Category: Monday Motivator

“Remember, the purpose of working en plein air is to learn to see better – to note value [tone] relationships and colour nuances that you only can only see when painting from life. It’s wonderful to be able to bring this knowledge into your studio practice. Painting en plein air is also about the experience of being in the moment in your painting environment. What it’s not about is a brilliant result! Nice by-product but not the purpose of painting en plein air.”

Gail Sibley, Packing for a Plein Air Trip to PACE

Plein-air isn’t only about landscapes or cityscapes. It could be a drawing of your mug in a coffee shop, the chairs in a waiting room, the inside of a building, a flower pot … it’s anything and everything that’s not in your “comfort art-making spot”.

Why do it? For me it deepens what I notice about somewhere, slows my brain’s running about and focuses that energy into creating something on a page. I get to listen to the birds and bugs and sea. The results vary from intensely pleasing to uh-oh, usually somewhere inbetween. Even if everything I paint is a dud, it’s not like that doesn’t happen in my studio on occasion.

What am I aiming for when I’m painting on location? It varies, depending on what I feel like, what else I’ve been doing, and if it’s a new spot or a regular one. Sometimes I focus on a small detail in a landscape, sometimes it’s the overall scene. To paint a sense of it, not a photographic likeness. To explore pattern and texture, shape and colour. Shape conveyed by line done in ink or fluid watercolour (whereas in my studio I’ll “colour in” the shapes).

Tone or light/dark is rarely a focus for me until mid-way in a painting. I know it’s something I don’t see strongly, instead I get seduced by colour and texture, so I have learnt to stop to assess and adjust it rather than fight against this natural inclination. On location, I often don’t bother because I’m having to much fun in the moment.

Creativity is a living force that flows through the maker and expresses itself in beauty that does not need to justify itself.

But in the Rationalism-drenched world there is a deep conditioning to the effect that everything must be explained, that beauty has no intrinsic value unless it can be intellectualised, that creatives need to pin down their work like butterflies on a board to provide a straightforward “this symbolises that” equation their intellectual superiors can grasp.

But this is a lie. That’s not how reality works, let alone the vaster reality creatives dwell in. You can fill a bucket to have a neatly defined portion of seawater to scrutinise, but only a fool would think this is a satisfying summation of the ocean.

Joumana Medlej, Zafimaniry Geometry, Caravanserai

The “hidden” meaning is that the creator enjoyed the challenge of making it, and that this is embedded in the piece too.

“For me play equals experiment equals learning equals exploring equals surprise equals creativity equals fun. Play gives you the freedom to create.

“Play for me is serious and hard work. You don’t have ideas so much as ideas find you. Then you are caught by them and have to follow them, just as it was at seven years old, but with the help of the technical skills I have learned over the years.”

Lotte Glob, “Three Questions to Lotte Glob“, Kilmorack Gallery 22/3/23

For me, the key to successful playing when painting or drawing is to approach it with lightheartedness, or nonchalance, to not be focused on producing a result (nevermind a “good” result) but on seeing what happens and where things lead. It’s not being frivolous, it’s playing.

In my Higham Hall workshop last week, in the last half hour of the last session, one of the participants decided to use up the leftover paint on her palette on a “scrap” sheet of paper that had various marks and colours on it, rather than discard the paint. The various colours and brushmarks that emerged then suggested flowers to her, and she painted a vase with a few strokes in the centre bottom. That’s the point at which I wandered into that corner of the studio and was intrigued.

A short story even shorter: after asking permission, I followed my impulse to blend together the colours in the negative space using a wide brush, then added a couple of squiggly lines with a rigger brush to define some yellow flowers. Then Helen added more blue as she finished up her paint. The result is this expressive flower painting which makes my heart soar with delight in its playfulness and sense of suggestion.

“Realism” is a blunt and incautious word, suggesting a spirit of documenting and depending on particulars, a literalistic subsurvience to the world of facts. I prefer generally to use the word “representation,” which is more neutral and denotes the interplay between motif and motive.

This re-presenting works itself out in the double dimension of space and color … Change the color, and the space reads differently; change the movement of the space and color has a different appearance and function.

Louis Finkelstein, “Wolf Kahn”, page 108

Motif = subject, theme, idea
Motive = reason for doing something

I enjoy exploring the point where there’s enough realism for a painting to read as a seascape, for example, without hesitation on the part of the viewer, which in turn then guides their interpretation of the sections painted more loosely.

When the in-house art critic and I were discussing the painting below, he said the composition was unusual in that it’s a third realistic sea but then two horizontal bands that aren’t. Is it a colourfield painting or representational? Does it all tie together without knowing the context, that is the yellow lichen covered seawall at CamusMor on Skye that I sat on so often? Does my having used the same colours across the painting connect them all? Does the composition create intrigue or block you out? When I look at it, I have the knowledge of all the other paintings that came before, the compositions that showed more context and the desire I have to explore more smaller parts of the landscapes and the patterns, colours .