Last year I started plein air painting and this painting of a slave cabin on St. Simons Island, Georgia was one of my first attempts. My artist friend Susie Burch, set me up with a list of all the outdoor artist's gear required and a list of all the accessories that actually are quite mandatory here in the South: bug spray, sun screen, a hat! and an umbrella to attach to your easel. To top it off, she invited me to our own paint-out on St. Simons Island for a week. Now that's a great introduction to plein air painting.
I painted this scene of a garden gate at the old Bulloch Hall Plantation here in Roswell in two mornings this past June. In looking back at these two paintings, I can see an improvement in some areas. The first St. Simons painting I like better because of the looseness of the brush strokes, plus I took the artistic liberty of making the roof color more terracotta which was a great contrast to the moss-covered oaks. Other than the palms and Spanish moss, you might mistake this for a charming English cottage. It's quite lovely now, but I imagine it was much more utilitarian during antebellum South. The old plantation house on St. Simons is gone now and all that's left on the grounds are majestic live oaks draped in moss and a few old slave cabins like this that are now maintained by a local garden club.
However, in the second scene, I'm even more pleased with capturing the light. This was done on a couple of sweltering mornings on the grounds of Bulloch Hall and looking back on the experience, I'm so glad to have caught the light on the tops of the trellis gate slats and on the tops of the posts. You can tell that I spent a lot of time (maybe too much time) getting the perspective right on the gate, fence and outbuilding. In retrospect, the lines are a bit rigid and I missed the loose quality of the earlier painting. On the other hand, I like the lightness of the leaves and the bark in the foreground tree. The bark has an almost fluid quality in the brush strokes. This plein air painting was done on a canvas toned with cadmium red, which unifies the painting and makes those greens pop.
Overall, I like both these paintings and remind myself that this is a process. Once you lather up with bug spray, swat the flies away, resign yourself to the heat, you lose yourself in the painting process. My wish for the New Year is to do more and more plein air painting in addition to the 5-6 studio paintings that are now residing in my head and begging to awake on the canvas.
