Plein Air painting
This is a passage from my future book on plein air painting, planned for release in Spring of 2011.
"I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting your landscapes in the studio. You must be right under the sky."
William Merritt Chase
Chapter 1
You look out the window; it's a beautiful day. The odds are against you from the start. You know the difficulties that you are about to encounter. To go out into nature with a blank canvas and return with a completed painting; this is the goal. As you start loading your easel, paint, and bug spray, the excitement builds. First comes the quest to find a subject that inspires you. One that you, and only you, can see the beauty in. Do you paint it? Of course you do. You have no choice.
As you start setting up your easel, the excitement continues to build. You squint your eyes at the subject and can already see it as a painting. All you need to do is translate what you see and feel onto the canvas as simply as possible. You begin quickly covering the canvas with all that is before you. Then suddenly you sense that you are finished with it. Three hours have just passed, and you were unaware of time. For those three hours, you almost had become a part of the scene you were painting. You know every detail of the scene and could probably repaint it from memory. The creative part of your brain is exhausted, yet you feel a slight exhilaration at the same time. You have just completed a successful plein air painting. This book is concerned with what takes place in those lost three hours: the actual process of painting en plein air.
Read
this journal . . .
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