For Artists Who Love the Outdoors

Here are five thoughts which chase me outdoors to paint regularly. The list is open-ended, so feel free to add your ideas to it:

1. I communicate daily with a number of artists on FaceBook, some who work almost exclusively outdoors. I admire that professional choice, and find in their efforts to paint in all weather and all climates, a challenge to myself to get out and paint in my locale, either the Rockies and foothills of Alberta, or the desert  areas in Arizona. Both climates provide me with powerful settings as well as a number of fine painting challenges.

2. There's a ruggedness about painting outdoors which follows a tradition set by the  French Impressionists over a century ago. Painting outdoors opens my eyes to the endless opportunities around me. My task is to follow the light, the way it strikes certain parts of the landscape and not others. My  enemies are time, weather and physical endurance. The changing of the light, the changing of the weather, and my own physical limitations keep me focused intensely on my work for relatively short periods of time.

Outdoor painting really is physically challenging. Packing my kit, trekking around the chosen  landscapes to find the best location , setting up quickly and accurately, painting two to three hours, taking down and repacking my kit,  hiking back out to the car and driving home - all of this is focused work, and yet it's exhilarating. (When I'm really organized, I will have gone to the location beforehand and narrowed down some painting site possibilities, to give myself a headstart.) I feel a tired pleasure driving home, even if the painting itself hasn't gone that well; it has been time well spent. 

3. I enjoy the limitations set by painting outdoors. I need to plan the materials I take really carefully - the restrictions of my palette, my brushes, my painting surfaces, and my easel requirements, shop cloths ( very important) and the time I have available. Everything I carry needs to be downsized and portable. On occasion I have found I've forgotten something - my water container, a favourite brush, a paint colour I wanted - and I have had to improvise on the spot. I have no other choice; there's no going back once I'm there, not until I've finished. I like that element; it keeps me sharp.

4. I have one chance to capture this light, one opportunity in which to get to right. I have to make decisions on the spot as to what to include and exclude from my work, what point of view I want, what style the piece needs. As I search for a location, I've learned to scan the landscape for certain linear elements which suggest a painting, and build the work from there. Once I've made that initial decision, I stick with it, even if something adjacent begins to look intriguing. Making the decision about where to start is key to my success, because wherever it is, I will put all my energies into capturing it over the next two to three hours.

5. When the painting works, the energy I felt creating it is, I hope, transmitted into the finished work. Even months later, I know what each plein air piece cost me to finish just by looking at it. That's not the case with studio work, where problem-solving and reworking tend to fade away once I've finished the piece; whatever struggles I had in creating it evaporate, leaving me with the finished work.

When someone asks about a plein air piece, "How long did that take to paint", I think the best answer I could give is to compare it to running a marathon. The race itself takes about three hours to run, but preparing for the race takes weeks, if not months. Plein air painting is an artist's equivalent event. 

 While each of these reasons help me in my studio work as well, the fun of painting outdoors always energies me fully. I am looking forward to my next outing even as I write this.