Painting wild places...

Keeping my website and artwork inventory up to date is a lot of work. Recording what galleries and shows pieces go to and when they are sold and to whom. So the blog tends to suffer.... While going through the 70,000+ digital photos I have, looking for some sky photos to use as a reference, I came across this series of images. They were all taken all on one day, Oct 13, 2017, as I started and then proceeded to nearly finish this plein air painting. The first one was taken at 10:45 am and the last outdoor one at  4:40 pm. Not all my painting days are this successful - this one was a winner! No biting bugs either!

I chose Madawaska Pond on this day because it's a wild and remote lake in the northern Adirondacks, only opened to the public around 2003 and I have been exploring it ever since. It's about a 9 mile drive on rough dirt roads and I love the wide-panoramic views at the pond, as the terrain is pretty flat there, so I brought a 12x48 inch linen canvas to work on. You see the blank canvas, with a pale tan base coat, in the first picture. I stopped at 11:45 am to take the second photo - composition sketched in with paint and because I liked how the sky looked first thing in the morning, so I painted it first. Sometimes I wait until a later point to paint the sky.

At 1 pm I stopped to take the 3rd photo, after having worked on the main shapes of the landscape and the water and reflections. Continuing that work into the 4th photo, which was taken at within about half an hour. Notice how all the clouds have cleared out of the sky - luckily I painted them first, when they formed interesting patterns!

3:45 pm I took the 5th photo and you can see just about every square inch of canvas is now covered. A bit more work and the 6th painting taken 15 minutes later. 

This is the painting as I brought it home. I took the photo at 4:17 pm on Oct 13. I spent most of the hours I painted working on getting the shapes of the landscape composed effectively, and then applying the colors to match what I wa seeing as well as I could. The light changed all day long - cloudy, no clouds, and the sun moved from the left side to the right. I tried to capture the aerial perspective - that is how the colors of the landscape are paler and grayer the farther away they are. What I didn't do was any detail in the foreground. I knew I needed to make it look like marsh grasses and plants and dead tree stumps. I figured I could add that in the studio. I don't really even want the viewer to look at the foreground, but to let it lead them into the depths of the painting. Examine the finished painting to see what else I added!  All the major work was done in the field. This is pretty much the process I follow in most of my plein air paintings. Sometimes I return the next day to finish outdoors, or even days or weeks later, making sure I either go on a day with similar weather conditions, or ready to change the shapes and colors to match what I see the day I return.

I also want to point out how different the landscape background looks in all my photos. That's because cameras are not as sensitive as our eyes. Cloud cover, the angle of the sun, whether or not the light is on the front of the landscape shapes, or behind them, wind affecting reflections, all have an impact on how the camera records the image. 

Therefore, my paintings aren't just the reproduction of what I see, they are really a record of the passage of time. The story of how I experience the specific place. How the changing conditions affect what is perceived and actually seen. Even how they affect me - sometimes I work so long that I get chilled and really need to rush things to finish up. But nothing compares to the joy of being in a special place and being able to use paints, brushes, and my skills to save the experience of that place as a painting.