March 25, 2019

I have just finished reading the wonderful book called Mad Enchantment by Ross King ( available on line from the Halifax library). It is an amazing biography of Monet, and perhaps even more of interest to me because being a fellow artist, I suffer from the same anxieties.( hopefully I am not quite such a beast). Also two years ago, Jim and I finally got to Giverny, Monet,s home and garden in France. When I stood and sketched in Monet’s dining room, the guard was agreeable, but when I pulled out my purse paints to add a little colour, it was forbidden. Since then I have completed a studio watercolour of Monet’s dining room and I have the underpainting done on a large oil.  While working on this oil I have suffered a similar problem to Monet’s after he had his cataracts removed. Before the operations, I could always trust my eyes, now I have a distortion that I have to work around.  Monet got very very special glasses that took eight months to make.  A passage in  the Monet book also discussed Monet insisting that he worked only on location, but in fact he built three increasingly bigger studios at Giverny.

I was encouraged to write this because of Annie Bennett’s comment about plein air or on location painting. She is a former painting student, a wonderful artist and a friend. She said that she was encouraged because of my Facebook posts to try on location painting.  First of all, usually when travelling all of my work is done on location. This year, because of my chest condition early on and now because of the extreme heat, ( and also some fear about getting up) I started doing some little sketches isolated on white paper of people from photos on my iPad that I had taken that day. So some of what I have been posting has been studio work.

That being said, I want to encourage every artist out there to paint on location. It hones the talents, develops ideas and sometimes has an immediacy or freshness that a studio painting can’t achieve.  The biggest barrier to on location painting, are the painters own fears and emotions. Be brave. Try it. Stick with it!

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