Sometimes I stumble across a paragraph or two in a book I'm reading that seem to say exactly what I think, only worded so much better that I could ever say. 

I read the following words the other day, and thought I'd pass them along because they say so beautifully what it is about the landscape that interests me, and why painting the landscape around me can be so energizing and refreshing:

"The forces of nature are huge, and we are tiny, and in the mountains it's easier to remember this.... I live in, or rather below, the mountains for two basic reasons: because I think the mountains are one of the last huge and wild and magnificent things we have left in this country, one of the last few things we have not yet, in places, grasped and squeezed and sculpted into some unrecognizable, and diminished, shape - a landscape, therefore, in which possibility still exists."

- Rick Bass, Why I Came West

Disciples of the plein air movement often wax poetic about the superiority of painting on location to painting in the studio. Me? Not so much.

I think that painting on location is an essential tool for the landscape painter, but as such is just one of many things we use to improve the skill with which we represent the essence of the landscape.

The studies I do on location typically don’t get much further than the stack of studies leaning up against my studio wall. Unless I’m participating in a show, I don’t aim for finished paintings when I’m on location. My goal is simply to capture the color and energy of the scene – those things that can elude the lens of even the most skilled photographer. 

 

Every once in a while I’ll like a study enough to frame it and pass it on to a gallery, but for the most part these small pieces are just reference material for larger paintings. The challenge is to successfully transfer the energy and spontaneity of the plein air study to the larger painting – it’s all too easy to get bogged down in detail once I step up to the easel in the comfort of my studio.

 

This particular painting is an example of the marriage of plein air and studio. I did the study for this painting on a windy day in November, after an early season snow had coated the peaks of the continental divide. I was standing on a pullout off of Highway 40 over Berthoud Pass, and it wasn’t exactly warm, nor was it pleasant to hear the cars whizzing by. I spent a little over an hour and called it a day.

 

I liked the original study enough to decide to make it into a much larger painting, and used it in the studio to inform my decisions about color and value. In the studio, I was able to make some conscious decisions about the composition that eluded me on location. I exaggerated the slope of the mountain a bit to add drama and movement (I had accidentally downplayed this in the study), and rearranged the foreground pines where I felt they were distracting from the mountain in the study. I used the study as a jumping off point for color, but injected some warmer tones into the mountain, and of course added a bit more detail as dictated by the 30x40” panel size. 

 

In the end, I needed both an hour on location and a week in the studio to pull everything together into a cohesive larger painting. I love to paint on location, but sometimes I love this blending of ideas in the studio even more!

As a landscape painter, it’s easy to go out on location and find yourself attracted to the obvious – those components of the landscape that just jump out at you screaming for attention (the bright gold of September aspens, the 14,000 peak that dominates the horizon, the picturesque alpine lake…). Sometimes it’s hard to ignore the majestic and notice the more quiet corners of the landscape, but oftentimes the more obscure subjects can result in the most beautiful, contemplative paintings. As I grow in my art, I’m trying to make an effort to seek out the scenes that are less obvious and find beauty in that which is commonplace.

 

The day that I did the study for this painting, I found myself driving all over the southwest suburbs of Denver trying to find something suitable to paint. It was not one of Denver’s best days for air quality, and the mountains of the Front Range were almost completely veiled by the haze of pollution. The leaves on the aspens were long gone, and the only color left was the orange of the last cottonwood leaves. In short, it was kind of an ugly day, and there wasn’t an “obvious” landscape painting to be found.

 

After driving around for far too long, I decided to park my car down by some ponds at Chatfield State Park and just paint what I saw as practice. I set up in a field not far from my car, and did four paintings in a row from the same location, changing only the position of my easel. I started with the most obvious view of a colorful cottonwood tree with the mountains rising up behind it, and finished with a sketch of the sun setting over the foothills. The study for this painting was the third I did that day, and it was a subject I would have completely overlooked had I only done one painting and moved on.

 

When I returned home from my painting trip and reviewed my studies, this scene was the most quiet of the bunch, but I felt it was the one with the most potential for a larger painting. I was drawn to the variation in the foliage around the pond from full-grown cottonwoods with no leaves on the far bank, to the saplings in the foreground in full color. Mostly, I liked the way that the still water provided a place for the eye to rest in the center of the painting, with the movement of the landscape encircling it. 

 

If I hadn’t taken the time to explore all of the possibilities of this particular location on what happened to be an unremarkable day, I would have completely missed this painting. It was a good exercise in searching for beauty – one that I’ll be doing more often in the future!