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The Artist’s
Almanac
June 2010
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Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,
Others whose fruit burnished with golden rind
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only.
-
John Milton, Paradise Lost
This spring that
brought us the floods also brought with it abundant rainfall, mild
frost free weather and the most abundant flowers and fruits I ever
remember. The artist feels obliged to celebrate all of it with his
brush. He cannot, of course, and feels guilty thereby. But if he is
open to all he sees and does what he can, he may at least do
something. The best art sometimes seems to just happen, and happen
most to those who paint the most.
Kay’s Spring Garden – Bill Puryear
Watercolor plein air sketch finished in just under an hour in
company with Joel Knapp
Claude Monet was
one of those. He and John Constable spent entire days painting
out of doors – indeed they were pioneers of the process, and
spawned generations of imitators. Painting in Plein Air involves
innumerable difficulties, including transport, travel, wet
paints, insects and livestock, changing light, landowners’
permissions, chatty onlookers and weather. Monet would return to
the same site, day after day and paint it on each sequential
painting with the same light and shadows, as in his famous
series of haystacks. Constable devoted an entire summer to
sketching clouds – clouds that were to reappear in magnificent
mien in his later six-footers.
Salisbury Cathedral - by Bill Puryear, July 8, 1989, 3:00 PM
Watercolor painted in plein air from a bridge over the water
meadows, where Constable once painted
the same scene. I worked under harassment and questioning by a crowd
of exuberant
young boys who tried to put a brush in my painting.
Our agreeable spring
has bloomed into early summer of billowing trees under majestic
cloudscapes. But summer temperatures in Tennessee are quite
unlike those in England and France, and only the most determined
can take them for long. Light changes and beginning shadows are
different from those at the finish of the picture. Cloudscapes
move fast; so do people. Most plein air paintings are completed
in under an hour, to be later elaborated in the studio, or else
forgotten.
The camera has
changed all that. While nothing captures light, color and
feeling like painting from nature, careful composition and
adjustment of values benefit from an aide memoire. The
bloodless, mammoth canvases of the modern superealists are full
of the latter, but sadly lacking in the former. They are not, as
we say, painterly.
Still, almost all
painters use the camera to some extent. Modern digital cameras
allow users to adjust color, light, and layout, or eliminate or
clone entire areas. Some claim this itself is a form of art, and
never touch a brush or chisel.
Monet found his
best motifs close to home, and even designed and built
his own private world around himself in his walled gardens and
private lily pond with bridge. Perhaps this telescopic candid
photo of my orchard this June will yet make a painting.
The Apricot Harvest
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