Plein Air to Studio

Though I have a great love for plein air painting and do it as often as my time and circumstances allow,  I have, out of necessity, become much more of a studio painter these last few years. Working on location is like painting calisthenics. It demands one's full concentration, advance planning, additional travel time, and a good amount of in-the-moment ingenuity in order to capture the particular color notes and light effects of that point in time. As with physical exercise, I get both an exhilarating rush and a bit of a drain afterwards. 

5:30 a.m. wake-up time ensured that I captured this sunrise in all of its colorful glory. As you can see, all of that color was long gone when I photographed the setting at around 7 a.m.

While I love the spontaneity in my plein air work, my studio work has its advantages. For one I can be more deliberate. Without the limitations imposed by time and changing light, I can go larger in the studio, and at times, improve on my drawing and composition. I can also experiment more easily with various formats, color combinations, and other formal aspects of 2D artistry. 

While I have been engaged in both practices for many years now, I want to do more to relate the two disciplines to each other in a more purposeful way. Part of the reason I haven't always managed this is because I tend to consign my plein air paintings to galleries almost immediately after I complete them, which means I am separated from them for either the length of the consignment, or forever if the painting is sold outright. I do have photographs of all of my plein air paintings as well as photographs of the location (though as you can see above,  the latter often tells me very little about the true color I saw in the moment.)

Therefore I'm making a concerted effort to do more plein-air to studio paintings, using the actual plein air paintings as my primary reference when at all possible. Here's my most recent effort:

"New Day Rising", Oil on linen, 20x24" ©Jennifer E Young

Here's my setup, in progress. I used my tablet holder to prop up my plein air painting so that both pieces would be under the same light for better color accuracy. It actually worked very well. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention!  :) 

Changing spaces (again)

I mentioned in one of my recent posts that we are in the planning stages with a builder to build a new studio at our new residence. It's coming along-- I'm excited! 😃  But given that we are just in the permit stage, I know enough about building an art studio to know that it will be a while yet before that dream becomes a reality.  Meanwhile, it will be important to save some money to help pay for the new digs. Sooo, I'm giving up my rental space and yet again, moving my studio. 

This time I will attempt to work once more in the house. I feel like we have rearranged our house so many times in the year that we have lived here, that it's comical. So what's one or two times more, in the scheme of things? The room I've cleared out for my little temporary studio has been a catch-all room; a mud room, a temporary guest bedroom, and eventually it will be my office.  It has a door that leads to the back screened porch and faces the site of the future studio. It sits a bit away from the rest of the house, and is just down the hallway from the garage. So in some ways,  the location is ideal for a little painting space.  

What's not ideal though, at ALL, is the lighting. This room is very, very dark, which is why I never thought to use it previously for a home studio. What's changed since we moved to Ashland though,  is the easel light, shown below (installed on my Sorg easel, with an unfinished painting.) 

The light is one by Revelite, which I learned of from seeing postings raving about it in several of my friends' Facebook feeds. Revelite makes traditional picture lights for lighting artwork, but also these work lights designed to work with artist's easels. They are slim profile, adjustable LED bulbs, with a high color rendering (CRI), purportedly, of over 90. 

I purchased the 36" light. I will admit I was sweating bullets when I ordered this thing because while I was "pretty sure" this light would work with my easel, I still harassed Revelite's customer service for a few weeks with a barrage of inquisitive emails.  It was, after all, a very expensive light. And it carried a hefty restocking fee in the event it needed to be returned.  Luckily, though, the light mounted to my easel without an issue, and I am really pleased with the quality of the light it provides to my painting surface. 

Above is my new home-based  temporary studio! Although I still think I need more light for the room, at least I have lit the most important parts of my workspace in order to get the job done.  I've lit the palette area with a standing Ott-lite for now, but as you can see this is a very cold, bluish light compared to the warmer but still very clean easel light (which I prefer.) I am still working on a better solution to this problem, because putting different lighting on my painting and palette will likely be problematic. 

If this little space is looking quite neat, it's because the rest of my supplies (frames, equipment, paintings, etc) are stashed in a million different places throughout my house,  with even more still at the rental space. All of that stuff will need to be moved out and consolidated and organized by the end of August, so aside from painting and splashing in the water with the kiddo, you can guess how I will be spending a good part of the rest of my summer! 

Irons in the Fire

It's been a busy week here at the Young/Webb household and I have lots of irons in the fire. I've been hustling this week to provide work for an interior design project, as well as finalizing a commission and framing and shipping for the upcoming Coral Bay Club show at City Art Gallery in Greenville, NC. (One of the paintings I'm sending is featured below.)

"Sunny Provence", Oil on linen, 12x12" ©Jennifer E Young

In addition, my most exciting news of the week is that we are in the drawing/planning stage of building a new art studio on our Ashland property! Hurrah! After operating my art business out of closets and storage sheds and the garage, plus a small rented work space, it will be so, SO nice to have all of my art stuff under one roof!

Right now the plan is to start breaking ground in August, but if you've ever had anything built, you know how that goes. Meanwhile I have to get all of my ducks in a row to identify and order fixtures, figure out the flooring and lighting, windows, etc. etc. So today is a bit of a #TBT as I find myself mining my own research, beginning with the all-important question of studio lighting. This post, written at the inception of my last studio build, is a good starting point for consideration, though I have a few more options to throw in the mix this time around. 

Back in the day I had a lot more time on my hands than I do currently, so I doubt I will be able to journal in a manner that is quite so in-depth. But rest assured I will be just as obsessed inside, and  I will be sure to post as best I can about the progress as things unfold.

Painting solvent-free with traditional oils

Readers who have followed my blog for any length of time may know that I have been in pursuit of solvent-free painting methods for some time. My reasons are two-fold; it's better for my health and I simply don't like the mess of dealing with solvents on a regular basis.

So for the last 10 months or so, I have been painting pretty exclusively with Cobra water miscible oil paints by Royal Talens for my studio work, though I still used traditional oils outdoors for plein air painting. This worked fine, though I still struggled with certain aspects of my chosen materials. In the studio, while the Cobra paints worked really well and complemented my working methods, in other respects I missed the depth and richness that certain colors in my traditional oils  provided to me. On the flip side, I still really hated having to carry around solvents when plein air painting. Both the weight of the liquid and especially the mess of pouring and emptying the solvents really bothered me.

So, after listening to artist Leslie Saeta's excellent Artists Helping Artists podcast featuring an interview with Robert Gamblin, (of Gamblin Artist Colors) I took special note of their discussion surrounding Gamblin's relatively new line of solvent-free gels and mediums. I will admit I have known about these mediums for a while, and even have some of them in my studio. But in truth I haven't done much with them, because other than thinning my oils in the beginning stage and cleaning my brushes between strokes, I don't use painting mediums and so I really wasn't sure how they would benefit me.

But in this podcast, when I learned that you can actually use solvent free gel to clean your brushes during the painting session, well, that got my attention. I can use my beloved traditional oils without a can of messy solvents in my backpack? Now you're talking!

"At the Ready", Oil on linen, 16x20" ©Jennifer E. Young

To experiment with the working properties of the method discussed, I executed the above painting in the studio. I did use a small amount of Gamsol in the beginning stages of my painting to adhere to the fat-over-lean principle of painting in oils. But I can carry this in a small container (a repurposed bottle no larger than an eyedropper that it once held my Argan face oil)  to squirt out a just little onto my palette for whatever small amount of thin washes I may need.  After that point, though, I paint with mostly just paint, maybe using the solvent free gel to get a little bit of slip in my stroke when needed, but mostly for cleaning off my brushes between strokes.

For clean-up on site, I wipe my brushes clean with the medium, maybe with one last squirt of Gamsol from my little bottle, before packing everything up . The final clean up takes place back in the studio. Different artists use different things to wash their brushes, from Murphy's Oil Soap to baby oil to plain old soap and water. I've used these too, but my favorite is Master's Brush Cleaner. This stuff comes in a tub and lasts forever. I can't even remember when I bought my current tub and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through. I just wet my brushes, swish them around in the tub, and the remaining paint is easily washed out under water. Something about this stuff seems to really get the oil residue off of the bristles and condition them at the same time. I don't know what's in that magic tub, and I'm not sure I want to know. But it seems pretty innocuous, though I always wear my gloves now when handling my art materials.

I'm really happy to be reunited with my traditional oil paints. I still like the water miscible oils, but it's hard to shake that first love, and now, it seems, I don't have to.

A tough road to a good week

Pardon my absence from blogging these last few weeks, but  I've had a bit of a tough road, health-wise this winter, and am only just coming out of it (I hope). For the last six months or so I have spent a good portion of my time chasing down the root cause of my aliments. In a nutshell it turns out that I have become allergic to many things. Suddenly, out of nowhere, my body developed rather alarming allergic reactions to common household products, metals, and even most of my clothing. Uncovering the culprits has been a bit like peeling an onion.

I have spent several weeks sorting through it all and purging what I could. It's costing us a small fortune and a lot of trial and error to replace these things in our home with ones that won't make me sick, but there is really no other way forward.

It's hard to pinpoint the how or why of it all. Could it be related to my occupation? Possibly. But just as easily it could have been set off by cleaning products, beauty products, or something in the water. Who knows? The only thing more I really want to say about it is that if you are an artist, protect yourself. I have been wearing latex free nitrile gloves for a number of years now, and consistently painting solvent-free en plein air and in the studio for the last 8 months or so. But there were many years before that when I was not so cautious and had my hands in solvents, likely breathed in volatile organic compounds on a regular basis, and allowed my materials too much direct contact with my skin. Bottom line, you have to treat your materials with a healthy dose of respect or else risk paying the price with your health.

Yes, I am still painting. I am trying to be less of a slob about it, and protecting myself as much as I can.  Things are calming down with the allergies from my efforts, but it has been a long, tough road. This week though, I got back outside to paint, and it felt so good! Here's an in-situ shot of one of my paintings during a visit to the Meadow Farm Museum, where I twice visited this week.  I haven't had a chance to photograph the finals but when the rain lets up I will share them also. 

As a bonus this week, I was notified by Plein Air Magazine that they wanted to feature my painting "Spring Renewal" in their ezine OutdoorPainter.com in their "Why This Works" column. Yeah! It's good to be getting back in the swing.