Plein Air Class -- Fishing and Painting

Saturday August 21st -- Learning objectives

• Describe historic phases of landscape painting theory


• Use mass macchia and creative space divisions


• Use large brush drawing with expressive strokes


• Use eye movement and focal point techniques to create compositions


• Use counterpoint and other line techniques to create compositions


• Create basic color pool mixtures based on seasons

Narrative:

Although landscape painting has a long history, we will arbitrarily begin with Corot and the French school. Corot mixed his colors and utilized value changes very skillfully, his colors were muted and soft. He anticipated impressionism and introduced a high level of romantic naturalism. A Corot study:



Constable introduced a more impressionistic style both based upon the Dutch tradition and, at the same time, exploratory techniques of abbreviated statements and expressive brushwork. His oil sketches were very avant-garde for his time and his mastery of freedom and observation unexcelled. His work represents the beginnings of abstraction and expressionism in landscape. A Constable study:



My own work is highly influenced by both of these painters. Here is a recent plein air painting in progress based on painting sessions off of Willamette Street (cemetery near 43rd Street):



One aspect of this approach is color pool mixing (described below) in which broken color is created by dragging adjacent colors into one another in a circular color pool. Highly saturated browns and reds intensify in relation to the greens and ligher areas.