Bringing Outside In

Wow! This has been a busy year for me! I just realized that I have not painted plein aire hardly at all this past year. Our Casita travel trailer was sole this past summer because we had not used in since our trip to Grand Canyon. Traveling to paint has just not been a possibility this year. That is not to say that I have not painted outside. I have long wanted to paint the wild creek area in back of our house and I have wanted to revisit the idea that I had several years ago to paint the brush and trees at Cedar Hill State Park which is just 15 minutes away. So that is what I’ve been doing.

What started as a kind of therapy, I began a painting at the edge of ur back yard. I would work a couple of hours, put it in the garage and then bring it out agan a day of two later. I tried to see how much I could bring to the view in the way of color, lilght,etc. I would even paint something lide the leaves in the foreground that were a part of another area. It was such a tumble of branches and roots etc that I really had to search for composition. I kept thinging of the ink drawings I had done several years back at Cedar Hill (above)

I started the painting above, again in the back yard) with an ultramarine drawing. I left and added much of the blue back into the painting as I went along. Again - same compositional challenges. the photos I took of the location would be almost impossible to paint from in themselves as the shadow area just was unreadable. With these two well underway I took my camera back to Cedar Hill and then started another2/ x 3’ canvas in the studio treating it the same way as I did the two out doors. There was virtually no color in the photo as the park turns virtually brown in the winter.

My goal is to somehow preserve the qualities that I like in my usual mode of plein air painting and with the additional hours spent on them at different times to get some of the additional considerations and deliberations of studio painting. i enjoy painting larger paintings and perhaps this could be a way to keep the freshness of plein air.

I did a fourth painting but it has turned our much more like what happens when I pant from a photo without the introduction the plein air. It started out much looser and as it is currently but I could never seem to achieve the quality of the intertwining branches and the resulting diminishing space in the background. It just represents the quality of the landscape with our the relationship of the immediate from to the mountains in the back.

I did a fourth painting but it has turned our much more like what happens when I pant from a photo without the introduction the plein air. It started out much looser and as it is currently but I could never seem to achieve the quality of the intertwining branches and the resulting diminishing space in the background. It just represents the quality of the landscape with our the relationship of the immediate from to the mountains in the back Then I cropped it and it got more of the quality II want. The painting strokes became important and I could do much more with light and color. Fun, yes!