Plein Air 5 - Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

why do you paint? 

for exactly the same reason i breathe. 

that’s not an answer. 

there isn’t any answer. 

how long hasn’t there been any answer? 

as long as i can remember. 

and how long have you written? 

as long as i can remember. 

i mean poetry. 

so do i. 

tell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing? 

quite the contrary: they love each other dearly. 

they’re very different. 

very: one is painting and one is writing.

but your poems are rather had to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.

easy?

of course — you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.

i never met him.

who?

everybody.

ee cummings, an imaginary interview, 1945

"That Blue House" oil on linen, 9" x 12"

Changes come along in a plein air piece all through the art making in quick succession very intuitively. More deliberative are the changes I make when I have returned to the studio with my on site painting and have let some time elapse for consideration. I am in a different mindset than I was painting in the field and the changes are about formal ideas about how the painting works, standing on its own without the subject to take as influence.

The painting above went through a few shifts that made it much more readable. It was the intense blue of the house with the orange house that was so much fun to paint, but I had to alter the blue in the studio to create better harmony with the rest of the painting. An entire foreground object was deleted. A few grounding shadows were added to the bare shrubs in front of the house. The roof color was changed to pull it away from the sky. And so on.

It's a two step process with plein air painting. I like to be mostly done on site, but often just a few tweaks bring the painting more concisely a finished statement.  I like my writing to be concise as well, and it has a very similar editing process, as well as an early period of intuitive messiness.

For my watercolorist friends, I would love to hear how the editing process differs for you! I know it is much more difficult to make a lot of ch-ch-changes.....

Something New From Me at My Blogger Site

I have added a page to my site that contains interesting opportunities for artists that I hear about. Right now it has the summer long workshop and class information for the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit, Maine.
Click the link to "Read this in the browser" above (if you are not there already) and click on the "Artist Opportunities" tab in the header bar to check it out. Check back for additions.