100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #20/#21

#20 - "Last Snow of Winter"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/05/05 (5pm)
Another car painting on the way home from the city. I was attracted to the contrast of warm foreground and cool background. I found I really had to keep lightening/cooling the values to get the background pushed back enough, and I concentrated on diminishing size of brushwork to create depth in the field.

#21 - "Banff Springs Golf Course"
Original Oil 6x8"


10/05/08 (3:30pm)
I really pushed the color on this one. It was a super flat, gray day with very brief windows of light. The real world wasn't inspiring me, so I made up my own world. (Fun!)

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #18/#19

#18 - "Late Spring"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/30 (11:15 am)
Wow, it was so interesting to come back from the desert and be thrown back in to cool on every level. An entirely different palette is required for spring in the Rockies. This is one of my favourite places to paint and I was glad to see there was still a little snow hanging off of the river banks, it's such a great element to design with.

#19 - "Mt. Rundle"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/05/02 (7pm)
This was a car painting as it was a super windy evening. The light was constantly changing and there were several moments that the mountain disappeared entirely. It's exciting to paint through such dramatically shifting light. I felt completely engaged - almost a part of the weather. What seemed to work best was laying in, and then grabbing the elements I wanted as they passed in and out of view.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #16/#17

#16 - "Desert Bloom"

Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/24 (2:30 pm)

Boy the desert is a prickly place! We laughed so hard at some crazy kind of tennis ball cactus thing that stuck to the heels of our shoes and came with us wherever we went. Couldn't set anything down or it was covered in prickles and burrs. It seemed like there was just nothing soft there until I saw this bloom and thought it would be a fun opportunity to focus in on the micro landscape.

#17 - "Tonto Sunset"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/24 (5:30 pm)

This is the last painting from our desert trip and my favourite. I'm adding a photo of me painting it to show what isn't seen in a photograph. I definitely took artistic license and pushed the warmth, but in reality I would say the scene looked about halfway between what I painted and what the photo represents.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #14/#15

#14 - "Sonoran Desert"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/23 (5:15pm)
The light was very soft and flat on this day, so I decided to tackle the desert foreground and think about texture and simplifying. I loved the muted greens against the violet backdrop with warm bits of desert floor showing through It was a quiet, unhurried piece with no urgency to race against light.

#15 - "McDowell Mountains"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/24 (9:30 am)

The two challenges with this piece were the flat light and the busy-ness of the scene. I focused on simplifying all those crazy sagebrush into masses and trying to create a sense of depth using color and value. This one worked me. Oh, and it was hot! Are you hearing this, I finally get to complain about being hot instead of cold! Not for long though, stay tuned.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #12/#13

#12 - "Desert Storm"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/22 (5pm)
I did 6 desert paintings when I was in Scottsdale at the end of April, these are the first two. Talk about visual memory skill building, the light was changing so fast that picking an idea and sticking to it was essential. When I set up to paint this the foreground was in shadow and the background in bright sun, by the time I squeezed out it was the opposite, so that's what I went with.

Gaye took this photo while I was painting "Desert Storm". I wanted to add it to show how high key this scene was even with stormy light. I don't usually paint with my camera over my shoulder, but things were so exciting I wanted it close!

#13 - "Saguaros at Sunset"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/22 (6:15 pm)
As I was gearing up to start this one, the light was bouncing around everywhere - it felt impossible to pick a subject because fascinating things were happening in every direction - and disappearing as quickly as they came. Desert sunsets are an incredible thing to be a part of, they build in intensity for about 45 minutes to this magical, mystical, spiritual crescendo, and then they're over and 10 minutes later it's dark. I got to share this one with my good painting friend Gaye Adams and we were both pretty blown away by it.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #10/#11

#10 - "Bow River"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/19 (6:15 pm)
This was painted in the same spot as "The Fairholme Range" (#7), but this time I wanted to focus on the river and trees as I loved the evening light on them. This is one of my favourites so far, because I finally did something that feels painterly to me, and because it really captured the mood that was present.


Note: I've decided to start posting two paintings at a time, every other day. One, to give me a break from daily posting, and two, to give you all a break from getting an email from me every single day - I know from my own experience this can be a bit tedious. So here's #11:

#11 - "Banff Morning"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/20 (11am)
This painting was done shortly after having a conversation with a terrific artist from the west coast, Brent Lynch. We were discussing plein air and he reminded me of some very important ideas:

-field studies are meant to be field studies, not finished studio paintings
-design is super important, move things around to support it
-keep the relative values of foreground/middle ground/background in mind (John Carlson talks about this a lot)
-visual memory is key, especially when painting at the ends of the day when light changes quickly, or in stormy weather (boy am I working on this, one of the hardest aspects of plein air).

Thanks for the great tips Brent!

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #9

#9 - "April Evening"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/18 (6:45pm)
This scene is a 5 minute walk from my house, and I always find it most captivating near the end of the day as the sun drops lower in the sky. It seemed too difficult to paint around the trees, so they were added at the end while the painting was still wet (oh the joy of 6x8!). I have always had a bit of trouble with tree shapes, so I really worked here to study them carefully before painting them, and they came surprisingly easily. I started with a dark mass in their general shape, suggested the detail with some middle tones, and the trusty palette knife came in to play once again for the trunks. Without them this painting was a wiper, so yay! that they worked.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #8

#8 - "Lake Louise"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/16 (4:15pm)
Lake Louise is a stunning turqouise blue in the summer, but there was something special about being up there in the spring quiet painting it still under its winter cover.

Today I'd like to share a quote from Keith Hiscock about outdoor work: "What I like about plein air the most is that it is not meant to be a masterpiece or a statement of something profound for the world to contemplate for centuries to come, but simply a sketch, a notation with paint or whatever medium one chooses, of a moment in time where one is actually observing at a particular place their surroundings and trying to make a nice note of it."

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #7

#7 - "The Fairholme Range"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/15 (6pm)
This was the second painting done this day (right after yesterday's post). I've been reading "John Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting" during this project - it has a wealth of great information about painting plein air, highly recommend it!

He says: "In landscape painting the thing that is of importance to artistic expression is the "landscape sense", a sense that makes us feel the weight of the mountain, feel the float of a cloud, feel the rhythmic reach of a tree, the hardness of stone. If we do not feel these things about a landscape, we miss one of its biggest qualities."  I considered this as I was painting this scene, as well as the stillness of the water and the softness of the late day light, and it really helped me to immerse myself in the experience of painting it.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #6

#6 - "Spring Thaw"
Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/15 (3:45 pm)

Today I had one of those plein air moments that make all the difficulties of painting outdoors insignificant. I spotted this little shore line breaking up and the vertical edge reflecting that bright value in the darker water, and was immediately captivated. I had just set up and was about 10 minutes into the painting when I looked up from mixing to see 5 elk strolling through the middle of my scene. The 3 in the photos below all stopped for a drink and a curious look at me and Lily before ambling away.

These guys didn't get painted visually into the painting, but they're definitely in there, wrapped up in the energy of it. This is what happens painting outdoors that can't occur when painting in the studio from a photo, the so cool experience of connecting with your subject while it is alive and unfolding before you. Awesome!

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #5

#5 - "River Spirit Sunset"
Original Oil 6x8"
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10/04/14 (6:30 pm)
This painting was done on the way home from a trip into the city - super windy so it was a car painting. It was the sky and the distant mountains that compelled me to paint this scene, and I really worked at keeping the edges soft to capture the mood of the day.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #4

#4 - "Frozen Falls" 

Original Oil 6x8"

10/04/10 (6pm)

This was the 3rd painting done on this day. I was attracted to all the diagonals answering each other in this design, as well as the soft light. Started it at 6pm and painted the last half of it after the sun had dropped behind the peaks. I know, I know, I'm whining a lot about the cold, but it was COLD! It was all I could do to get enough paint on to call it finished, the only detail I put in was on the trees and the slope on the right. I was pretty stoked to get 3 keepers done in a day, that's a first for me.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #3

#3 - "Bend in the Bow"
Original Oil 6x8'

10/04/10 (3:30 pm)
This was the second painting done on April 10th, I moved about 50 feet ahead of where I painted yesterday's post. Still lots of ice on the river, which I loved - but it was freeeeezing! (You'd never know it by watching Lily, who kept wandering around in the river collecting rocks - one of her top 10 favorite things).  

The huge challenge with this study was painting on such a bright platform and looking into the sun. The umbrella helped tremendously, but it was still next to impossible to see color on my palette and panel accurately, and a lot of my mixing was done from knowledge of my colors and my best guess at proportions. I have since figured out that in these situations it helps to set up your easel so that it has a dark background behind it if at all possible. Also, the umbrella shown here is black underneath which is often an asset, but when painting in extremely bright conditions I now use a white one which lets a lot more light in and decreases the extremes of contrast from the scene to my painting area.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #2

#2-"Winter Grasses"
Original Oil 6x8"

(For purchase info click here)

10/04/10 (1:30 pm)
This was the first of 3 paintings done this day. I was setting up to paint the river scene in the photo below (tomorrow's post), but as I was squeezing out paint, the warm grasses on the left kept catching my eye, and I felt compelled to have a go at them. I really had a lot of fun with this subject, especially near the end when I used a palette knife - for the first time ever in my life! - to suggest the highest lights on the grasses. I found it to be a much better tool than a brush for this job, the color and line are cleaner, though it was a challenge to get the paint in the right place.

100 plein air paintings in 100 days - #1

#1 - "Banff Airstrip"

Original Oil 6x8"
(For purchase info click here)

10/04/09 - (6pm)
The painting that kick started this project found me. I wasn't planning to begin until a bit later that week, had been at the studio attending to odds and ends all day and was driving home for dinner when I passed this scene. All my painting gear was in the car, and I had been gearing up mentally for this project for a couple of weeks, so suddenly it didn't make sense to keep driving. The scene I stopped to paint was a small snow squall blowing through with the trees very diffused and no color whatsoever in the scene, but by the time I rifled through my pack and fished my painting gear out, the storm was gone and the sun was shining, so that's what I dove in to. Halfway in the sun was gone and the rest was painted from memory.

Other than paint on the steering wheel (hard to keep a rein on those brushes), it actually worked quite well painting in the car, which will come in handy when the weather is changing its mind every 5 minutes as it often does in the mountains. Felt great to finish #1 and get the ball rolling. 99 to go!

To see the remaining posts in the 100 in 100 Plein Air series, please click here and then scroll down and follow the links in the sidebar to the right - from May to August 2010.