Unicycle Painter

Plein-air painting meets extreme sports.

Read more about unicycle painting, link.

Rocks and Shallows

Oil study on location, 9 x 12 inches on oil-primed masonite panel.

Previous GJ post: Color in Mountain Streams

Lehigh River Video

Here's a short video showing steps in a plein air oil study two days ago.

The early stages show the subject drawn with a brush, large tones scrubbed in, and the details of foam saved for last.


The oil painting is 9 x 12 inches, and took about six hours.


Here's a shot of the final painting.

Hudson River Fellowship

Yesterday the group of landscape painters known as the Hudson River Fellowship officially finished their month long residency in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

On Friday, the weary but triumphant band of artists gathered in Hunter, New York for the traditional potluck supper and the showing of the harvest of pencil drawings and oil studies. Above: Emilee Lee.

Among the chief inspirations for their approach are the pre-Impressionist location studies by Asher Durand, Frederic Church, William Trost Richards, and the Russian sylvan wizard Ivan Shishkin. Below: a work by HRF fellow Erik Koeppel.

The HRF students come from all over the world. They receive a free scholarship, though the association is not an atelier or academy as such. To preserve the feeling of collegiality, the name was changed from “Hudson River School for Landscape” to “Hudson River Fellowship.” The instructor is Nature herself. Below: Noah Layne

This summer Mother Nature dealt them an unusual amount of rain, wind, bears, and mosquitoes, along with the the usual challenges of changing light and fluctuating stream levels.

“It is through extensive and real engagement that the artist learns to capture the spirit of the landscape,” the website says. “The many hundreds of hours spent out in the sun and the wind, scrupulously studying nature, transform the artist.”

Charles Williams told me that they woke up before the sun rose each morning and often stayed on site until sunset to capture the fleeting colors of dusk.

Many of the students hail from an academic background, where their precise observation skills help them sort out and organize the vast complexity that confronts the eye in a forest streamscape or a tree study. As Sadie Valeri puts it, they learn to “Slooooow waaaaay doooooown,” and really observe before they put down each stroke.

The disciplined observation of the HVF, if it is combined with feeling and imagination, is sure to “boldly originate a high and independent style,” as Asher Durand wrote in 1855.
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Grand Central Academy blog showing behind the scenes.
Official HVF website.
Sadie Valeri’s blog, with videos of painting in a downpour.
Here are Sadie's detailed reviews of various plein air art materials.
Another very detailed post on "Lines and Colors" about pochade boxes.
Previous GJ post on the Hudson River School for Landscape.

Plein Air and Poetry

Some great painters, such as John Sargent and Anders Zorn, did their most memorable work when they were face-to-face with their motif. Nature is so rich in her inspiration, it's reasonable to ask: how can anyone improve on a plein-air painting?

Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) painted this perfectly competent study on location. It shows a log bridge at the end of a millpond. It is well observed and executed. But it leaves no impression on the imagination.

Back in the studio he refined the image and transformed it into poetry.

He simplified the background row of trees and added a ragged patch of evening clouds. He eliminated the floating log and developed the row of timbers in the lower left. He brought more attention to the uncertain footpath leading from the foreground plank across the three logs to the thin distant trail.

The image suddenly takes on a new interest, not because it is more finished, but because it is better composed. By sifting his direct impressions through the filter of memory and imagination, his work touches the emotions. We stand at the crossing point between our frail human pathway and the downward journey of the falling water, as the sunset prepares to cast us into darkness.

By the Millpond (1892) is one of Levitan’s most beloved works, and it is one of the touchstones of the Russian landscape tradition.

Mystery Artist: Water Lilies

Can you name the artist who painted these water lilies? I'll send a deluxe Dinotopia map to the first person who guesses the correct answer.
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Addendum: Zelas correctly identified the Russian painter Isaac Levitan (1860-1900). The painting is 95cm x 128cm and was painted in 1895, before Claude Monet's famous water lily paintings.

More samples of Levitan at Athaeneum.org/Levitan and Wikipedia/Levitan

Puttin’ on Daubs

One day Edgar Payne was painting outdoors, far from any sign of habitation. He was surprised to find a man behind him, watching.

Then the man said, “ Why that’s nuthin but puttin’ on daubs!”

A little later the man shook his head and said, “But you sure gotta know where to put them daubs!” and walked away.
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Recollection by Evelyn Payne Hatcher in an addendum to Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar A. Payne.

Transparency of Foliage

Foliage in trees has different degrees of transparency.


When the leaves emerge in the spring, you can easily see the sky through the tree. The leaves make a whisper-thin veil that has to be painted very delicately.

Some trees, like the one on the left, cover the sky more completely, with fewer skyholes. (Asher B. Durand)

The tree on the right is an oak, and it happens to be very opaque. As the foliage becomes more opaque, you can begin to see the form of the tree in terms of a light side and a shadow side. The maple on the left is more transparent. The foliage was drybrushed over the sky to suggest the delicacy of the leaves.

Look for a variety of degrees of transparency within a single picture, for beauty almost always accompanies variety. Claude Lorrain almost always had one tree that was very transparent adjacent to another that was more opaque.

Bonheur Ram Studies

Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) set the standard for oil studies of animals.

These studies of rams are masterpieces of texture, lighting, and expression. For her larger works, like The Horse Fair, she did innumerable studies in oil and charcoal.

Wiki on Rosa Bonheur

Plein Air People

There’s no rule that you have to paint only landscapes or cityscapes when you’re outdoors with your oil kit. You can paint people, too.

French academic painter Jehan-Georges Vibert executed this 9x14 inch oil study called “At the Corrida” outdoors at a sporting event in 1875. Evidently he painted each figure spontaneously as they struck momentary poses.

Click to enlarge. There's a man leaning over the railing, cheering, and three different women holding up their fans to shield their faces from the sun. Each is a study in character, each sketched from candid subjects.

The piece shows signs of being painted in a slotted box, a typical plein air set-up from the time. The study was probably finished out to the edges later.

See 29 images by Vibert at Art Renewal Center, link.

West Clare Graveyard

I woke up before dawn in Kilnaboy, County Clare, Ireland to paint this graveyard. The church was in ruin behind me. Three gravestones with Celtic crosses rose up from the overgrown grass to be blessed by the first rosy light of morning.

James Perry Wilson’s Dioramas, Part 1

When you stand in front of a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it feels like you’re looking into miles of real space.


But just beyond the taxidermied animals and the fake twigs and leaves, you’re really gazing at a painting on a vertical wall just a few feet away from you. The slightest wrong color note or eyecatching brushstroke would jump out and shatter the effect.

The artist who painted these illusions was James Perry Wilson (1889-1976), who established the highest standard ever reached in diorama backdrop painting.


His first training was in architecture. He was mainly self-taught as a landscape painter. He traveled to study the environments that he sought to portray, making stereo photographs and plein air paintings on location, often using a “widescreen” format with two or more adjacent canvases.

According to contemporary accounts, he occasionally removed his clothes in remote locations and painted in the nude.

He captured both the artistic and scientific truth of a particular locale, with painstaking accuracy of botanical, atmospheric, and geological detail.

In addition to his work in New York, he painted some of the dioramas for the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, The Museum of Science in Boston, and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.



Every diorama has a “tie-in” area where the 3-D foreground comes up against the painted back wall. Nay-sayers had claimed that it’s impossible to represent water along the tie-in line. Rising to the challenge, Wilson designed the Connecticut shoreline diorama to feature a couple of areas with tie-ins crossing water areas, including the section above, where the painted illusion begins just beyond the turtle.

The full backdrop was often 35 feet wide or more, with a dome-shaped ceiling. This required large amounts of paint and careful mixtures. To make the perspective accurate across such a oddly curving surface, Wilson worked out a unique grid system that he called “the unsquare square” to compensate the foreshortening of the side sections.



Every backdrop was carefully planned using maquettes, color sketches, and full-size charcoals drawn on the backdrop before the final paint was applied. The tie-in area was the last section to be completed, and had to be painted with four-foot brushes after the foreground elements were in place.

Tomorrow I’ll share some rare notes and technical tips from JPW.
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More on Wilson
Wilson’s dioramas have been lovingly preserved thanks to the efforts of Michael Anderson of the Yale Peabody Museum, link,
Stephen Quinn of the American MNH, link,
and Ruth Morrill, JPW’s former assistant and the widow of dioramist Ralph Morrill.

Stephen Quinn’s book Windows on Nature chronicles the story of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.

Continuation of this post: James Perry Wilson's Diorama's, Part 2.

Foggy Weather

Most folks like sunny, cloudless days, but artists often prefer fog, rain, and clouds. This sketch in Maine wouldn’t have been half as interesting on a day with a clear blue sky.



The water was glassy, just one semi-tone darker than the sky. Everything was gray except those red details at the waterline. All the color of the far boats dropped out. The distant sailboat is just a ghost.

As with overcast light, there is little modeling of the form, because white light is coming from overhead in all directions.
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Related posts on overcast light, part 1 and part 2

Industrial Pasadena

Here’s a plein air study of an industrial landscape from Pasadena. I have no idea what all those tanks and tubes are for, but I enjoyed trying to convey the variety of forms and colors.

Jim watercolors a landscape in Malta

Jim has sent a very short video of a watercolor townscape-in-progress. He reports that he and Alan Foster took wonderfully colorful 1950s-era Maltese buses all over the island. It looks like good weather for plein air watercolor painting, too.

Painting in the Car

On a rainy day, one of the only options is to run the heater and the windshield wipers while you prop your work on the steering wheel. The problem I had at this paintout a few years ago in Rye, New York, was fogged-up windows. The painting was a dud, and I ended up rubbing it down and doing another once the rain cleared in the afternoon.

Hi, everyone, Jeanette here. Thanks so much for all of your encouragement. Since this post is about sketching from the car, I thought this one might fit. I did this ballpoint pen and watercolor sketch from the front passenger seat on a cold day in the Catskill Mountains. We were waiting for our younger son to finish skiing with his friends. We had an hour to ourselves (sans teenagers) and Pine Hill is sort of a forlorn and ramshackle little town, our preferred locale for sketching.

Since all I had with me was a sketchbook with laid-finish paper, the paper buckled a little. The color is from my palm-sized Windsor&Newton bijou box, bought in Los Angeles 27 years ago when Jim and I were dating.

Speaking of Jim, he called from Malta, and helped me with my technical problems. I also appreciate all of you who explained the quirks of Blogger for me. Jim is fine, sketching away, and hasn't yet been able to find an internet cafe from which he can upload photos. Something about the software being correct. I'm sure he'll have plenty to show when he gets back.

Track Excavator

I’m attracted to sketching unlovely subjects, not to make pretty pictures, but just to understand how things are made. As I did this watercolor study of a track excavator, I was thinking how much the mechanical arm is like the anatomy of a human arm.

The main difference, I guess, is that the hydraulic “muscles” work more by pushing, while human muscles work by pulling.

Shearing Day

Yesterday Scott Balfe (left) joined me for a day of painting at the Dancing Lamb Farm . It was shearing day for over 100 of the Icelandic sheep.

I set up near the barn to paint the sheep waiting their turn. What attracted me was the contre jour lighting, the mistiness of the atmosphere, the frost on the ground and the turn in the road in the distance.

The sheep didn't really pose; I had to construct composite poses based on a variety of individuals milling around.

Jeanette helped out with skirting (top), the step where the fleece is laid out on a mesh table and impurities are picked out. It was windy and cold in the barn, so we were grateful for the warm meal of farm-raised chicken soup and homemade cheese.

Rhinebeck Paint Out

Yesterday was the Seventh Annual Great Rhinebeck Paint Out. It was a crisp sunny day, a little past peak fall color, with a temperature around 40 degrees F. I'm a wimp, so I had full long underwear. I'm using an Open Box M pochade box.

One of you asked for a step-by-step, so on this post you can follow along.

First, here's a photo of the motif: a view to the east of the village of Rhinebeck. It's a very busy subject, but I like the strong leading lines of the road and the soft gray mass of trees in the center.

I started on an 11x14 sky panel, oil primed with a blue gradation. The blue color helped in two ways. First I had an approximation of the sky color already established with dry paint, so I could work delicate detail over it. Also, the blue was a nice complementary color to lay beneath the warm autumn-colors.

The first step was to draw in the main lines and shapes with a bristle brush and burnt sienna oil pigment. Note the horizontal eye level line, even though I can't see the actual horizon. The brown dot in the middle of the road at right center is the vanishing point for the sloping street lines of the foreground.

I oiled up the sky with Liquin to make it more receptive to overpainting. I put in some light feathery cirrus clouds, and a pale glow along the horizon. Then I started softly stating the dry branches. and other details against the sky.

At this stage I needed to figure out the overall light statement. At first I planned to put the foreground in shadow, but that left the middle ground too busy with competing interest. So I established an illuminated foreground, shadowed middle ground, and light distance. This gives a feeling of passing clouds and draws interest to the activity of the far intersection.
I carried the lines of the road to that vanishing point you saw earlier. For lines like this I used a mahl stick to balance my hand.
Here's the finished painting "Light at the Crossroads." The 3 o'clock deadline was looming, so I scrambled to resolve the unfinished areas. On the left side, the houses are stated fairly broadly, which in the end probably helps accentuate the confetti of the intersection.

By 4:00 it was hanging at the event space. It's behind the light, next to the painting of Vanderbilt I did with Erik Tiemens last summer, reworked on the spot last week with fall colors. A painting by Keith Gunderson is below mine.
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Previous Gurney Journey posts: Sky panels, Sky blue, Illuminated foreground, Mahl stick, Confetti, Vanderbilt Vista, Complementary priming color.

Paint-Out Tomorrow

If you're in the New York State area tomorrow, please stop by the village of Rhinebeck in the Hudson Valley for the 7th Annual Plein-Air Paint-Out and Auction.

A paint-out is an event where professional artists gather on-site in the morning to create a painting, which is framed and auctioned in the afternoon. It's the closest thing to tightrope walking or improv theater in the painting business.

The autumn color is at peak and the weather promises to be sunny. Over fifty artists will be attending, including Jim Adair, Gary Fifer, Tarryl Gabel, Keith Gunderson, Betsy Jacaruso, Hae Suk Kim, Seth A. Nadel, Robert Schneider, and me.
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For more information, and the complete list of artists, link.
For a listing of other plein air events, and a great site for the on-site painting information, visit OutdoorPainting.com