PLEIN AIR EVENT Painting Without Pressure to Compete or Exhibit Five artists were invited by PleinAir magazine to paint on a 500-plus-acre farm, with the only expectation being that they share information about their creative process with readers of the magazine. An ideal situation for outdoor painting is to have someone provide a stunningly beautiful and varied landscape; offer accommodations in a comfortable home used exclusively by the painters; free the participants from the daily chores of preparing meals, cleaning dishes, and making beds; provide each person with a golf cart for carrying supplies throughout the conserved lands; and expect nothing more than permission to share the artists work with others. That s exactly what happened when five artists were invited by this magazine to spend a week together on New York s Long Island. They were hosted by a family undertaking the restoration and conservation of the main property and the adjacent island. The family has put conservation easements and instituted operational policies for the benefit of the wildlife, vegetation, land, shorelines, and buildings on the farm and island. There are homes, barns, stables, and recreational facilities throughout the property, which extends into Little Peconic Bay. The artists were provided with a five-bedroom house and solar-powered golf carts so they could paint the ponds, beaches, pastures, barns, and miles of trails leading through forests that were ablaze with brilliant October colors. The surrounding landscape has been painted by other notable artists for well over a century, including William Merritt Chase, Irving Ramsey Wiles, Thomas Moran, and Winslow Homer. The artists participating were Erik Koeppel, Joseph McGurl, Lauren Sansaricq, Nancy Tankersley, and Dawn Whitelaw. All of them are observational painters who consider plein air to be an important part of their creative process, and they have each developed their own individual ways of working on location. Because there was no pressure to complete paintings Splendid Last Words Dawn Whitelaw 2013, oil on panel, 12 x16 in. Dawn Whitelaw working on Splendid Last Words while standing next to one of the solar-powered golf cart provided to the artists www.pleinairmagazine.com / December-January 2014 46
Nancy Tankersley painting End of Season by the boathouse End of Season Nancy Tankersley 2013, oil on panel, 12 x 9 in. October Intermezzo Dawn Whitelaw 2013, oil on panel, 11 x 14 in. Courtesy Richland Fine Art, Nashville, TN for an exhibition or competition, several of the artists experimented with new materials, sizes, or techniques in an effort to stretch themselves and explore new options. It was an extraordinary opportunity to step away from our normal routines, paint an inspiring location at a magical time of year, and be free of most all our daily chores, says Whitelaw. Tankersley quickly adds that golf carts proved to be ideal plein air vehicles; she says, When you are in a situation like this where you don t have to be concerned about traffic and rough terrain, a golf cart is ideal for hauling equipment and providing a comfortable seat from which to paint the landscape. Tankersley took the trip as an opportunity to try new techniques and explore the process. Like other plein air artists, I see and read about ways artists approach their paintings, but unfortunately I don t often have time to try all those techniques, she says. When I m under pressure to create a consistent body of work for an exhibition, or when I m participating in a festival that requires me to complete a consistent group of paintings by Friday at 3:00 p.m., there is little opportunity to spend time experimenting. During the week on Long Island, I was particularly interested in painting on sheets of frosted Mylar with transparent colors, because I had seen Jon Redman and Robert Lemier demonstrating that approach. It took a bit of getting used to the slick surface and the colors, but I learned something useful in the process. Tankersley completed the painting on Mylar by the end of the week, and she developed a number of other paintings on panels of the houses, ponds, boathouse, and barns on the property. Tankersley also used a plastic scraping tool to carve straight lines into the wet oil color. A lot of plein air painters struggle with the proportions and perspective of buildings, and the edge of the scraper is perfect for placing those lines accurately, she says. After I m satisfied that everything looks accurate, I move paint over the scraped lines to obscure them but I may try leaving them in some of the finished paintings because they lend a nice textural quality to a picture. 47 December-January 2014
Lauren Sansaricq also appreciated the opportunity to work on plein air paintings with no concerns about meeting the expectations of a dealer, patron, or juror. I ve been painting in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for the past few years, so the relatively flat marshes, pastures, and woodlands offered intriguing possibilities for painting, she says. The farm was so beautiful and peaceful that I was even able to set my chair in the fields, along the gravel roads, and under the trees to paint the views. The sunsets were especially dramatic-looking from the cliffs above Peconic Bay, and the cloud pattern was completely different each day. Sansaricq worked on smooth Ampersand boards using oil colors thinned with a solution made from 60 percent Gamsol and 40 percent stand oil, a medium that gets progressively thicker as the Gamsol evaporates. I typically spend four to five hours on a plein air painting, she says, and the medium allows me to apply thin glazes of color during the initial painting stages and progressively thicker and more opaque strokes when I get to the final stage of painting textures and details. Sansaricq s style of painting is based on studies of 19thcentury Hudson River School paintings and emphasizes the sublime light and atmosphere in the landscapes. Koeppel worked in a similar way but chose a different range of subjects on the farm. Two of his paintings captured the majesty of the oak and maple trees throughout the property, while the others focused on the broad scope of the land surrounding the ponds. Koeppel was featured in the September 2012 issue of PleinAir and is the subject of an instructional DVD (Techniques of the Hudson River School Masters with Erik Koeppel, Streamline Premium Art Video). Whitelaw used active brush marks to define the shapes in the landscape, and she was inspired by one particular part of the farm where ponds reflected the sunlight, fall foliage, and small buildings. I love finding a place to explore over and over again, and that seemed to be my spot, she says. Some places are stunning in the morning light and others in the afternoons, and I made note of the light around the pond when I first began to explore the property. I also found the bluff over the bay to offer a dramatic combination of water, sky, cliffs, and trees. This is the kind of place I could spend months painting and never exhaust the possibilities. I worked on panels that were alkyd-primed and had a medium texture. I applied the paint with bristle brushes and no medium. I use the plein air paintings as reference for larger studio works. McGurl s painting materials and techniques were described in the November 2013 issue of PleinAir. In that article, he emphasized that he is interested The Boat House Road Erik Koeppel 2013, oil on panel, 10 x 14 in. Collection the artist Erik Koeppel www.pleinairmagazine.com / December-January 2014 48
PLEIN AIR EVENT Stormy Morning on the Path Lauren Sansaricq 2013, oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. Collection the artist Lauren Sansaricq at work Solitary Tree on the Bluff Lauren Sansaricq 2013, oil on panel, 8 x 12 in. 49 December-January 2014 / www.pleinairmagazine.com
in human reality and how to express in my paintings our relationship to what we experience. He mentioned that he achieves a heightened sense of reality by working on an outdoor painting for as long as it takes to gather all the information he might need. It s important to spend a lot of time at a location, he said, so I get into a transcendental space and block out everything going on around me. Since McGurl s objective is to gather information and not to compete, he works on relatively small 8 x 10- or 9 x 12-inch boards, using colors tinted with Winsor & Newton Underpainting White. That fast-drying white makes it easier to build additional layers of color without the surface becoming excessively slick and oily. He develops his depictions of natural forms in the landscape using progressively smaller brushes in order to add waves across the horizontal expanse of the water, branches in the trees, and subtle shifts of color in the sky. He also blends in details and textures using a kind of stump rather than a soft-haired brush. One of the best parts of the week s activities was the evening discussions that took place over dinner and around a roaring fire in the living room. Each of the participating artists shared information about their careers, relationships with collectors and dealers, approaches to teaching workshops, and inspirations they received from both contemporary and historical plein air artists. On one of the evening, McGurl showed a PowerPoint presentation he developed in response to a book by artist David Hockney (Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters). With each slide in his presentation, McGurl rebutted Hockney s assertions that many artists of the past secretly used cameras and lenses to project images in order to trace the outlines of the forms. At the end of the week, the owners of the property hosted an informal exhibition of the paintings and asked each artist to describe his or her response to the landscape. The hosts were pleased that each artist found something inspiring and created paintings of locations that could be identified by the people who live and work on the farm. M. Stephen Doherty is editor-in-chief of PleinAir magazine. See more paintings by the artists on this memorable painting trip in the expanded digital edition of PleinAir. Plein Air Study of Sunlight in the Afternoon Joseph McGurl 2013, oil on panel, 9 x 12 in. Joseph McGurl painting from the pier www.pleinairmagazine.com / December-January 2014 50