Panel Painting Plein Air

Friday April 4, 2008

I’ve been painting outside suffering through the wind and cold. When I’ve found a sheltered spot the temp hasn’t been too bad, but the last few days sheltered spots have been hard to come by. The wind has just been blowing like crazy. It definitely feels like the seasons are changing. After the last few sunny days with harsh conditions, today feels like a different world. I walked outside and the air smells like spring rain, the snow is disappearing, and the sky is heavy with a blanket of clouds.

Painting has gone pretty well lately. I’ve tried out a few panels lately. I’m definitely more comfortable with stretched canvas… there’s a bit of give when you put brush to canvas, and the paint seems to soak in a bit. Somehow with canvas covered panels (or just gessoed panels), the paint sort of feels as if it all sits on the surface and is more liable to get muddy. I’ve figured out a way to use the paint with a minimal amount of medium so the following layers can sit on top and not just smear watery paint around. It reminds me of how pastels work. If you do under layers with a dryer technique, then the top layers can stay clean. This is important to me because the first thing I do with every canvas is fill in all of the major shapes of the composition with an aproximate color. Actually first I tone the canvas with some mucky brown color. Wipe all of that off so that the canvas isn’t bright white any more. Then draw in the compostion and fill in the major color pieces. So the painting I’m posting with this blog is one of these paintings on a linen panel.

By the way, I have a fair number of linen panels I’ve been making (as opposed to cotton, which is much more affordable) because I bought the wrong type of linen 2 years ago. I wanted to try soem linen out, so I bought about 5 yards of it… probably cost me several hundred dollars, and then got home to stretch it and realized it’s all pre-primed! I HATE pre primed linen or canvas. It’s almost impossible to get a nicely stretched surface with this junk. It’s almost as worthless as tubes of green paint (you should mix your greens, no greens allowed on the pallette. See my buddy Frank’s blog; “The Terra Vert must have been from the days when I was still looking for the perfect tube of green. I tried em all. They all stink. Throw out your greens and just mix them. Terre Verte is stupid. ” http://www.frankgardner.blogspot.com/ )
So the point is that I found the only thing I can do with this junk is glue it on panels and now I get a really beautiful surface for painting.

On another note, a friend sent me to this link to check out a really nice painting.
http://www.delart.org/view/collections/js_greenscats.html
It’s kind of abstract in how it adds up to contrasting shapes. I really got a kick out of it.

Also, the workshop is filling up. If you are interested or want to talk about what we’ll be doing please feel free to get in touch.

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