Favorite Plein Air Sites. A Friend Share His

Mark Collins of Charlottesville, VA (www.markcollinswatercolors.com) introduced me to one of his favorite outdoor painting sites today, private property at the top of a mountain above Crozet, VA. The temperature was about 15-degrees cooler than in the valley and the flowering trees were about two weeks behind those in lower elevations. There were spectacular views in all directions, but we set up down hill from top of the mountain so there would be less wind, and we both focused on the Blue Ridge Mountains that were dramatically lit by the light breaking through the clouds.

Mark is primarily a watercolorist, but he enjoys plein air painting in oil and often paints on the mountain, especially when a friend travels and asks him to take care of her place. He enjoys being alone with nothing much to do except paint the many views on the mountain, some intimate and some expansive. I'm looking forward to joining him again as the location is inspiring and give me a better sense of how vast and magnificent the landscape is in the Shenandoah Valley.

Mark Collins (left) and me painting on a mountain above Crozet, Virginia

My 16" x 20" oil painting of the Blue Ridge Mountains

When Plein Air Is a Start, Not a Finish

As I've been challenging myself to work larger on location -- up to 16" x 20" -- I get home with the paintings and immediately notice somethings that are obviously wrong or incomplete. The issues are usually about the range of values and their ability to convey the sense of space, or they relate to areas that aren't sufficiently developed. I find that I get so involved in covering the canvas it 2-3 hours, that I lose the ability to see the pictures objectivily. As I work on resolving those pictures in my studio, I remind myself there is nothing sacred about completing paintings on location. Plein air is a process of gaining inspiration and information from nature, but it isn't the only path to expressing what is observed.

Here's a sequential set of photographs of a painting I did recently on a hill overlooking Fishersville, VA. I'm still trying to decide how I want to resolve the lack of spatial separation and the awkward change of scale in the middle of the canvas, as well as the lack of harmony in the depiction of the houses.

Risking Change

We all talk about risking a change in painting materials & techniques, but to actually make those kinds of significant changes can be daunting. I've decided to take those risks now that I have a new home, studio, and landscape; I can devote more time to my own painting; and I have ideas to work on that were suggested by artists I have interviewed or watched demonstrate.

Among the changes I want to make are the composition of values in my plein air landscape paintings and the palette of colors I use to create those images. Specifically, I want to lighten the value of the shapes in the distance, and I want my color choices to be less dependent on exactly what I observe in nature.

Here are a few of the paintings I've created since establishing these objectives. When working on the first painting (Blue Ridge View, 2013, oil, 16" x 20"), I made an effort to lighten all the values in the distant spaces and darken the foreground shapes in order to project a deeper sense of space. I also pushed the colors in the background towards light purples and blues while pumping up the grays, browns, and purples in the foreground.

When working on the second painting (Road to Charlottesville, 2013, oil, 12" x 12"), I reversed the value composition by making the background shapes dark and those on the right-hand side much lighter than they actually appeared. I also moved the colors toward warmer tones using the new Gamblin Warm White oil paint, as well as warm pigments like yellow ochre, cadmium red, and ultramarine blue.

Finally, the view through the trees (View From Wayne Baptist Church, 2013, 11" x 14"), is also one in which I lightened the background, darkened the foreground, used thicker mixtures of oil color, and pushed the color mixtures towards warm purples, yellows, greens, and browns. By the way, I painted a 9" x 12" snow scene in March from the same parking lot.