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Tag: plein air events

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Quantity vs. quality

Home Farm, oil on canvas, 20X24, in an elegant copper frame with white fillet, $2898 includes shipping in continental US.

“I realize that my goals as an artist conflict with what I like and what I’ve learned,” a thoughtful reader wrote (in an actual letter, with a first-class stamp). “While I like to call them plein air ‘festivals’, I know they’re competitions designed to provide income to the host of the festival.” They’re promoted to artists as a way to sell paintings, but not all of them deliver equally.

I’ve been corrected when I’ve called these events ‘competitions’, but that’s exactly what they are. If artists aren’t competing directly for prize money, they’re competing for sales.

Main Street, Owls Head, 16X20, oil on gessoboard, $1,623 unframed.

My correspondent is learning to integrate value sketching and grisaille before going to color. “Taking time to sketch and check values on what I will paint goes against the idea of finishing five or six paintings in five or six days. As it is, I generally finish just three or four paintings in a one-week plein air event!

“Oh, well, I have six to eight months before I apply to one again. That’s plenty of opportunity to speed up my process.”

There’s no doubt that the more you do something, the faster it goes. I am quite capable of doing a value sketch, grisaille and good moderate-size oil painting within a three-hour window, but I’ve been at this a long time.

Another reader visited a large regional festival earlier this year and wrote, “I don’t get why people in the competition bang out crappy paintings in two or three hours instead of spending a day or more doing one good one. You could do four good ones versus six or more crappy ones.

“The current plein air frenzy misses the point of why artists painted outside, historically, and what they really achieved.”

“I think plein air competitions have lowered the quality of plein air painting,” a professional artist told me. He is not talking through his hat; he’s been a prize-winner at top-notch national shows. “That relentless push for quantity floods the market with frankly-mediocre work.”

Blown off my feet, 16×20, $2029, includes shipping in continental US.

What’s ironic is that this friend is, himself, a very fast painter, easily capable of hammering out an excellent painting in three hours. But he’s also very tough on himself, and doesn’t submit work that he doesn’t think is up to his own standard. Painting one fast painting is not the same as pounding out half a dozen or more paintings in a week under pressure. That has a way of dulling your compositional and color sensibilities.

No matter how you go about executing your work for a plein air event, quality, not quantity, ought to be the overriding concern.

“Apple Tree with Swing,” oil on canvas, $2029 framed.

My personal preference is the event in which each artist can submit only one work. These affairs usually give the artist a few days to execute one painting, and the selling prices are, generally, commensurate. I’m able to relax and think carefully about my approach. Furthermore, 35 painters producing 35 works means sales are more consistent than in a show where forty artists each knock out half a dozen works. Many of the resulting 240 paintings are never sold.

Yesterday I quoted a student complaining about mundane landscape paintings. However, that doesn’t answer the greater question, which is: if it’s not any good, what’s the point in painting it?

I like plein air festivals, and I’m sorry that my current schedule doesn’t allow me to participate in more of them. But I also recognize their potential to be corrosive to the very spirit of plein air painting.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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That show you want to get into, and can’t

Schooners in the fog at Camden, 9X12, private collection.

“How do you get into shows like Camden on Canvas?” a reader asked in response to Friday’s post. “It seems like I just keep getting rejected over and over.”

When I was young, I was very naive. I thought I could apply to prestigious shows and I’d automatically get in, because the jurors – of course! – would instantly recognize my genius. It didn’t help that I had some early successes, which were the equivalent of a new golfer hitting a hole-in-one. They didn’t signify anything about my skill, but they made the inevitable rejection that much harder.

Ketch and Schooner, 8X10 in a solid silver leaf frame, $652 includes shipping in the continental US. Lighter fog, 20 years after the above painting, my style has changed but the dock remains the same.

Today I’m no smarter, but I’m far more experienced. I’ve learned the hard way that the competition is fierce. We work our way up to big shows by putting in time and effort at smaller shows. Jurying is subjective, so you might win an award one year, and be rejected another year. (I’ve never had much luck trying to game the system by only applying to shows where I think the jurors will like my work.) Moreover, there are some factors you can’t know, such a gallery’s pressing need to have more of one medium, or artists of a particular demographic, in a show. You can’t take any of it personally.

It’s partly a game of numbers; the more events you apply to, the more you’ll get into. I’m a better painter than I was 25 years ago. I hope to be even better 25 years hence. My success rate is better than it was a quarter-century ago and I expect it will continue to improve.

Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US. This is one of my favorite things I’ve painted in Camden in recent years.

Painting in front of an audience

“I hate painting in front of crowds,” a friend kvetched as we scouted locations. In the case of nerves, as I wrote last week, desensitization helps. But for most experienced painters, the problem isn’t nervousness but distraction.

That’s a harder nut to crack. We are supposed to talk to passers-by, engage them in the painting process, and encourage them to attend the auction or sale. However much that helps business, it can have a toxic impact on your work.

Sometimes I do two paintings: one is a serious entry for the auction, and one is theater. But that’s not always possible.

I cope with frequent interruptions by digging deeper into my process. That way, when I’ve lost the thread, I can go back over my mental checklist. And when I’ve gone completely off the rails, I take a break and go bother some other artist.

There are artists who simply can’t deal with the endless chatter. There are solitary perches even in Camden, where they’ll squirrel themselves away to paint. The downside is that they haven’t established a relationship with their audience, and that’s not good for sales.

Camden Harbor, Midsummer, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

What about the weather?

This has been a very unusual year. Fog is a beautiful part of our climate, but even lifelong Mainers have told me they’ve never seen this much dense fog.

Obviously, I’m not a meteorologist but since we’ve been in a fog pattern for months now, it’s unlikely to change by Friday. What’s a poor artist to do? Shorten the pictorial distance, play up the atmospherics, and, above all, count my blessings. It could be snowing.

Camden on Canvas features “twenty-two notable New England landscape artists [who] will paint, en plein air, at multiple local sites” from this Friday morning to noon on Sunday. Start your tour at the information tent outside the Camden Library’s Atlantic Avenue entrance. There, you’ll find information about us and a map showing where we’re painting. The tent will be open from 9 to 5 Friday and Saturday, and 9 to noon on Sunday.

The reception and auction will be Sunday, July 23, 4 to 6 PM, and features Kaja Veilleux, who’s the most entertaining and professional art auctioneer I’ve ever worked with. Tickets are available here.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: what’s the point of a three-hour painting?

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Near the wonderful, loose Andrew Wyeth watercolors at the Farnsworth Art Museum is a small room dedicated to his painting practice. You are surrounded by his careful investigation of details, compositional sketches, and studies. “When I was painting Christina’s World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn’t a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself,” he said.

Edward Hopper, who mined similar veins of alienation as Wyeth, was known for meticulously storyboarding his major paintings. He drew thousands of preparatory sketches. A comparison of one of his final sketches for Nighthawks with the final painting shows just how important his drawings were in cutting things down to the bone. He used drawing to shake off the burden of representational reality.

Failed attempt #1 at Chauncey Ryder trees. I’ll go back up the hill and try this again if it ever dries out. Dialing back the chroma will help.

Modern plein air painting

On the flip side, there’s contemporary plein air painting, dashed off in alla prima technique in a matter of a few hours. I love plein air painting myself, but a recent conversation with a student had me wondering about its lasting value. She is frustrated with her local painting group, which never works more than two or three hours. “What’s the point of rushing like that?” she asked me.

There are hundreds of plein air events in the United States every year, each of which has around thirty juried artists, each of whom in turn produces 5-10 works per event. That means the art market is flooded with tens of thousands of paintings from these events alone. Not all of them are good. I’ve produced more than my share of duds.

These events create a commodity that’s affordable to a middle-class audience. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s what drove the Dutch Golden Age of Painting, which gave us Vermeer, Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Failed attempt #2 at Chauncey Ryder trees. Boring composition and I made a messed up stew of the buds on the branches.

But it’s equally true that mass movements give us our share of dreck. The paintings done at plein air events are often safe (read ‘boring’) and dashed off without a lot of thought. That’s because plein air events are a production grind.

Loose brushwork has become the norm of plein air painting. But there’s no law that says that plein air must be quick, or that loose brushwork is the apotheosis of outdoor painting. These are just tropes of our times. Leaning into them too heavily just makes you a copier of other people’s ideas.

This start I like. Luckily, it’s steps from my house, so I can revisit it the next time there’s a break in the rain.

Go outside and take your time

This spring in the northeast is miserably cold and wet. I’ve painted outdoors just twice. Out of the three things I did, the one I like is the least-finished (above). In the other two, I was tinkering, trying to feather trees like Chauncey Ryder. Everything else in my paintings suffered. I don’t care; I’ll wipe out the boards and try again.

I have my eye on another stand of trees, small spruces. I want to see if I can mimic the soft brushwork of Anders Zorn in them, since to me he’s the only person who ever painted baby evergreens convincingly.

“You’re going to confuse yourself with all this mimicry!” Eric Jacobsen chided me. Well, no, because I don’t really want to paint like Ryder or Zorn. I want to figure out how they did this specific soft-focus thing on trees. I could never do this if I was still rushing around churning out three-hour paintings at events. The cost of failure is too great.

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Dealing with criticism

Best Buds, 11x14, $1087, oil on canvasboard, available here.

This week I received another unsolicited critique. No, I’m not going to repeat it to you.

I recently heard about someone who saves hate mail to a designated file; they can be referenced if needed. ‘If needed’ is a chilling commentary on our times. Anyways, I’m not tough enough to keep corrosive cankers on my hard drive. I just complain to whoever’s nearby and delete them.

That hasn’t always been the case. When I received my first negative review, I cried for two days.

Apple Tree with Swing, oil on canvas, $2029 framed, available here.

Once you stick your head over the parapet and become any kind of public figure (and I’m not much of one) you start to get the occasional brickbat thrown your way. It’s going to come in the form of obnoxious messages and comments, bad reviews, or old-fashioned snark.

That’s no reason to not try to excel, but it does give me pause when thinking about the lives of famous people. Mixed in with the adulation is acid. It’s very easy to forget that these are actual people with feelings, rather than mere players in a public spectacle.

More to the point is the complaints that volunteer organizers regularly receive about events. How often do we consider the humanity of the person who arranged for tables, chairs, rain tents, food, jurying, etc. when we start kvetching about the labels and the lights?

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478, oil on canvas, available here.

The spectacular achievement of putting together a sustainable cultural event has been on my mind this year. Perhaps it’s because I count several such organizers among my friends. I’ve watched how hard they’ve worked.

One of them started her event fifteen years ago and has since handed over the reins. She still gets called regularly for routine tasks and questions. Another started her event this year. She’s small but tough, and that’s a good thing. She must have sent out ten thousand emails and answered a thousand questions by the time she was done. Not all of them were kind.

Beautiful Dream (Rockport Harbor), oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed, available here.

My dog is the mildest of creatures. He’s trained to heel, and he’s on a radio collar to remind him if he messes up. Still, I’ll occasionally encounter someone on the trail who hates or fears dogs. The other day, we passed a woman who snatched up her toddler and turned away, a horrible grimace on her face. Perhaps she was actually afraid, but what she was signaling was raw, palpable anger.

For the remaining 45 minutes of our hike, neither Doug nor I was in a good mood. We were waspish with each other and with the dog. That experience reminded me of how easily hostility is passed from person to person.

Constructive criticism is one thing, but snark has more to do with the critic’s internal settings than any real problems. If possible, just hit the delete button and purge it from your internal hard drive. Studies show that forgiveness is not just a religious mandate; it’s good for your health.