Plein air ideas 9

I have taught plein air painting off and on for twenty five years , maybe more. I forget. Over the years, and particularly recently, I have noticed I am teaching the same things over and over. There are a handful of faults that I see every time I teach. Let me load some bullets into my clip and here they are;

• The painting is in all middle values with the contrasts so suppressed that the painting has no punch.
• The values of the lights are confused with the values of the shadows. The lights are not consistently brighter than the shadows.
• No attention paid to color temperature. The picture is executed with no regard for which notes are hot and which are cool. This is particularly true with painters using three color palettes, which don't lend themselves to the expression of color temperature.
• Drawing is haphazard or done without much care or delicacy.Often this happens to painters who value velocity or brushwork over drawing. Usually painters with studio backgrounds, or better still, atelier training seem to have a better grasp of drawing the landscape.This is a failure to look very closely at the landscape.
• Designs that are overly symmetrical or too"stock" usually that means big tree on the left balanced by a field on the right. 
• An uncomfortable closeness to the nearest objects in the painting. The footlights are set in to close. They are painting everything from their toenails to the zenith.
• A line which seizes the viewer in the foreground and directs them into a collision with the side of the frame rather than into and through the picture
• An underpainting in a hideous and assertive color that poisons every note laid on top of it. This is usually explained as something a previous teacher ( who was REALLY good!) had insisted was the only way to do things.
• every color in the painting is as bright and saturated as it can possibly be painted. A lullaby played on kettledrums and air raid sirens.
• A cursory "that's good enough" effort without a real intent to create something special. The painting is banged out in a short period of time and without much reference to nature or an attempt to design or bring anything personal or original to the presentation.Usually this is cured by developing an awe for the wonderful work of some deceased artist who becomes a yardstick against whom the fledgling tyro can compare themselves.

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I am going to be teaching a workshop this july in New Hampshire. Check it out here.