Here's a picture of me - painting "en plein air"
| "En plein air"
is a fancy way of saying "outdoors" in French. It probably doesn't
sound as dumb in France where everyone is speaking French, but it's kind
of pretentious here in California. Look at those colors in my pallet. Why - I've got black, and white, and every shade of gray from Payne's to neutral. The Puritans wouldn't be caught dead using those colors, but that's just another silly pretension. Unlike traditional watercolorists, I think of white paper as my natural enemy. (If God wanted to see white paper He wouldn't have created paint.) I do my best to wipe out the white paper and cover it up. All of it. There's nothing wrong with the traditional approach of leaving the white paper alone, but there's nothing wrong with my way either. Turner didn't leave any white paper - at least none that I could ever find. And Henry Miller once said of him, "His paintings glow like opals in the dim light of the London Museum." I like that! |
If I'm forced to paint 'en plein air' - then at least give me a balcony in Kauai, complete with shade, a table, and a refrigerator nearby. It doesn't hurt to have music too. I just love to rough it like this.
Here I'm doing it the smart way - taking pictures in Wrangell Alaska and storing them on a flash card for use in my studio when I get home. The nice doggie with the empty water bottle is a Wrangell native, but he seemed to enjoy hanging out with me when he wasn't preoccupied with chasing a big raven that kept eyeing his bottle.
This year we bought a small (26') motorhome and are in the process of planning a number of trips that will find us painting our way across the U.S. and Canada. Here we're camped on Bodega Bay, but soon we'll be coming to a campground near you!
