About winter painting

I am going to do a series of posts on winter landscape painting. Before I get to the equipment and the other adaptations needed to paint outside in the winter, I want to talk why you would want to do it in the first place.

Here's a painting by Aldro t. Hibbard* as an example of why. There are great pictures to be made outside in the winter. The potential for designs is enormous. Those big areas of "white" are just great for making arrangements. Pretty much everything in the landscape is darker and sits silhouetted against that white field. Also the snow is woven throughout the whole scene generally so it often unifies a picture. Like white velvet painting!

There is another thing that happens in the winter too, all of that green goes away. That makes the deep woods into a fine place to paint when in the summer it is way to closed in. Big views appear that are only there when you can see through the trees . Village scenes are unified because of the snow on rooftops is common to all the houses and driveways and other ugly ephemera disappear or can easily be made to. In the winter you can stand in the middle of a stream and look up its length like a country road. Below is my old friend Stefan Pastuvov painting along a frozen stream in Maine.

I would rather paint outside in January than July. In July everything is green except for the sky which is blue (with a little yellow in it) in January there are dozens of colors, and they are sophisticated 500 dollar suit colors too. There are heathers and ochers, browns and russets. The pines are green but its not the acidic green of summer and the snow is prismatic. Its not white, it is opalescent. It is very interesting to paint. When you want it lower in value than your pure white pigment, you will have to add color to it to get it there. What color? generally all three. Or you will paint it purple and shoot yellow into it. Or paint it green and lay purple over that, or pink and then, well you see what I mean. The color of snow in the light and in the shadow is vibratory. It is my favorite thing to paint.

Here I am painting in the snow up near Bethel, Maine. There is another good reason to paint outside in the winter though. If you want to be a plein air painter and are only painting outside in the warm months you are only working PART TIME.

You are also missing out on a lot of learning. The structure of the trees is evident in the winter and that's when you learn that. You wouldn't imagine you could learn to be a figure draftsman only drawing the clothed figure. Well, the trees model nude in the winter! A lot of landscape painting is tree painting. They are the figures on the landscape painters stage. In order to learn to draw those figures you need to be out there in the winter studying their anatomy.

There are a lot of what I call inominate colors out in the winter landscape. An inominate color is one that you can't easily name. That is, its not red, or blue, or yellow but a combination of all of the colors. They are everywhere in the winter and learning to make them is fun and teaches a sophisticated range of grays and browns and heathers etc. That puts more arrows in your color quiver.I will be back and tell you more about winter painting tomorrow.

* Aldro from the book Aldro Hibbard artist in two Worlds available through the Rockport Art Association

Odds and ends

Winter in Paris, by Brian Blood

This is the winner of the October Fine Art Views competition. Here is a link to that page. Congratulations Brian. I really like the painting above, it has so much charm and the restrained color scheme is awfully nice. The quiet color and handling made it a charming rather than a mawkishly sentimental painting.

The geometry of the foreground buildings is varied and interesting and the bridge across that open negative space has a great decorative shape.The red and green in the buildings in the foreground are lovely mineral sorts of colors that look well against the grays and ochers of their surroundings. I could use a a winter painting trip to Paris, I know a great place where we could have lunch.

I have been asked about the Gloucester easels and whether the Take it easel is still available. I e- mailed Rosemary whose family business that is down on the cape and she sent me a letter of explanation. Here that is:

Stape;

We went to great lengths to ASK permission of the original makers of the

Gloucester Easel about reviving it. We met with a hearty "go for it" as they no longer had any interest in making it. We could not get copyright or trademark it, originally the "Andersen Easel" as it had been in the country for over 50 years. No one, to our knowledge, has produced it for decades before or since we started making them almost 20 years ago; although the west coast art supplier, Daniel Smith, wanted to produce them, they found could not make it financially profitable,
though they did purchase one from us at that time.

When we can, we hope to order more materials with which to build our HAND CRAFTED original reproduction of the Gloucester Easel which Emil Gruppe made popular in his Gloucester School of Painting so long ago.

Alas, Creative Mark has outsourced our "Take-It-Easel" BUT it doesn't function like the original "Gloucester Easel" that inspired our revival. We correct this. The "Beauport" easels made in China, are finely manufactured . . .the wood is excellent, the holes drilled on a multi head machine are very accurate, and we tune them up to function perfectly!

Here is the really good news:

We offer you the fully functional Beauport Easel for $250 including shipping and a lovely padded carrying bag, including all the extra pegs, extender legs and a wing–nut fastened platform for small works, all the additional parts China sends.

Thank you for your interest and for your loyalty, we are most interested in facilitating your plein air painting success!

Rosalie, Tom and Tobin Nadeau

So, there is how to get a working Gloucester easel. The Chi-com easel will not work out of the box and unless you know a LOT about them it will not be possible for you to get one up and working.

Next week I am going to do the The thirteenth Boston International art show at the Cyclorama in Boston. Here is a link to that. For several years now I have volunteered to help the Guild of Boston Artists with their exhibit. There is a lot of hauling things around to do and lots of hanging pictures up and taking them down, and I am good at those things. I will hang a picture in the show at the Guild booth.

I will see some of you there, I know, introduce yourselves to me, I would live to meet you. It is quite a show and many of the most important galleries on the East Coast and elsewhere are exhibitors. The show specializes in in antique and representational paintings. It is a real good place to see a whole lot of fine painting and learn about the trade. There are lots of fine antique paintings for sale and most of the best known living traditional and realist painters will have work there too.

Park at the Clarendon street garage. It affordable and close, to the Cyclorama building. I will probably do some reporting in the blog on the show for those of you in Australia, Jakarta and Germany.Wait till I tell you why the building is called the Cyclorama building, clue, it was never used to race bicycles!

Panel boxes

I have had a small group of people express interest in a winter snow painting workshop. It looks to me as if their is enough interest to do a workshop. I will get back to you again about that, if you are interested let me know. I am thinking January.

I intend to start writing on winter painting and equipment soon. However, I have a whole lot of art history I want to do and some of my own history too, I am not sure what comes next. I have ideas about what to write about, lots of them. I assume that at some time I will have uploaded everything I know about onto this blog and it will end. However I still have great swathes of subject matter I still want to write about.

Here is a panel box. Its purpose is to protect wet paintings from getting ruined while on painting trips. I have about six of them in different sizes. I make these myself but there are commercially made boxes that are lighter and probably as good. This box is many years old and probably predates the plastic ones available. But it is very tough. If I wanted another size that I didn't have, (this one is an 18 by 24 ) I would get out my table saw and make it. Here is a view of its interior.

It is made of luan plywood screwed with sheetrock screws to 1 by 4 pine sides. The top is hinged with a pair of small cabinet door hinges and held closed on the other side with a sash lock from a window. An eye hook will work for that too. The panels slide into grooves put into the sides with a table saw, here is a view of those. If you are not able to cut those on a table saw, you can build up the spacers by gluing and then nailing with fine brads small square mouldings also available at the lumberyard.


The whole affair is pretty rough and they take a beating being packed and unpacked, stuff gets piled on them and so they need to be rugged. I think of my panel boxes are a sort of specialized crate. The plastic ones would work for some people, but I don't think they would be tough enough for me. I killed several French Easels before moving to the Gloucester easel. I am rough on stuff, I use it every day and it all needs to be far more rugged than the weekend user would need.

You can make a box to hold several different sizes, for instance, I have a box that will hold any panel that is 14" long on one side, so it will hold an 11 by 14 but it will also hold a 14 by 18, I deliberately made the box deep enough for that.

I use the 3/8" hardboard to make my panels ( here is how to make panels ) and I recommend that you do also, but you need to decide if its that size or the 1/4" before you make those slots. It is good to leave a little play in there so you can get the panels in and out too. Some of your panels will be a little long, I don't think they grow but there seem always to be a few which are a little longer then they are supposed to be.

More about drying.

Grave stones, Lanes Island, Vinalhaven, ME.

There that's as good as anything else for a picture. I like always to post a picture at the head of each post, and I have been making a point of showing more New England scenes, I have shot so many.

In the comments I was asked about painting gel, Neo-Meglip in particular. That is something I have not used much. Meglipo is an old gel that was made with litharge a form of lead that is cookeed in oil. It is part of the Maroger system of painting that was espoused until recently by the late Frank Mason. Because of the toxicity associated with its manufacture and the marvelous handling qualities it imparts, Gamblin has made a substitute that is alkyd based. I have tried it, and I don't see any reason why if you like it, you should shy away from it. I do not recommend the real Marogers. I am going to catch flack from the folks out there who swear by the stuff and I am perfectly happy for them to use it. I won't.

One of the additives that accelerates the drying of paint is lead. It used to be added to house paints and all sorts of things to make them dry. The same is true if you are using lead as your white, you will get faster drying times. I used to mix a small amount of lead into my white for just this reason, particularly when I was traveling. There is an interesting alkyd flake lead made by Winsor- Newton which is in their Griffin line of alkyd paints.

The Umbers and Siennas dry quickly too. If you want faster drying these are a good addition to your palette. Particularly if you don't want to use lead or an alkyd medium. Watch the paints on your palette. I don't clean them off my palette every night, I leave them and clean the field in the middle. Notice which ones seem to dry out the soonest and those which seem to never dry.

The ultramarine and viridian, pthalos and ivory black dry a little slower but they do dry reliably.
The viridian tends to grit up a bit on the palette and I have discussed this problem before. The transparent reds, quinacridone and alizirin are the slowest drying. The alizirin is so slow and unpredictable that I advise you no longer use it and switch to the newer permanent alizirins, which are quinacridiones.

I was asked in the comments about drying paintings in the sun and whether I thought that was OK. I should point out that I am not a chemist, and I am not a real stickler on the materials, I do what works. The responsibility level changes when I am advising hundreds of you on something like this. So I should say, "well I do it!" and let you decide for yourself. It is easy for an art materials supplier or a magazine art expert to say "don't do x" It is safe for them to say no, they can't possibly get into trouble. Lawyers do that too. In the real world though within reason you do what works, because the art has to get made and out the door. I also look at how things seem to have been done in the past.

There is an exception to that, and oddly enough it concerns a pigment that never really dried. In the 19th century there was a fad for a pigment called bitumin. It was an asphaltum, a tarry brown goo made into an oil paint that gave a warm glow to paintings and gave them a Rembrandty dirty varnish kind of color. In the time that was much appreciated . Paintings, made with bitumin have had all sorts of problems, they have bubbled, the bitumin has moved about under other colors and come to the surface in some areas. It gets liquid again in the heat and causes other colors above it to crawl or "alligator" No one to my knowledge uses this stuff any more, It did used to be available when I was a kid and I tried to make some old timey looking paintings with it in my "Dutch " phase. I saw one of those old paintings of mine from the early 70's not too long ago and it looked OK, but I wonder if someday it will weep hydrocarbons from its surface. They can put a pan under it.

Here is tonight's weird little factoid. When the American Luminist painters like Sanford Gifford and others went to paint in the American West, they carried black iron boxes. The put their fresh paintings in them and put those out in the sun. That cooked their paintings dry out there in the desert in no time, I am sure.

I have panel boxes that will hold wet paintings and keep them out of trouble when I am traveling until they are dry. I should do a post on panel boxes, I don't believe I have.