Plein Air Just Before the Parade

My friend and I set up our easels across the street from a couple of Victorian houses last Saturday. It's a nice empty lot where an elementary school used to sit and the city keeps it mowed, so it was really an ideal place to paint. I am always looking for spots like this when I drive around. Parks are great because they have restrooms, but they don't always have good views. In the country you can look for  substations owned by the electric company, sometimes with nice views of farms or farmland. And of course railroad tracks along unused sections of track are great places to set up too.

The day was sunny and cool, perfect for painting, but when we began to see people walking on the sidewalk with chairs and coolers I realized it was the morning of the Wauseon Homecoming Parade and we would need to move our car very soon if we didn't want to be blocked in, or watch the parade.

I had a pretty good start but I needed to spend another 30 minutes doing touch ups at home. This experience really proved to me that if you have an incentive you can get a lot done in an hour and a half.

Sunny Days

Today felt like July here in Northwest Ohio, unlike most of the days we've had this month. It wasn't too bad by the lake, because there was a cool breeze. I've spent the third week in July at Lakeside for the past few years. The Lakeside Association organizes a three day plein air paintout and a wet paint sale on Sunday.

There are usually a lot of viewers but not too many buyers. The heat today may have discouraged some folks from attending.

I had some helpers this year, proving once again that you're never too young to have a Bob Ross moment. Not every tree is happy, but if you're painting the trees you're probably happy. Or at least you're living in the moment.

Tumacacori Mission Tubac, AZ

When we arrived in Tubac we found the area experiencing a record-breaking cold spell. The ranger at Tumacacori Mission told us the previous night's temperatures had dropped to 4 degrees. Plumbers were making out like bandits, with unprotected pipes freezing and creating lots of problems for homeowners and businesses.

Even with two pairs of gloves on and a beautiful sunny day the biting wind made it a chilly proposition to paint outside. But we came here to plein air paint and we would not be deterred! We stood in the courtyard, out of the wind to paint a back yard view of the mission. It was still an interesting subject with its block walls and bell tower.

This is an 11" x 14" painting, which is the largest I g\felt I could complete in the short period of time we were out there. Ironically, while it was 40 degrees that day in Tubac, it was closer to 50 degrees at home in Ohio.

Mixed Greens, or "Why I Don't Put Green on My Palette"

My basic palette consists of cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow deep, cadmium red light, raw umber, rose madder, yellow ocher, ultramarine blue and cobalt blue. Sometimes I will add a color to experiment with here and there. I tried 'hydrangea blue' --made by Shin Han, on this expedition, and I found it a strong mixer (probably some pthalo in there) but also a beautiful color that creates deep mysterious greens as well as subtle golden greens. You can't always get a brilliant green from ultramarine so it's definitely a color I'll keep in the paintbox, if not on the palette.

September on the Miami

14" x 11"

oil on canvas

Another Plein Air Painting --Down by the River

Sometimes these paintings practically paint themselves. A cool sunny day with no breeze and no bugs, unless you count some tiny red beetles that apparently decided to hatch right beneath the sycamore tree where I was standing. They didn't bite so I wasn't terribly worried.

I wish they were all this easy. Looking downriver this painting was easy to compose. Foreground--rocks, Midground--sandbar, Background-- distant trees. A really lovely location and an equally lovely day spent painting.

September Breeze

When the month of September finally arrives I have usually done enough plein air paintings throughout the summer months that I have become 'accustomed' to the haphazard life of an outdoor painter. Not this year! It's been so danged hot that I have languished in the studio painting fruit or people for the most part. Now that the temperatures have finally dropped I am enjoying the late summer breeze.

A visit to the river over the weekend sparked this plein air painting.

16" x 16" oil on canvas

Plein Air Painting and (Another) Rant

The weather has been awesome this week so I have been outside painting after work and haven't had time to blog. Finally, after a summer where the average temperature seemed to hover around 95 degrees, we have some seasonal temps.

I am sharing a few paintings completed earlier in the week, when a friend and I drove to Putnam county to paint specifically for the 10th Anniversary Exhibition sponsored by the Ohio Plein Air Society. If you're wondering why we had to travel to Putnam County I am wondering right along with you. The rules of this exhibit state that the paintings must be done at specific locations around the state of Ohio. This leaves those of us who live a distance from these locations at a huge disadvantage. The choice was clear: make our displeasure known by not joining in the exhibit or just go with the flow and hope that the next exhibit has fewer rules and regulations. I chose the latter but quite a few artists decided not to enter anything. Let's face it, artists don't like rules. We love our freedoms, we are creative people and we do not like to be restricted! This is especially true when we are told what and where we have to paint. It is very difficult to be inspired to paint when you have to travel to a location you are not familiar with and figure out where interesting things are. I would hazard a guess that the person who organized this event does not understand how inhibiting rules like this can be to an artist.

Plein air painters, especially, are comfortable on their own turf. We want to show our best work and the way to do that is to show the places we have come to love to paint. Some artists live near the water and they excel at creating wonderful paintings of lakes and boats and docks. Others live near rolling hills and they have become experts at creating the atmospheric conditions that showcase their area.

The painters who live near or in the five "designated painting areas" have a distinct advantage in this exhibit and I suspect that this has caused some of the controversy surrounding the event. They are familiar with the area, they can paint many more pieces and choose the best ones. They don't have to spend money on gas and get time off work to travel to other areas. In other words-- they are in their comfort zone. It's difficult to do your best work after traveling and scouting locations in an area you're not familiar with. It's one thing to do it for a paint out, with no pressure. It's an entirely different situation when you must drive to your location, find a good place to paint and produce a quality painting -- all in one day. It's just not that easy for most of us, especially if we have day jobs and children to consider. I usually don't have the time or gas money to travel a distance to set up and paint. There are too many beautiful scenes right in my own backyard and these are vistas I am comfortable with and ones I would love to show the world.

I enjoy being a member of the OPAS organization and the opportunities it has provided me to paint and exhibit my work and I'm hopeful that the next exhibit they sponsor will allow artists to showcase their best work. That work will more than likely be comprised of paintings completed on  their own territory and under more relaxed circumstances.

These two pieces were done on the same day, near Pandora, Ohio and they really demonstrate how weather affects mood and atmosphere. I did the first one in the morning under a gazebo while it rained softly. The second painting was done at the same location but looking in a different direction in the afternoon. What a difference a few hours can make! 

A Plein Air Weekend

I spent a long weekend at the annual Lakeside Wooden Boat Show and Plein Air Festival. After a week of 100 degree heat the temperatures fell on Friday and I was wearing a jacket when I arrived at the gate Friday morning. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds in the afternoon and the jacket came off. Our final day was a breezy but warm Sunday, when the artists were invited to participate in a wet paint sale at the the park.

Jim White and I had decided we would kill some time by drawing people for free prior to the art sale, so we set up our easels and had some fun. Most of our clients were people who worked for Lakeside or children, but we didn't mind. The wind nearly took my paper with it a few times, yet every one seemed happy with their drawings. At least the price was right!

Here's Jim, doing his Sargent imitation.

Here's another friend of mine, Richard Maxfield, who's trying to sell some paintings. Or maybe he's just trying to explain his own unique creative process to them.

After the sale a friend and I took a dip in Lake Erie and THAT was extremely refreshing after being outside in the warm July sun all afternoon.

Here's a picture of my favorite subject from the weekend. I stayed with a great family and I asked one of the boys to pose with his rod and reel at dusk. I thought he would just stand on the dock and toss the line in once in awhile. Instead, he used real worms and he had a bite within minutes. It became an exercise in futility to paint him. The fish, a sheephead, according to my model, was reeled in after a few minutes of drama and it was a big, fat one! Unfortunately, the line broke and the fish swam away with the hook, which resulted in an interesting story about the actual size of the fish when he told his cousin about it later that night. It was getting dark so I took a few pictures, roughed the sketch in and finished it in the morning.

The Fishing Story

16" x 16"

SOLD

Sunrise, Sunset ... more plein air paintings

I don't typically paint sunsets. There's a good reason for this and that is that the moment they live in is so brief it's hard to get the paint down before it passes. I wanted to give it a try though because it was so striking on our evening walks near Lake Ocqueoc. I chose a small canvas (6" x 8") and started at 8:30 pm. I finished by 9:15 pm but during that 45 minute time frame I mixed more colors and observed more changes in light than I ever had before. The final painting is a culmination of those minutes and probably represents the image the way it appeared to me around 9:00 pm. After that I was painting from memory. I couldn't look directly at the sun of course, so I was just glancing in the general direction of where it was slowly sinking behind the horizon.

A lot of artists will tell you they don't "do" sunsets. Their reasoning is that a camera can capture that brilliant color more accurately than paint can and in just a fraction of a second. I used to think like that, but I learned some things from painting this sunset. I discovered that the water can change from a cool blue to a tangerine orange in less than a minute.Ultramarine blues mix nicely with cadmium reds when you don't have a lot of time to be choosy. Violet clouds look more violet when they reside next to pink. In other words, I learned a lot about color and how it affects other color. Valuable information to an artist who is concerned very deeply with color effects.

There will always be artists who take a picture of a sunset and then proceed to try to reproduce the brilliance of their photograph in a painting. I will not be among them. I will be the painter who puts on her polarized sunglasses, sets up her easel in front of what God created, and tries to capture that moment as it actually happens. It's just a lot more exciting for me. And it's more fun. At this stage in my life I've resolved not to paint anything I don't enjoy painting. Why? Because life is short!

6" x 8" oil on canvas over panel (Pintura ™)

A sunrise gives you a bit more time to experiment. This is the same lake viewed in the morning with the sun behind me. Notice how the long  horizontal canvas emphasizes the size of the lake. This is why I love painting outside. It's the same view, but a different time of day and a different format and a completely different viewpoint. Nature is always the best teacher.

6"x12" oil on canvas

Plein Air at the Fair

Last fall a few of us went to the fair and did some plain air panting. It was very, very hot, but other that we had a good time. My friend, Ruth Ann, even sold her painting! Most paintings start with an idea. I wanted to do a painting of some female plein air painters -- that was my idea. I had a picture form when we painted at the fair in September so I pulled it out. Unfortunately there was a huge rope in front of one of the women so I had to use some guesswork to get her face in accurately. This made it more challenging but also forced me to lose detail, which is always a good idea when you are painting impressionistically.

I took just a couple pictures of the beginning process to show how this painting is all about the design and really not much about the people. Although they're both nice gals. :)

5" x 7" oil on gessoed Masonite

Plein air painting at the Fulton County Fair

 

 

Paintings from Lake Waynoka, Sardinia, Ohio

The OPAS paintout at Lake Waynoka was August 19-21. I ended up with a few nice paintings form the weekend.

Local Wildlife Investigates Me As I PAint their Habitat

My friend Ruth Ann captured this photo of me hurriedly packing up my painting equipment (I was done with the painting), as a herd of javelina approaches. They don't see too well and I was a little worried about what they were going to do. These critters, who look like miniature wild boars, don't see too well and I guess they were just trying to figure out what I was doing in their neighborhood.

Paintings from the Upper Peninsula

My family and I just returned from vacationing in the Upper Peninsula on Lake Huron. We stayed at a really nice place near Hessel, MI - right on St. Martin's Bay. With a lakefront view facing southwest we had truly awesome sunrise and sunset views.
I brought along standard size 8x10 and 11x14 panels to paint on just for the ease of transporting them in my wet canvas carriers. The first painting shows a view of the bay in the early morning. The second one was painted in late afternoon. Notice how the atmospheric conditions affect the view dramatically. We experienced days when the weather was quite humid and the lake was misty. When the wind picked up conditions cleared and the waves became choppy. It was a great experience for us as we live quite a ways inland.

St. Martin's Bay - misty morning

St. Martins Bay - afternoon

Oak Openings last week - a plein air 16" x 16"

It was a really hot day and I wanted to get in some practice for the paintout at Lakeside this weekend so I decided to paint in a shady area at Oak Openings, a metro park near my home. There was a nice breeze and I was congratulating myself on staying cool in the 95 degree heat when a big gust of wind came out of nowhere and blew my easel over. Of course the painting landed face down, it nearly always does when that happens. OK, it;s not the first time I've had to pick out gravel, grass, weeds, and dirt out of a wet painting but that doesn't make me any happier. I scraped off the dirt and excess paint and spent another 15 minutes repairing the piece and i think it is actually a better painting for it. Maybe I'm just telling myself what I want to hear..

Sauder Village paint out with OPAS August 16, 2010

The Ohio Plein Air Society, of which I am a proud member, sponsored a paint out at Sauder Village in Archbold, OH last Saturday. It rained all week and cleared up for the weekend so I was grateful as I was a co-sponsor of the event. I did two paintings: a scene of the adjoining farm in the morning and later after a group critique I took my bored daughter home and returned to the village green where an Antique Car show was in progress. I quickly chose a bright red car as my subject and set up the French easel (my speed at setting this up is improving--- really, it is).
Knowing I had exactly 1 hour and 45 minutes before the Village closed gave me a deadline to finish and I always paint better, faster and looser if I know there is a deadline. Here is Don's 1929 Cabrolet (sp?) which he purchased as soon as I finished.
Below it is the landscape, which I brought home and tweaked a bit. The horse was not recognizable as such until I worked it a bit more.
All in all, a great day of plein air painting.

Spring Blooms - Original oil painting 6 x 6 Art Squared Plein Air by Sallows

My neighbor's tree -- is it a crabapple tree? I'm not sure -- but it caught my eye and I pulled out my palette and captured the scene as quickly as I could.

Plein air painting of my birdbath

The sweet hour just before sunset when the sun is low in the sky and everything is bathed in an orange light. My favorite time to paint. The little bird stopped for a drink even though three dogs watched from the patio.

Fall Landscapes

I love to paint in August and September when the ground turns warmer. I painted a picture at this stable where my friend works and the owner saw me painting and hired me to paint a house portrait for a Christmas gift for his friend. Sometimes all you need to do to sell work is go out there and show what you can do! Here are a couple larger 16x20 landscapes painted plein air in 2-1/2 hours.

The Hotel Lakeside

Another painting from the Chautauqua community at Lakeside, Ohio. This one is 16" x 12", and I painted it while I stood on the pavilion after a strong storm had passed through. The weather took a turn for the better and cleared up eventually. When you paint plein air it seems to be easier to paint on a consistently gray day than it is to paint when the sky is changing constantly (partly cloudy). All the paintings shown here will be available on my website or in my eBay store beginning next week. No painting will list for more than $300 and all of them are nicely framed and ready to hang! I am taking lots of pictures here and hope to complete many more before the week is over.

Painting on vacation

We are on vacation this week and I have been painting outside because the weather has been perfect. Last weekend I joined over 40 other artists for a paintout at Lakeside, Ohio. This was a three day plein air painting excursion, although I could only attend two days. It was lots of fun and the quaint cottages and old-fashioned shops are wonderful inspirations for painting. So this week I have only landscapes to post for a change. They tend to sell more quickly than my still life paintings so maybe that's a good thing. Below is North on Second Street, 16" x 20", framed in a whitewash solid wooden frame.