The Making Of An Artwork

I have fallen down on the job of writing this blog, mainly because I try to spend my time painting and sculpting. Of course, the hope was to get guest writers to give different points of view on art and about art. It seems everyone is busy writing other things or afraid to tackle the topic of art, but that is a topic for another day.

Today's subject is about what goes into making works of art that you can hang on your wall or place on a pedestal. It is different for different styles, so I hope to cover various topics in a continuing series.

Although the beginning is the substrate, the medium, the tools, and the years of practice, those are a bit boring to start with, so let's jump into Plein-air (painting outdoors).

Plein-air - One has two choices when painting outdoors: either one paints quickly or one paints at the same time, same place on subsequent days. Why is this? It is all about light and shadows and as the sun moves, these change significantly. Also, as the light changes the colors change. The scene you chose to paint at 10:00am is a different scene at 4:00pm. With changes that occur minute to minute, it is a race against the clock to capture that particular juxtaposition of light and shadow, or the subtle hues that attracted you. So, you have a limited amount of time, probably a maximum of 3 hours, before the changes are too great to bother remaining at the scene. The larger your canvas (panel, etc), the more paint you will need to apply to cover it and the faster you will have to work.

While watercolors will dry pretty quickly outside, which can actually be a hindrance, oils will be worked wet on wet. You may have learned in your early experiments with paint back in kindergarten that mixing complementary colors (red & green, blue & orange, yellow & purple, etc) result in shades of brownish gray. Working wet on wet can result in something that looks a lot like mud. This is where those thousands of hours of practice come into play. Planning your painting might require leaving bare spots for color later, or knowing which colors should be applied last, or delicately laid on top of other colors to avoid mixing. It is also about knowing which parts of the scene need to be captured right away before the light shifts and which can be filled in from memory.

Okay, that sounds difficult, so why not try the other option of painting several days in a row - same time, same place? Granted it requires having the time to do this, but with a bit of planning, not too hard to schedule. If you are lucky enough to live somewhere with consistent weather, this is a good option. Of course, anything can happen between day 1 and day 2.

This painting is an example of the hardships of this method. I picked a lovely afternoon to start it, knowing the light would change too much to finish it in one go. Two days and I would capture it, but the second day it rained in the afternoon, ditto for the third day. I wasn't available the fourth day, and we had a hard frost that night. The next day was lovely, but the flowers were not. Luckily, I had done most of the work on the flowers the first day, could use my memory for some bits, and the rest of the scene was pretty much the same. So, be aware that the lovely field of sunflowers or wheat blowing in the wind might be harvested from one day to the next, the weather might not cooperate, or your kid might get sick and you will understand the perils of this method.

Other challenges of Plein-air painting include: finding a spot to stand where you won't get a sunburn and your paints won't bake on the panel, avoiding being carried into the stratosphere by your shade parasol, swatting bugs without painting yourself, fishing bugs out of the paint, using the sand that has blown onto your painting as an additional textural effect, trying not to get run over, sudden squalls, etc.; you get the idea. Yikes! Why bother with painting outdoors, when you could just take a photo and paint from it? Good question. The answer has to do with color. A photograph simply will not pick up the subtleties of color that a good artist can see. The photo can be very useful to help finish a painting back in the studio, if the artist has either a good memory for color, or has laid in the colors that the camera isn't going to capture. There are certainly moments that must be captured in memory or as digital images (or a combination of the two), as they are too transient for anything else, but Plein-air painting does give the artist free rein to attempt to paint all of the subtleties of light.

What do you see when you look at your yard on a glorious summer day? Let's imagine you have green grass, some green shrubs, a couple of green trees, and perhaps some yellow flowers.  You can probably differentiate between the various greens, but translating the light spectrum into a pigment spectrum isn't always easy. Do you need to add blues, reds, violet or yellows to the various greens? Then there are the differences between the greens in the shadows versus those in the sun. If you pluck a leaf and bring it inside, it may look fairly uniform in color, but when half of the leaf is in shadow and the other half is in sunlight, the colors look quite different.

Can you tell which of these greens is different? In what way is it different?

So, the job of the Plein-air artist is to see the subtleties of light and color and translate them into pigment on canvas, to do it quickly, and achieve a result that can be interpreted by other people.

Sometimes the day is perfect!