Finishing Touches ~ Potomac Artworks

10.23.2009

Finishing Touches

This is yet another vista from Hillsborough Vineyards near Leesburg, VA. The first day of our workshop there, I spied it for my second day. Turns out, so did Richard McKinley for his demo that morning. Call it bravery or ignorance, I decided to pursue it regardless.

This day required pastel underpaintings with water. I feel that this is my least successful underpainting method. Being daring in workshop and class environments, I decided to go complementary with the piece, using Senneliers for the purest of pigment. In part because they are so soft, the underpainting wound up being too dark and crazy, although the work did have good bones.

After working on it for quite a while, I'd covered almost all of the underpainting, except for some tree trunk details (aka runs) to the upper left. Doing his rounds amongst the participants, Richard decided to pull out the potential of this painting. I'm sure you can identify the flourishes he added.

Finishing Touches
Soft Pastel on Mounted Wallis with a Pastel and Water Underpainting
9x12

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The Charm of en Plein Air

Much of my work is done en plein air, French for "in the open air." People often associate it with the Impressionists, but the move to paint outside preceded them by a number of decades. The trend to appreciate landscapes as a genre at all was new for the time.

Several characteristics contribute to the distinctive beauty of en plein air painting. They are generally smaller in size in order to be able to capture a scene in a single sitting. Because of the time limit and environmental factors such as the sun and shadows moving, they often lack extensive details and might appear slightly fuzzy or unfinished. Lastly, they tend to have a freshness and spontaneity which makes them impossible to compare to traditional and methodological studio work. That said, my own studio work tends toward the same feel as en plein air, which then identifies my overall style: softness with an edge.

My aim when painting en plein air is for alla prima paintings, which roughly translates for me as "what happens outside, stays outside." It adds another level of difficulty to the work.

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10.23.2009