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I got these out of order somehow, but I'm not sure it matters. May 10 was a fine morning for painting, although we were careful to stay out of the way of the volunteers who were setting up for the Museum’s upcoming weekend events. Catherine, Elaine, and I settled on a view across the fields to a gap in the tree line leading to distant fields beyond, with interesting shadow patterns in the middle ground, while Barbara, finding the gate open, drove all the way back to the end of the half-mile farm road to set up at the turn-around. There was a lot of green in the view I'd chosen, so I selected a Richeson pastel board, 11x14, with a rust red surface to paint on. I have had some problems in the past with the Richeson boards holding the pastel, but this one worked fine. In fact, I was really taken by the way that deep warm red played up the greens, especially the lighter greens, laid over the dark blue hard pastel I’d washed in with denatured alcohol to establish my darkest darks. The effect was very nice and I am thinking about getting some more of those boards. After about 90 minutes of work, I had everything else blocked in as I wanted it, but I was struggling with those ground shadows. They’d gotten too purple; my efforts to tone them down did not work; the shapes were becoming too regular (like stripes); and I was finding the board's tooth getting filled. So I packed it up and brought it home; I plan to remove the pastel in that section of the painting and then reestablish the shadows as they should be.

We had a very nice day for this return visit to Brookside. There is so much here that it is always hard to decide what to paint. Barbara and I opted for the deep purple-blue fountain with the red foliage behind; Maria, Catherine, and Marty all set up elsewhere. Once settled, I decided to try this one using only my newly-purchased hard pastels, a set of Caran d’Ache and a set of Polychromos, both broken into half-sticks and loaded into one box. It provided me a much better understanding of what these pastels can (and cannot) do, but on the whole I don’t consider it a successful painting. I was happy with the drawing, but I should have spent more time composing and less time drawing! If I decide to salvage it, I will start by working on edges, which are everywhere too crisp, and then remove the small green tree behind the fountain and add another red one, letting the red foliage extend almost (but not quite) all the way across the middle ground. I’m sorry to say that this is the 8^th plein air painting (out of the last 10) that does not live up to the promise of the view or my own expectations. If I were to postulate a cause, the first I would name would be a failure to concentrate. I start out strong enough, but as the painting progresses, I lose focus and get sloppy. Then I find myself playing catch up: asking the how-can-I-fix-this question instead of the how-can-I-improve-this question. I am capable of painting fairly well outdoors, but if I want to do that more consistently, I definitely need to start taking it more seriously and taking more time to make every mark count.

We had a beautiful day for our first official paint-out of 2013, and a lot of people turned out. Only about half the azaleas were blooming, but none of us minded moving the flowering ones into our paintings as needed; it’s one of the advantages of being an artist! I walked the whole garden to find a view I liked and ended up where I’d started, in the small gazebo at the entrance, painting the view across the reservoir to the distant shoreline. I am making a conscientious effort to lighten up this year (my husband says all my trees are too dark, and he’s right), so I spent most of my mental energy on the foreground tree and azaleas. I am happy (-ish) with the result, although the painting itself is not terribly successful at the moment. I need to add  more foliage on the left, in front of the tree trunk, and do a better job of integrating the left- and right-hand sides of the piece: right now the middle seems kinda empty. Once I’d done as much on that one as seemed prudent, I pulled out a small (6”x9”) sample sheet of the sanded surface Multimedia Artboard to try out. I did a small version of the same scene, experimenting with underpainting and different pastels. I found that it accepts my underpainting technique (hard pastels washed in with denatured alcohol) pretty well, and took soft pastels nicely, but it was difficult to get any real coverage with my harder pastels (NuPastels, Polychromos, and Caran D’Ache). My next effort will be to see how well it works with colored pencils over a watermedia underpainting.

This was my first experience with the annual “Paint the Town” plein air festival in Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It is a lovely town on the Chester River, full of kind and friendly people and many paintable views. That is, in fact, true of all of Kent County, as my friend JoEllen and I discovered. Thursday was the first day of the 3-day event, and we spent the morning in the Eastern Neck Wildlife Refuge. I did two paintings there before lunch, and then finished the day at the boat launch on Quaker Neck Landing Rd. On Friday the 26^th I drove up to the northeast part of the county, where I’d seen a view that had stopped me in my tracks during my reconnaissance on Wednesday – a bright red barn against a warm green tree line, with a brilliant gold field in front of it. It was an arresting scene and a painting experience that seemed to flow like magic: in fact, the painting I did there won Best in Show at the wet paint show and reception on Saturday -- see the painting here. I completed three paintings that day, and another one Saturday morning before spending the day in my hotel room framing 4 pieces for the show. Too tired for Sunday’s Quick Draw, I came home and collapsed! Apart from the fun of painting, I was also extremely pleased to reconnect with old friends who live in Chestertown, and with a good friend of my mother’s whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time when she and her husband kindly invited me to dinner. Altogether an extraordinary experience; I do plan to Paint the Town again next year if I can!

On April 6 my friend Maria and I painted at Tudor Hall, in Baltimore County, early in the morning before the 9:00 am registration for the annual meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters’ Association (MAPAPA). This was another cold morning -- which I am finding I greatly prefer to the normal heat and humidity of Maryland’s summertime plein air season – but sunny and without much wind. I completed an 11x14 painting of a small shed in sun and shadow, which won first place among the work completed by MAPAPA members that morning. As time goes on and I get more practice, I am learning more and more about how to make the most effective use of an underpainting of hard pastels washed in with denatured alcohol, trying to knit the bottom and top layers together to make the most of both, and keeping the amount of soft pastel layered over the underpainting to a minimum. The painting needs some adjustments in the foreground, but I am happy with the composition and overall feel.

Welcome back to plein air in Howard County! My plein air season started in Vermont, this year, though, when I travelled to Grafton, VT, to join a week-long plein air workshop led by painter Charlie Hunter in and around his Bellows Falls hometown. Charlie is a tonalist, known for his moody and evocative paintings of derelict factories, rural outbuildings, elderly railroad cars, and other artifacts of man’s presence in the post-industrial north.  He uses water-miscible oils and an extremely limited palette – just ultramarine blue, viridian, and burnt sienna, with a little unbleached titanium white added when necessary – to create what he calls “murk.” He starts with careful pencil sketches to resolve issues with drawing and composition, and then goes directly to paint – no preliminary drawing – on a gessoed board.

Watching this process was fascinating. He did his first (and only) demo on the hotel porch in Grafton, on the day we arrived, a wet and misty Tuesday. This is a perfect plein air day, in Charlie’s estimation. (He is the only painter I’ve met who greatly prefers an overcast day for outdoor painting.) At 55 degrees, this was also the warmest day of the week. On Wednesday we painted along the Saxtons River in Bellow Falls, next to a closed WPA-era bridge and a crumbling mill. Although Charlie did not do a formal demo again, we were always welcome to watch him paint. The temperature had dropped to 39 degrees for the high that day; the next two days didn’t make it out of the low 30s.

Thursday we painted on the property of a maple sugaring operation. I set up in the shelter of the house porch and stayed there all day, painting in every visible direction. Had I run out of views, I would have gladly painted the porch furniture, just to keep out of the wind. But Friday was the most challenging. The wind had picked up, the temperature hovered near freezing, and we were set up in the wide open parking lot of the Grafton Ponds ski area, with nothing but our cars to break the wind.

By Saturday I was beat. I stayed in our meeting room all day with a few other less-than-hardy souls, painting and sketching out the window. Each day Charlie led a critique of the work done by the participants, all of whom were experimenting with his medium and technique for the first time. As the only pastelist, my goal in going to Vermont was to learn to do a better job of massing my values and to be less literal, more emotive, in my work, based on Charlie’s excellent example. I still have a long ways to go in that regard.

For more information about Charlie Hunter, see the profile in the August-September 2012 issue of Plein Air Magazine or visit his website, http://www.hunter-studio.com/

Yes, I am way, way behind on my plein air blog. No excuses, just the result of 1) a lot of other art and art-related work to be done, and 2) dealing with the rapid deterioration and death of our almost 16-year-old cat, Harry. Harry was diagnosed with diabetes over a year ago, and while we could manage his disease with twice-a-day insulin shots, there was nothing we could do about his increasing weakness and loss of muscle control, and the associated cleanliness issues, which consumed ever-larger portions of my days over the past 6 weeks or so. Eventually it became clear that his time had come, and we said goodbye on Oct 3. He was a sweet, affectionate cat and we miss him dearly, as does his brother, Sam.

I did, however, make it out to paint on a few occasions since my last blog entry. On August 24, Maria, Rita, and I painted at the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge, on a day that started cloudy but brightened considerably in the later morning. One of my favorite parts about painting at the PWR is talking to visiting school kids about art and art-making. Judith, Barbara and I painted at Back Creek Nature Park in Annapolis the following week, and I made a mess of it: not paying enough attention to where I was and what I wanted to do there. Jane, Maria, and Mary Ellen joined me at the Daniels Area of the Patapsco Valley State Park on September 14, and I focused on the railroad bridge and the workyard behind it. Both the PWR and the Daniels paintings have some merit and will help me with studio paintings this winter. The same cannot be said for the piece I did at Scott’s Cove on September 21, with Barbara and Kate. I tried a gouache underpainting for the first time, and it was spectacularly awful. I clearly have a lot to learn about using gouache! On September 28 we returned to the Howard County Living Farm Heritage Museum, on a truly beautiful morning. Karen, Barbara, and Kate joined me, and we were all struck with the gorgeous golds of the soy fields. The painting I did needs a little work – the lower half of the sky is the wrong color (too cool a pink) and needs to be a much warmer golden peach, and the foreground shadow needs to be a bit lighter – but I am happy with it otherwise. Then last week we joined the exhibitors and visitors at the Howard County Conservancy’s annual Fall Fest. Barbara, Karen, Ann, Elaine, and I spent a perfect morning – sunny and crisp with a little breeze -- working to capture the autumn colors of the fields and trees. I worked on the same scene I’ve painted several times: the two-trunk tree at the end of the mown path, with distant fields and the tree line behind it. That view never fails to entrance me!

Although they’d predicted rain lingering into the morning from overnight storms, the morning was, in fact, beautiful. Kate, Cathy, Mary Ellen, and I returned to one of my favorite places to paint, the Orange-Avalon area of the Patapsco Valley State Park. I arrived about 8:30 and spent a good long while deciding where I wanted to paint. Then, after setting up and trying some thumbnail sketches, I decided I did not like my first choice, after all, so I shifted ground to a spot where I could see the shadows of the trees making interesting patterns on the gravel driveway. Tried a thumbnail or two there and liked the prospects much better. It just goes to show you how valuable those little notans are – those sketches kept me from wasting my morning struggling with a painting that was never going to be a success. This one is no masterpiece, of course, but it serves as a good record of the place and the light and the feel of the morning, which is what I’m aiming for. I am no longer looking to produce plein air work that goes straight into a frame (except for competitions, of course). Instead, I would like to get back to producing larger and more finished studio work developed from the plein air paintings – I feel I have really neglected studio painting over the past year or so, and I need to redevelop that discipline.

It’s been a month since I was able to get outside to paint, and for some reason I felt more rusty than I normally do, even at the start of the season. Our session scheduled for July 20 was rained out (apparently we were not meant to paint at Black Rock Mill this year: we’ve been rained out twice). Although the weather good – beautiful, even -- for the next session, on July 25, I was caught in not one, not two, but three traffic snarl-ups on my way south to the Greenbridge area of the Reservoir. It took me over 90 minutes to make a 25-minute trip. Golly. By the time I got there, I pretty much had to turn right around and go home again for a late morning appointment. All I could do was take some photos. I did not paint the following week, since I was at the CPSA’s annual convention in Covington, KY. So here I was, one month later, and feeling like a neophyte. We’d moved the session to Monday the 13^th to avoid a rainy Saturday, and also changed locations: I had no desire to fight Baltimore beltway traffic on a Monday morning to get to Cromwell Valley State Park, which had been on our original schedule. Instead, Judith, Rita, and Maria and I met up at the Howard Co. Living Farm Heritage Museum, one of my favorite spots. Having forgotten my umbrella (it’s like I’ve never done this before!), I opted for the view from the shady front porch of Hebb House…I like that line of little trees, with their branches reaching almost straight up. The painting is not frame-worthy, but a good gestural sketch. If ever I can shake off the jim-jams, I want to try my hand at plein air sketches in gouache. I have been inspired by the incredible plein air gouaches of Bernard Dellario: visit his website and I guarantee you will be too!

Although this was forecast to be a mostly cloudy day, four of us (me, Barbara, Kate, and Karen) ventured out to the Tridelphia Reservoir, anyway, and found the sun breaking through and the morning shaping up nicely. For a variety of purely coincidental reasons, I had not been to that spot to paint for several years and I’d forgotten just how lovely it is, with multiple views of the reservoir and some beautiful old-growth trees with lots of personality. Since I got a bit of a late start, though, I decided to stay on the fishing pier and do a small pastel of a few of the canoes and boats lined up on the far shore. I liked the way the composition sort of stratified into a series of horizontal bands -- trees, grass, boats, wall, rocks, water -- and how the red canoe just captured the eye. So I decided to break the rules and place the canoe in the center of the composition, with the bands deployed above and below. That meant I had to keep it simple! I laid in the horizontal shapes with hard pastel, washed them in with denatured alcohol, and then kept the application of softer pastels on top as spare as possible. I do like the result, with that canoe front and center. I'm such a rebel.