decided to shun-pike from New York City to Rochester after Rye Painters on Location one year, and found this fantastic site along the way.
I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is in the air. I’m leaving some fall landscapes for you.
As I’m fishing through my memory for autumn paintings, I realize I’ve painted a heck of a lot of them myself.  Perhaps that’s because the Northeast is so glorious in the fall.

So here is a tour of some places I love to paint. I hope you get a sense of the spirit of place that drives my painting:
Nunda Autumn, pastel. This is the view from the Kellogg farm in the Genesee Valley, and I wish I could get back there soon to paint again.
Finger Lakes marshes in autumn. I have painted in the Finger Lakes more than anywhere else (often with my former painting partner Marilyn Feinberg). It’s where I realized that northeast landscapes are not about depth of field; they are about the tapestry of surface.
The Dugs in Autumn. Right after the Finger Lakes come the lower Adirondacks. This is a marsh formed by a beaver dam just north of Speculator.
Maine Surf. And then there’s Maine. Beautiful in every season. I painted this in Rockport several years ago, during a nice rainstorm.
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Magic Carpet Ride

Lacey autumn shadows at Highland Park in Rochester.
I am back in Maine and left you a week’s worth of posts, except that yesterday was too wonderful in Rochester to ignore—about 70° F, still air, lovely sky, and good friends.  So why not share our perfect autumn weather so you can enjoy it vicariously along with us?
Virginia draws Lyn painting the Conservatory.
A tropical bougainvillea sneaks its way out of the Conservatory window. It’ll be pulling that finger back inside soon enough!
Rumor has it that it will continue all week, at least here in Rockland. The Northeast in autumn means cool nights, warm days, clear skies, and leaves that crackle underfoot and powerfully scent the air. We’re at the height of fall foliage, so if you can somehow catch a magic carpet ride to Maine and join us for this week of painting, you will not be disappointed.
Carol Thiel painting in the shade.
It was a gorgeous sunrise, there is a clearing sky, and I am off to organize my car and welcome our guests. Blessings! Peace!
Carol drawing in the shade. The power of modern graphics–she reminds me of the start-up screen on my Kindle.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!