Delphinium Walk

It is blazing (as in dangerously) hot outside, so as I value my health, I've been having a good time inside reinterpreting my outdoor paintings. 😄  Not every plein air painting I've done calls for expansion. Some of my local pieces are just right as charming vignettes. But this garden piece, painted at a beautiful estate off of River Road, commanded more study. 

My 24x20" painting, alongside the 9x12" plein air

These are the delphiniums at Redesdale, which I had the great pleasure of painting in very changeable weather this past spring. I started out attempting a more literal translation, but given that the new piece was enlarged, and scaled slightly differently, I felt as if the composition need some alteration. The painting seemed to want more breathing room, so I scraped down much of the sky around the upper right quadrant and pushed the trees on that side further into the distance. Here is the final:  

"Delphinium Walk", Oil on linen, 24x20"  ©Jennifer E Young

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!  :) 

Outer Banks love affair

Though I don't get there often enough,  I have long maintained a love affair with North Carolina's Outer Banks. Last week we again made our annual sojourn there, and what a week it was! The weather was near perfect, the water a crystal clear turquoise blue. There were dolphin sightings, beautiful sunrises, and pelicans, sandpipers, and seagulls presiding over it all. 

This was the first year in a long time that I was able to get out and paint so often. I kind of made it my mission to do so, especially since the weather was so cooperative all week (my fabulous husband and daughter were pretty darn cooperative too.) My fair skin suffers from too much sun and heat, so I took to painting mostly in the early morning or early evening to salvage it as best I could. Here's a little slideshow of the plein air paintings I completed there. I plan to use these as jumping off points for developing larger pieces in the studio since I will likely have to curtail much of my plein air painting during the unforgivably hot month of August. 

All of these paintings are done in Gamblin traditional oils on linen mounted canvas board. I used my new favorite plein air medium, Gamblin's Solvent Free Gel as well as a small dropper bottle of Gamsol for laying in my design at the beginning stages of the painting. This really keeps the transport and setup of my plein air gear lighter and more streamlined. Hover your mouse over each of the enlarged images to read more about each piece. 

"Dune Shadows, 6 PM", Oil on linen, 8x10"

This was "our" little gazebo that let to the beach. I enjoyed the shadow play across the dunes and sway of the sea oats. 

"Parting Gaze", Oil on linen, 9x12"

This was painted in the late afternoon/early evening beneath the Avalon Fishing Pier in Kill Devil Hills. That man stood there gazing at the ocean long enough for me to capture him. There were a lot of people camped out under the pier, and kids running everywhere. I presume they were doing what I was doing,  seeking refuge from the July sun. The scene I painted doesn't belie the chaos that was immediately surrounding me. But even amidst the hubbub, the ocean still evoked a relaxing effect. 

"Morning at Avalon Pier", Oil on linen, 9x12"

This was painted in the early morning. I took walks down to the pier several mornings from our beach house, and really got a lot of pleasure out of this approaching view, so I thought I'd better paint it. 

"Basking", Oil on linen, 8x10"

This was just a fun little midday piece I did from underneath a large beach canopy that my brother-in-law graciously set up. I later added the little umbrellas in the distance because it seemed to call for something up there. This lady was the only person that wanted to sit still for me while I painted her!

"Anchored at Sunrise", Oil on linen, 9x12"

No sunrise at the beach is ever like the last, but this sunrise had the added bonus of an anchored Navy ship sitting on the horizon. I didn't pack any Permanent Rose, so I struggled a bit to get the color intensity I wanted so the overall effect is very high key. The value relationships though were good, so I decided not to try and make any adjustments after the fact. I had to do this very quickly and loosely, as the entire light and color scheme changed extremely quickly.

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.

Sunset Sail

Ever since my last blog posting, we have had rain, rain, rain. Needless to say, it thwarted many of my open days where I would have otherwise painted outside. The up side is that I finished the large 30x40" sunset painting I had started a while back, the progress of which I present to you now:

"Sunset Sail", Oil on linen, 30x40"