Plein air landscape painting and sketching is something I’ve done practically all my life.
Although I’m mainly a studio painter these days, I venture out with my plein air kit as often as I can. I may sketch with pencil or watercolour, depending on the circumstances, but painting oil sketches is my main focus.
Many of the benefits of plein air painting are easy to see. Plein air work is fun and mentally absorbing. It can be sociable. It gets me out of the studio and into the open air. It’s an excellent activity to do while travelling—I enjoy combining it with long trail hikes and trips to places of natural beauty.
Other benefits are much more subtle and difficult to explain, however. It’s really these that make painting outdoors indispensable for me.
It’s hard to articulate these profound values, but here are five of the main reasons why there is simply no substitute for plein air painting in my working life as an artist.
The 5 Unique Benefits
1. Plein air painting is the best way to record the experience of seeing with the human eye
2. Plein air painting hones fundamental skills like no other exercise
3. Plein air painting focuses the mind when it comes to materials and equipment
4. Plein air painting encompasses the passage of time
5. Plein air paintings are invaluable in the studio
Painting in a traditional shipyard in Oman. I am using my mini pochade box with water soluble oil paints, my usual plein air painting kit for travel. The sun was hot, the day was blindingly bright, there was nowhere to sit but on the burning sand. Yet the vivid colours. stark contrasting shadows, and architectural shapes of the boats under construction were irresistable.
1. Plein air painting is the best way to record the experience of seeing with the human eye
When I paint outdoors, I’m trying to produce a faithful record of my experience of seeing in that moment. To put down on the canvas what I perceive with my own eyes, as truthfully and precisely as I can. That sounds simple, but it’s my greatest challenge.
Plein air landscape painting gives me an efficient way to record the fundamentals of a specific scene or landscape as I observe it, to note the general light conditions, landforms, atmosphere and overall layout of the terrain.
More importantly, it helps me pinpoint—and record in paint —the true, natural colour values and tonal relationships I see when I look at that scene. Eye and hand must work closely together.
It’s that accuracy I’m after when I go out with my pochade box, and, as I tell students, I don’t think there’s any other way to achieve it. The only way I know to reach that level of fidelity to seeing, or even roughly approximate it, is through the regular discipline of painting en plein air.
And what about photographs? They are useful tools. I use them myself. But I always keep in mind that cameras don’t deliver the level of precision our eyes do, especially when it comes to colour and tonal values. To record what my eyes see when I look at a landscape, there is no substitute for plein air painting.
Sardinia, a beach not far from Bosa, on the east coast of the island. This unique beach was a mix of sculpted sand forms and slabs of sandstone running out into the sea. It challenged my ideas of what a beach should look like and made me rethink my approach to painting the scene. I had to paint quickly because the scrap of shade I’m sitting in was moving fast.
2. Plein air painting hones fundamental skills like no other exercise
I think of plein air painting as painting bootcamp. It makes a painter stronger in short order.
Even at this point in my career, it helps me stay fit as an artist. It makes me better at planning pictures on the spot, taking quick decisions, committing to choices and following through. Even if it doesn’t work out perfectly every time, I always learn something from the process.
It challenges my observational skills, forcing me to look more carefully, to really see what’s in front of me and decide what’s important about the scene. I have to make rapid calculations about which features are essential, which are not.
Because it has to be done quickly, plein air painting improves the speed and assurance of drawing, colour mixing and brushwork. It develops overall efficiency in the painting process, helps overcome hesitancy and develops painterly instinct.
At first the time pressure can be hard to handle, but it gets easier with practice. Eventually it begins to feel intuitive to size up a subject, make some quick decisions and set about getting it down on canvas without delay.
My rough and ready travel painting kit including rags, makeshift receptacles for water (cut-down plastic bottles), a palette knife, select brushes, water soluble oil paints in a plastic box and the wilderness drybag I keep everything in when I’m on the move. My plein air gear may not be glamorous, but hopefully it’s all there when I need it. Also shown here, a previously painted landscape on board.
3. Plein air painting focuses the mind when it comes to materials and equipment
In my studio, there’s an abundance of everything—too much stuff. Every conceivable brush, colour, medium, support, ground, is to hand, ready for me to use. If it’s not, I can order it in a few minutes.
The same is not true for plein air painting. When I go outdoors to paint, I need to carry absolutely everything I’ll be using with me.
My kit needs to contain whatever I require to meet the conditions in the field, from thinners, to paint colours and brushes, down to sheets of plain kitchen roll for blotting. At the same time, the whole package needs to be light and portable. This paradox forces me to take a high degree of responsibility for my equipment and materials.
I have to think carefully about where I’m going, the kind of conditions I imagine I’ll find there and the kind of painting I ultimately want to do. I have to come to terms with my painting habits and preferences, say, for one kind of medium or brush over another. I probably need to make a few sacrifices to get everything into my rucksack.
I’m constantly thinking about and modifying my plein air painting kit in search for the perfect the perfect balance of lightness and completeness. It’s a kind of obsession.
Plein air painting from a sailboat is an attractive idea, but it adds another variable to the process: the movement of the boat. The answer is either to choose a dead calm day or paint at top speed. In this instance the sketch did not work out, not because the boat was moving but because the light was too dull and dead. You win some, you lose some: not all sketches are successful. That’s also a lesson of painting en plein air.
4. Plein air painting encompasses the passage of time
A photograph records one instant, a frozen moment in time. Even a film only captures a few moments at most.
When I paint en plein air, the resulting image similarly seems to depict a certain place caught in a particular moment in time. But that’s an illusion. Plein air painting is a process that happens over time and must encompass change.
Any given plein air picture captures not just one moment, but a whole succession of moments. Time passes as I paint, the light conditions shift, the wind rearranges the leaves of the trees, people and dogs wander up the path, changing the scene even as I try to capture it.
This means that, even before I start painting, I have to build change into my process, planning for how the scene will evolve during the time I’m painting it. This involves imagining how the shadows will track as the day progresses, how the light will fall on various objects in the scene and even on my canvas or the spot I’m standing in.
To deal with the fact of change, I also need to make decisions about my painting as I work on it. The shadows are constantly in motion, but I need to choose a place to fix them in the painting. I have to look at the sky and pick a configuration of clouds I think is especially evocative or representative of that place and time.
This need to account for change can prove maddening at times, but it’s one of the defining factors of painting from life.
It’s also the reason why the oil sketch of a landscape can turn out to look somehow more “right”, more representative, than the photograph. It’s because the artist’s decisions have landed well and produced an image that captures the essential characteristics of a scene better than a photograph could.
Spanish oil sketches drying on a tiled terrace in Andalucia. These are scenes I painted in and around the Alpujarras. Good weather, beautiful, remote, landscapes and dramatic light make this region a pleasant destination for plein air painters. The broom is obviously for removing sketches I don’t think have worked.
5. Plein air paintings are invaluable in the studio
I am primarily a studio artist, as I mentioned. I use my plein air oil sketches as visual references to make bigger, more worked-out, landscape paintings in the studio. Even when I have photographs of a subject, the oil sketch will always be my primary source material.
When I’m working on a large landscape, I pin the oil sketch directly onto my easel, right next to the larger painting. I refer to it constantly.
At this stage, I deliberately avoid looking at photographs, except to check fine details, like the number of windows in a building. But, even when faced with a photograph, I will know instinctively the adjustments I have to make in the painting because I’ve done the plein air sketch and spent time focusing on the real thing.
Plein air painting works as a memorizing process. Looking at the sketch in the studio triggers my memory of seeing the scene. I can feel it happening in my head.
I relive the real-life experience of observing that landscape on that day. I recall the painting choices I made, how I dealt with the changing light, the colours I chose, the tonal relationships I saw.
My aim is to translate the quality of immediacy and aliveness from the oil sketch to the larger studio painting, to convey my experience of seeing in a larger format. Oil sketches painted en plein air provide an invaluable resource for doing this.
Some scenes seem to make decisions for the painter. This beach in Sardinia demanded a particular restricted palette, evident here on my mini-pochade palette. Its peculiar landforms dictated a special geometry that gave the painting its final form. Painting conditions were not ideal, but the subject brought a special magic to the work.
What am I thinking about? Hopefully nothing but the scene before me and the tools I have in hand: my brushes, paints, thinners…