Artist vs The Outside: Plein Air Week

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Me, contemplating lugging all my paints outside for the first time.

I should have seen it coming. I live on an island. And the lesson of island living is "where there's water, there's wind." So on Sunday morning when I woke up to cloudy skies and a light but constant breeze around my house, I should have realized that the cafe I was supposed to go to - a little shack on the end of a dock in a marina - would have a much more challenging sort of weather.

But it was the middle of my self-imposed plein air week and the schedule called for me to be at Mosley's Cafe come hell or high water, so I went.

Mosley's doesn't have any indoor seating. They've got a counter and a stool looking out over the estuary toward Oakland, and I'm sure it's lovely on nice days. Sunday was not a nice day. Sunday was a windy day. So much wind. People romanticize painting outside but there was nothing romantic about me with my hood drawn over my head and a blanket wrapped around my legs trying to keep my sketchbook from blowing into the bay.

This is what I'd been resisting for decades. This is why I hadn't done plein air before. I knew I'd hit situations like this. The weather was downright antagonistic, and I couldn't imagine getting any good painting out of it. If it were any other day, I'd go home. But this was plein air week and this is specifically what I was trying to confront: the difficulty of the outside. If I couldn't get any good painting done, I was going to have to lower my ambitions significantly and settle for bad painting. Any painting at all.

And on this particular day the path to "any painting at all" turned out to be settling for one single brush (I normally use 8) and a single color (black).

Reading this, you probably think it was discomfort that I was trying to avoid, and that's true, but actually the real enemy, the constant looming threat, is distraction. There's so much happening outside all the time. It doesn't leave a whole lot of space in your head for other things like "what color should that building be and how do I mix it." Painting has always required a lot of brain power from me and there just wasn't any left.

Painting en plein air is the practice of painting on location, usually outside. It has a somewhat long and greatly storied tradition going back to the 1800s when paint tubes were invented and suddenly oil paint became portable. Artists could take their paints outside, up mountains, to the ocean, on boats, wherever. And they would do this because it was by far the best way to learn what the outside looks like. Landcape painting exploded in the 1800s and plein air is why. Albert Bierstadt, George Innes, JMW Turner, the whole Hudson River School... it all comes from this one piece of technology that gave painters the ability to go outside and study the light directly and figure out how to replicate it in paint.

Plein air is also a pain in the butt. First you have to lug all your stuff out to your site and then you have to deal with the heat and the cold and the sun and the wind and the rain and the bugs. There's often simultaneously too much and not enough subject matter, the mountains are in the wrong place, the shadows change shape constantly. And that's assuming you didn't forget some crucial component of your painting kit. An artist once wrote about the time he'd hiked to the top of a mountain in Nepal only to realize he'd left his canvas back in the hotel room.

But when it comes to studying light there's really nothing else that comes close, so although I've been avoiding it for decades, last month I decided to get over myself and tackle plein air head on.

The goal was simple: go outside and paint. Over and over again. Enough that I would be forced to get past the initial large hurdles of plein air and still have a few days left to actually paint. I decided to commit myself to seven days. In a row.

Understand, reader, my expectation going in: days 1-4 were most likely going to be write offs. I was going to go out, I was going to be uncomfortable, the sun was going to be in my eyes, I'd get eaten alive by mosquitoes (we don't have mosquitoes out here right now), I was going to kick rocks, and maybe if I were really lucky I'd get a brush stroke down or two.

Nathan Fowkes and Jeremy Mann are both phenomenal painters who spend a lot of time outside observing nature and painting what they see. Crucially, they both pursue plein air to learn and to make their studio paintings better, and not as an end in and of itself. This aligns with my purposes, so I had reason to believe they'd have some good ideas about painting outside. From Fowkes, I took simple statements - choosing one focal point and ignoring everything else - and from Mann, I took bunny squares - tiny, fast studies of the lighting conditions.

I also phoned a friend.

Left to my own devices I'd go out all full of enthusiasm the first day, hit problems, go home tired and frustrated, and the next day would be a much harder motivational challenge. And I figured if I could find a few friends to meet me on certain days, I'd be forced to show up when I might not normally want to. So I called one up, asked if she wanted to paint with me for a day or two, and was delighted when she committed to the whole week and insisted we get together for coffee later that week to plan our sites.

I got three paintings out of this week. Three whole paintings. Three watercolors, which I don't normally do. I got enough done that I was able to apply to a juried plein air competition (results pending). I got outside. I saw whales. I painted in rain. I painted in wind. What follows are some excerpts from my journal of the week and some of the sketches and final pieces I created during this time.

Wednesday, March 26 (Day 1)

"I tried to get into the spirit of the thing yesterday, under what I would consider optimal conditions: it was warm and sunny, I was sitting at a table with a chair and I had my emotional support milkshake.

I lasted 15 minutes. Then the milkshake was gone and I was bored and frustrated. Today I'm committed to spending 3 hours. Outside. In downtown Oakland. The forecast calls for rain."

Monday, March 31 (Mosley's was the day before)

"...you can't allow yourself to get too comfortable painting en plein air. A good plein air painting is the story of a place and all the distractions, the niggles, the annoyances, those are all part of that story. And if you don't allow yourself to be immersed in the place, you won't have the visceral, physical understanding of your location that translates into an evocative painting.

On the other hand, you won't be doing much painting at all if your canvas blows away. So, it's a tricky line to walk."

Friday, April 4

"It is the end of plein air week and I have had so much coffee. "

Upcoming Events

May 5-9: Plein Air Round 2: Park City Edition. I'm headed to Park City, UT for a week to tackle another week of plein air. This time with more mountains and less oxygen. Expect to see the results of that in an upcoming newsletter.

June 7-8: East Bay Open Studios. I'll have my studio open for visitors from 11am - 5pm both days. Come say hi, see my work space, hang out, talk to other artists. 2908 Chapman St, Oakland CA 94601

June 16-20: Fantasy Art Workshop Illustration Intensive. A bunch of us get together in Milwaukee to paint fireballs, robots, witches, and magic. It's a workshop for all things fantastical and storytelling and it's one of the highlights of my calendar every year.