The concept of plein air is easy to grasp, but it seems that no two artists do it the same. The idea is simply to paint outside, which means that you will paint directly from your subject matter. There are artists who call themselves plein air artists, but they work from photographs in a studio, and there are some who not only paint indoors, they even conceive their ideas indoors, so the only part of the process that is done outdoors may be the photography work.
You can go on YouTube and watch any number of artists painting outdoors, or indoors, and I sometimes do that if the weather is a bit rough, and I'm staying home doing other things. But as I've been plein air painting for a long time, I thought I'd discuss my process and thinking as it concerned how I work.
When I started painting outdoors, I decided on a number of things. One was committing myself to working outdoors. I had a minivan at the time, I would store my works in progress, my easel and my paint box in the back. When it rained, I even worked from the shelter of the van. I did make allowances as it concerns undercoating. If I have the concept of my painting planned out, I would underpaint in the main areas in my basement. These are areas such as the sky and the ground. Actually, I made this concession pretty early on, especially as it concerned painting large sections of sky.
The next general rule I had was to work large. I was never happy with my smaller works, and to be honest, from the time I first started painting, my concepts always planned out big, rather than small. I know, the vast majority of plein air artists work small. Plein air competitions are devised for artists who work small. Because of this, I rarely enter those conpetitions. On the one hand, I think it's a rather restrictive attitude towards art. I walked out on one show that complained that my work was larger than 20 inches, and I never entered that show again. On the other hand, if the judges refuse to accept larger works, it's their loss.
Because I work large, I would need to return to that location more than a few times. . This kind of rule meant depending upon consistancy in weather. Yes, the weather does not always work that way, but it does mean you have to pay attention to weather conditions, and have work ready for a variety of climatic situations. Some of my paintings would take two or three years to finish only because of the weather.
As an adult, I worked in the paint business as a color developer, so I learned very early on what colors were necessary to paint plein air. I quickly grew tired of green and blue, and it forced me to think of my subjects in other ways. I started to see the contrasts in my work, as well as the spacial relationships. This became important to me, as it taught me to see an abstraction in my realism. It also taught me to rearrange objects with in the painting if it was necessary to do so. Finally, looking at realism beyond realism you stop thinking in terms of objects, but instead, think about spacial relationships, or relationships in other artistic ways.
As for subject matter, yeah, I might want to paint flowers or some trees, but which ones to paint is less important than the contrast I can find between light and dark, or the spacial arrangement within the objects I am painting. I'll probably discuss this more fully in a later blog post. For now, lets just say, I am a plein air painter who pretty much follows his own rules and tastes.
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