The Landscape Still Life

Still life is usually painted in the studio, under controlled light. Delacroix did some open air still life, and probably other people, but mostly it's an indoor sport.

Not one of Delacroix's more famous pieces, or even one of his best, but has always had a kind of wild charm. A series of objects more suited to Chardin than the Romantics, but instead of chiaroscuro, painted in plein aire light.

But once upon a time I was out in my truck hunting for landscape motifs, and blundered into a series of manmade objects which caught my eye, a bunch of nondescript objects lying by a barn in Batavia, Ohio. Most of them I couldn't even name. Nor did I, as I have been taught, rethink their arrangement in abstract terms, and then move them around to suit my fancy. This was a Found Arrangement, and it didn't want any alterations from me.

Exactly what I found so charming is hard to put into words, although the preponderance of the three primary colors certainly was a factor. The blue tube — I have no idea what it actually was — had a brilliant highlight I admired. The block of wood's side plane was lit up by reflected light from the ground, although this can't be seen from the photograph. I don't know. I just dug it.

It was certainly worth a 16x20" canvas, and I just happened to have one such canvas in my truck. I went at it, although the three primary color notion was lost when I began scribbling in a green for the dying grass.

I loved placing the setup off to the side. I loved the rhythm of the objects, which I did my best not to screw around with. It just seemed peaceful, and pleasing, and in its own humble fashion, profound.

I generally do better work if I've taken the time to scribble the whole scene in pencil, which I did do here. Hardly a drawing to win a beauty contest, but it captured the melody of the scene, and gave me an idea of what I was trying to accomplish. This sketch was done before the above lay-in.

On the second and final day I restated everything, bringing the drawing into a little better focus. And I added the reflected light to the side planes of the wood block, and some in the interior surface of the blue cylinder.

The red object is a spool around which heavy cable gets wound.

Good luck trying to sell something like this, although it does what a good small picture should do: it's a simple, peaceful arrangement of shapes, a little 16x20" oasis of logic and clarity which really ought to be hanging in the home of someone who thrives on clearheaded thinking, and love. Which is exactly what happened. Currently it hangs on the wall in the home of my son Dylan Bell.

23.5°

The Earth's axial tilt of 23.5°, as we all learned in elementary school, produces our four seasons. An engineer friend once did the basic solid geometry work for me that proved that at our winter solstice in Cincinnati, we received slightly less than half the sunlight on a given area of land than we do at the summer solstice. It's not tough to understand. When the sun shines down on us at a more oblique angle, the same quantity of sunshine is spread out over a larger area.

I never was terribly aware of the lowering of the noonday sun until I began doing a lot of outdoor landscape painting. When one is fascinated with reproducing the sensation of bright sunshine on canvas, the lack of such sunshine becomes something personal. I recall one November afternoon a few years back, trying to fake it, to pretend that the days were as bright as they are in the summer. One might just as well pretend that there is no law of gravity. Seasons ought to be embraced. One can choose to live at a lower or higher latitude, but that 23.5° just won't go away. If you want the dazzle of sunshine in your winter pictures, you may have to stick to the Golden Hour (see the post from two weeks ago), and catch the descending sun's rays as they hit upright objects perpendicularly, as they do the ground plane during the summer.

When Europeans first began exploring equatorial Africa and South America, a lot of them did so at the cost of their eyesight. I've never experienced sunlight from directly overhead, and neither had they, but it isn't something to be trifled with. I have a friend in Brazil. I keep toying with the idea of asking him to host me for a few weeks in late December sometime. I'd love to see for myself sometime the ultimate blast of the sun, and see it right on the heels of winter solstice here.

Another fantasy long held is the notion of getting in my truck in the middle of June and driving as far north as roads will take me. Civilization seems to require a sun that climbs a few degrees,

The noonday sun goes up, and it goes down. At its nadir we celebrate, because we know it's going to begin to creep upward. Chanukah, Ramadan, Kwanza, the Roman Saturnalia, New Years Eve and of course Christmas. The best Biblical scholarship indicates Jesus Christ's birth taking place in early September, but the Roman Church leaders' choosing a date so close to the solstice can hardly be written off as a coincidence.

And of course it isn't just the height of the sun that changes, but the whole panoply of flora, fauna and atmosphere. Foliage and leaves disappear at the treetops, and then the level of that disappearance descends. November is the month of that descent. The trees reveal their structures, like a cocktail party of skeletons. Grass becomes brown.

I don't know the scientific reasons why, but winter skies do not resemble summer skies. The puffy cumulus clouds of summer aren't much in evidence. Stratus and cirrus clouds rule the day. You can see it in the picture above. Winter may not be as pleasant to the plein air painter as summer, but the skies are a lot easier to paint.

If you're smart, you'll hunt for the particular beauty to be found in each season and, for that matter, for each day of the year. If the height of the sun never changed, life would be far less pleasant.

It is noteworthy that, following the Great Flood, God told Noah that as long as the earth remained, there'd continue to be seasons (Genesis 8.22). This must have been a huge comfort to Noah. Little children thrive on daily schedules, familiar foods and predictable games. Grownups need the cycle of the seasons.

"The Circle Game", a celebration of the changing seasons and the process of growing up, is arguably Joni Mitchell's best song. "Here Comes the Sun" is about as good a piece of work as the Fab Four ever offered us. All of us, consciously or unconsciously, need to be reminded that life is a merry-go-round, not a conveyor belt.

Like it or lump it, summer looks like summer, fall looks like fall, winter looks like winter, and spring looks like spring. Impressionist landscape is the story of the changing seasons, and the only suggestion I can make is to dress in layers.

Spillway Girl Revisited, Part One

This past February when I prepared to spend six weeks in Charleston, SC, I did lunch with Carl Samson and Richard Luschek, and shared my objectives for the pictures I intended to paint in the Low Country and afterward.

There were three. I wanted to work larger, I wanted to solve all drawing problems in advance of beginning to paint, and I wanted figures in my pictures.

Carl stopped me at that last one. "No, you don't want figures. You want meaningful figures."

This is why it pays to have friends, and particularly, friends who've already walked the path you intend to tread. The first Charleston picture I finished paid homage to all three of my stated objectives, but not to Carl's caveat. Here's an oil sketch of the picture's star. It took me fifteen minutes, and was far more satisfying than the finished picture itself.

This was to be my Texting Woman opus. I persuaded a local woman to pose for me, and did this rapid sketch. For some time I've wanted to do a picture of someone sending a text message while traipsing through an idyllic landscape. This was my chance. I did all of the things I'd intended: worked large, had a figure, and in the course of doing several sketches like this one, tried my best to solve all drawing problems in advance.

But it was a scene which I could never get excited about. I'm not sure why not. The tree and roadway had been studied and sketched at length. It should have worked, but it did not. The figure was meaningful enough, but the whole scene wasn't. Maybe I was in a hurry. It wasn't all that interesting a scene; mostly it was convenient. And it takes time to find an area's great motifs, the ones which beg to be painted. I had my sketch of the woman. I could have waited till I found the appropriate country road for her to ignore. But I didn't. Haste makes waste.

I guess another factor is the time of year. Summer and fall are times that seem given to good pictures; they're punched up with color. Late winter and early spring are desolate by comparison. Where's the pictorial irony of a woman ignoring a desolate landscape in favor of her smartphone? Honestly, who could blame her?

Later I did find plenty of meaningful vistas in Charleston and did some good pictures there, but this one ain't one of 'em.

Fast forward to June, when after putting in four sessions on a view of the Duck Creek Spillway, I spied a young woman wandering through the trench and prevailed on her to pose. The result was Carl Samson's "meaningful" figure. She turned an unfocused urban landscape picture into a genre piece.

It was a nice little picture, worth its five sessions (or approximately fifteen hours) or work. but little pictures weren't my objective. I wanted bigger, fully realized compositions, and my Spillway Girl seemed worth a more monumental treatment.

The model was willing to give me a shot. We exchanged phone numbers, and I stretched a much larger canvas.

So in early July, the woman and I rendezvoused at the spillway, me with a larger canvas and she with a giving heart. The truncated cone structure in the center of this snapshot is the foliage-laden object in the foreground of the earlier picture. In between that pic's completion and this one's beginning, they'd done some trimming on my side of the spillway.

This was Day One. I think the best one can hope for on the first day is to cover the canvas, to give yourself a pictorial environment in which decisions can be evaluated and, if necessary, corrected. I got the canvas covered.

It is helpful to not build up huge mounds of paint while outlines are still being figured out. This picture got scraped down a few hours after the end of each session. The alternative is silly. If paint is built up along a sitter's outline, this leaves you with no opportunity to adjust that outline, or lose it altogether. Ernest Hemingway famously said that if you removed all of the pretty words from a passage and it still had some punch, then you had a good passage. The same is true of hard outlines and a buildup of paint, at least at the beginning. Such elements are a tool, but a tool not to be used until pretty much everything is figured out.

At Day One, my story was, in ascending order, about three things: pavement soaked with water from the sluice gate, graffiti, and the woman washing her feet. In terms of physical area, the pavement was the largest, the graffiti the second largest, and the woman the smallest. In terms of focus, the pavement wanted the least, the graffiti the medium, and the woman the most. The plan was to provide the viewer's eye with a large surface to contemplate and wander around in, but to leave that viewer no option other than to return to the woman. There are such things as ensemble movies, like Robert Altman's Nashville, or Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, or Parenthood or The Best Years of Our Lives. But like most films you love the most, this painting was not to be an ensemble. My Spillway Girl was to be the one and only star.

Whether or not that was a good plan, it was the plan, and in the eleven subsequent sessions, that plan was never changed. Day One was the picture's melody, and I was satisfied with it. For the next couple of weeks, I would be tasked with tweaking its instrumentation and arrangement. But the melody never changed. I think time proved that it was a good melody.

Chasing the Golden Hour

Cinematographers call the hour preceding sunset The Golden Hour. The descending sun's light takes on an orange hue; slanted and upright objects, such as trees, mountains and people, are spotlighted by that orange. It's a lovely time, and particularly in autumn and winter, when the dimming light of the sun is depressing as all get out, except during The Golden Hour. Famously, David Watkin tried to schedule as many exteriors as possible of his film Catch-22 during The Golden Hour. Landscapes painted during the dark seasons are often painted during The Golden Hour. Autumn still looks like autumn, but it's brilliant and shimmering.

Two years ago, in late October, I became fascinated with a goose field in Newtown, Ohio during The Golden Hour, and sketched the light effect very rapidly:

One of the things every painter learns sooner or later is that to obtain an effect of bright light, white paint is not a good tool. Bright light does not equal white, which actually is quite cool, but rather it equals intense color — particularly intense warm color. Even the greens seen above are warm, obtained by mixing ultramarine with cadmium yellow medium, rather than cadmium lemon.

This sketch was done over a previous painting, which perhaps explains the rough texture. It took all of fifteen minutes to paint. The little flecks seen at the far edge of the field are geese. It would take me two years to come up with a satisfactory way of indicating those geese in a larger picture.

A couple of days later I returned to the spot with a 20x24" canvas. I did this underpainting. Not sure why I chose this Indian Red for the ground, but pale yellows and oranges are often very good for skies, especially skies one intends to paint in blues later on.

Possibly the Indian Red was chosen as a complimentary color to the greens of grass and foliage, as well as being a pigment capable of producing fairly dark values. But looking back, if it's throbbing compliments I was after, as well as a pigment that could give me darks when necessary, wouldn't Ultramarine have been a good choice, as something to be overpainted in various oranges?

But heck, this was 2015, back when I was very young. I had heard about the need to have one hue pervading and dominating a scene, but I hadn't yet accepted and embraced the notion. Not, at least, to the extent that I could use it in the scoping out of color, and the selection of pigments for underpainting.

Here's a snapshot of the scene taken that day, but the real Golden Hour hadn't quite arrived.

I think scenes such as this one, with a strong light effect, testify as to the folly of looking into its various components, instead of taking jn the whole scene at once. The more I'd look into the sky, the more blue I saw. But the whole scene is essentially orange. Orange, in the parlance of some painters, is the scene's Mother Color. That effect was lost here.

This alteration was made last year about this time. The strong oranges suggest The Golden Hour. The sky's blues had to be tempered with yellow, or that orange domination would be gone. In some ways, this state is superior to the "final" version I completed yesterday.

Here's the final session on the picture from last year. It didn't end on a good note; i looked into the sky again, and lost some of the intense light on upright planes. Thus did the picture look for another year, leaning against the wall. An unfinished picture, particularly one fraught with unsolved problems, hangs like Damocles' sword. It cries for solutions. It cries for understanding which one may not yet have.

And it's a souvenir of earlier times, times when 20x24" was my idea of a full size picture. Today, anything smaller than 20x24" is a miniature to me. I've run out of stretched and mounted canvi, and have to cut up some plywood soon, upon which canvas can be glued. I think I'm going to go after 20x24" and 24x28", a bunch of 'em. Between those and the scores of failed pictures of yore, I've got many square yards upon which I can learn and teach.

This was yesterday's effort. Maybe I'm done. Maybe the scene, and the picture, aren't worth further futzing. I think I got my Golden Hour, at least as well as I did two years ago with a used canvas and fifteen minutes.