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!