There are artists who will brave ice, snow and all the rest of winter's bag of tricks, and paint outdoors all year.  I'm not one of these hardy souls but I do enjoy getting out in the field with canvas and paints once the weather is good.  I do it for several reasons.  First, it is a pure joy to get out in nature and paint a beautiful scene, or even an ordinary one, in the fresh air with a mountain stream rushing by, birds chirping, wind rustling through the aspens, the whole experience.  Sometimes I feel that a day spent painting outdoors is a "free day", i.e. it doesn't count against the total number of days I'm allotted here on earth.  A silly thought but a happy one!

Second, plein-air painting develops good painting habits which I always hope to carry back into the studio.  In the field I have limited time and changing light so it is vital that I make decisions quickly and live with them, simplifying what nature has provided to the greatest extent possible.  There are few distractions, no email to answer, household chores to do, etc, so I develop a nice strong focus on what I'm doing.

Third, I often paint with a group, and it's always good to get together with other painters.  One of the occupational hazards of painting is that you can spend a lot of time alone with your canvas and paints, so it's good to have some camaraderie with your fellow painters.

Most of my plein air paintings are never shown in exhibitions, they're more for practice.  But sometimes one of them really works, and sometimes in a way that is different from the way in which successful studio paintings work.  You give up some of the virtuosity that can be achieved in the studio, but you get more of the raw expression and the zest for the subject being painted...in other words, just good honest painting.

It's great to be at this time of the year, the beginning of all of the great outdoor summer things, including painting.

This painting is 10 x 8 inches and was done on site in Clear Creek Canyon in Colorado.  Like most of my plein air work, it was done entirely on-site, no corrections or fussing with it back in the studio.

Happy Summer to all!

This painting is a 12 x 12 inch oil painting of a scene in the Arizona desert.  I started it as a demo in a class I am teaching.  Among the ideas I was demonstrating with this painting were the use of gradations (here present in the sky and cloud) and the use of a "limited" palette.  I use quotes around the word limited because the number of colors and what you can do with them...does not feel limited at all.  In this case the colors I used were:

Phthalo Green

Cadmium Red Light

Cadmium Yellow Medium (but not so much of this)

Titanium White

That's it.  No blue, violet, orange, brown, grey, black, etc.  Those who are painters will recognize these colors as very bright strong pigments.  Phthalo Green in particular seems to want to dominate everything around it.  A big part of this painting was to keep mixing color until I got the right neutral tone.  Mostly this was a matter of starting with the Phthalo Green and adding small amounts of Cadmium Red until the color got where it needed to go.  With a little patience in the color mixing, this was tremendous fun to paint.