Scully - Drawing and Painting on Location: a guide to en plein-air

Drawing and Painting
on Location

A guide to en plein-air

The Road to Bothampstead, Kevin Scully (pastel on paper). The season suggested in this painting is unmistakable, and has been created by the use of warm colours in the sky, the road and the buildings, which contrast with the cool colours of the trees and foliage. The emphasis on colour has therefore been reversed, but the effect created still conveys the mood and atmosphere of a sunny, autumnal day.

Drawing and Painting
on Location

A guide to en plein-air

Kevin Scully

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2017

Kevin Scully 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 241 0

Contents

Introduction

Everything that is painted directly and on the spot has always a strength, a power, a vivacity of touch which one cannot recover in the studio three strokes of a brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel.

EUGENE BOUDIN

That Yellow Time of Year, Kevin Scully (oil on board). Detail of a painting highlighting the amazing colour produced by fields of rape in flower, on The Ridgeway in early spring. The composition leads the viewers eye along the meandering track and into the landscape beyond.

A Brief History

For both the amateur and professional artist, drawing and painting are totally enjoyable and absorbing pastimes. You can become completely immersed in your subject matter, spurred on by that initial sensation that inspired you to want to capture a particular scene at a certain moment. To the exclusion of all else, your entire focus is on re-creating a three-dimensional image on paper or canvas in two dimensions. This in itself is a challenge, and sometimes the results can be frustrating and even disappointing, even though the process has been pleasurable. However, when you have created something that youre pleased with, the sense of fulfillment that you experience more than makes up for all the unsatisfactory results. There is nothing more important than practice, and the more you draw and paint, the more confident you become in making the right decisions about subject matter, composition, and the manner in which you go about your work.

Ships Riding on the Seine at Rouen, Claude Monet (oil on canvas). Monet created many paintings near the Seine, and this picture is an example of an earlier work that displays his interest in the effects that light has on colour, and how he attempted to evaluate how he perceived this, by painting from direct observation. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

For obvious practical reasons, most people are in their comfort zone when working from home or in their studio. This can often mean working from photographs, sketches, memory, imagination, or a combination of all four. This is fine, but sometimes work produced in this way can lack integrity, particularly if its obvious that it has been created almost directly from a photograph. When you are drawing or painting something from life, you automatically study things in greater detail, and you notice things that you wouldnt see or give a second thought to if you were taking a multitude of shots with a digital camera. A photograph is useful if you want to refer to a particular detail at a later stage, but unless you are a professional photographer, your photographic image will not capture the true colours or depth of perspective that you see in front of you.

Not that you necessarily have to copy precisely what you see when painting from life after all, its your picture and you can interpret it as you wish. Your own personal reaction to a scene will always lead you to emphasize certain areas, whilst other parts may receive less attention. What you should be aiming for is to capture successfully the essence of what you see in front of you, whether its a landscape, seascape, buildings or people. Painting directly from life is all about what you saw and experienced at a particular time on that particular day. The memory of it will always be much more intense than if you had simply photographed it.

There is a movement afoot at present that suggests there should be a self-imposed limit on the amount of time in which a painting should be produced. The reasoning behind this is to resist the temptation of fiddling with, and over complicating a painting. This is something you might like to try, and you may find that this suits your style of painting but there is no reason why you should restrict yourself in this way.

Drawing or painting from life, particularly in the open air, can be an exhilarating experience. Not only are you seeing things in three dimensions, but you are also absorbing atmosphere, sound, smells and climate, with all of its variations. By simply recording that which you see, whether its with a spontaneous quick sketch or a more detailed painting, you are making a visual note of the sensation of your encounter with the real world with a far greater authenticity than can be achieved when working from a secondhand image.

How you record this response to what you have chosen to draw or paint is entirely up to you. If you are happy just to make rapid drawings in a sketchbook you will need very little equipment, but the chances are that you will soon become hooked on working en plein air, and the temptation to take up the paintbrush will be irresistible.

Beginnings

Without colours in tubes, there would be no Czanne, no Monet, no Pizarro, and no Impressionism.

PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR

It is often mistakenly believed that the Impressionists were the first artists to pick up their paints and wander off optimistically into the countryside in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although they were certainly the first movement of painters who more or less wholeheartedly abandoned the notion of the established method of classical, studio-based painting, there were others before them who felt the need to paint from life, rather than the generally accepted way of painting landscapes in the studio.

The Romantic landscape painters were considered to be the pioneers of working en plein air, although much of their output consisted of sketches made outdoors with the finished paintings completed in the studio. Among these artists in England were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, and in France, Eugne Delacroix and Thodore Gricault.

Painters of the Barbizon school in France were greatly influenced by the Romantics, and developed a distinctive naturalism in their plein-air painting.

The group was led by Thodore Rousseau, and included Camille Corot, Jean-Franois Millet and Charles-Franois Daubigny. This school of artists is considered to be the precursor of the French Impressionists, the most famous of the plein-air painters. What is thought to be quite unremarkable today, was received by the establishment of the art world in the late 1800s as quite revolutionary.