Period
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| Painted in one hour on the walls of Lucca, June 2015 |
It's wonderful to see the breadth of
interest in the idea of plein air painting, especially in America. It’s not
unallied to our penchant for know-how, figuring out how something is done,
because it is, in fact, a learnable and teachable discipline. The phrase "plein
air" has become so popular, in fact, that it has taken on a value that
transcends its actual meaning. At one level, this is fine, since anything that
gets people to paint landscapes is positive. But the confusion of meaning, to
the point at which plein air becomes more a euphemism than a definition,
defeats both an historical conception of what artists were doing in the past
who painted en plein air (like the works in the Gere
Collection at London’s National Gallery), and
confuses the playing field for those doing it today (whether in terms of
practice or the publication/premiating of practice).
Let me put it another way. Painting
en plein air is painting out of doors, perforce in a short window of time.
Anything that is not painted in that way is a landscape painting. That is not a
value judgment—a well-painted landscape not done en plein air can be a
much better painting than an actual plein air work. But to paint in the open
air is to be subject to a moving light source (the sun) and a changing
atmosphere. The former especially conditions the window of time within which
the artist may work, because after about two hours (as Valenciennes
recognized centuries ago) you’re simply not looking at the same scene anymore. While
mid-day in the summer the light is fairly constant for hours, it’s also a
bleaching light that rarely yields compelling paintings. Of course, you can try
to return to the same scene over subsequent days at the same time and find the
same light, possible in the summer in Italy but not often in the late autumn or
early spring, much less in England any time. And since the reason people
started painting en plein air in the first place was to record fleeting
conditions on site, to bring back to the studio like captured game, why would
you want to treat the out of doors like a painter’s studio, expecting to show
up day after day to paint in the same conditions? Record your experience, and
go home and work it up in the studio.
And it’s not true to say that the
amount of time to make a painted sketch is not a factor in its appreciation. Fragonard famously
painted a series of portrait sketches in an hour, which he proudly
scribbled on the back of the canvas. I’ve realized that the time constraint
focuses the mind, and forces a focus on the essential elements of a scene.
Whittling the time down to an hour not only conditions a subject doable in that
time, but an economy of means in realizing it. It shouldn’t be forgotten that
one of the reasons to paint en plein air is to hone one’s skills, not only to
bag an appealing painting.
