Close-up Sunflower, 12x12, by Jeffrey Smith

It was one of those perfect Sunday mornings.  The sky was a beautiful shade of blue, and I was at the University of Minnesota’s Display and Trial garden.

I must admit that, given the idyllic setting, I had  a hard time picking a spot to drop my gear as I circled the gardens this morning.   One drawback of painting in a garden like this:  it seems like everything is in bloom! A clump of flowers here, next a flowering bush, then a blooming tree…if you don’t choose carefully, it can be a bit overwhelming.

This morning I was drawn back to one of my favorite subjects, the sunflower.

Should I give in to the flowers all around me and paint a broad scene, just indicating the flowers as little daubs of bright, colorful paint?

Should I paint at a mid range, and show more of the total plant and its surroundings?

Should I just pack up my stuff and head over to Starbucks for an iced latte? Sunday mornings are best with a second cup of coffee…

I opted for a close-up view of just one sunflower.  I positioned the sunflower on my square panel thinking about the abstract patter of  leaves behind the blossom and the light coming from above.  And of course, I included some of the perfect-blue Sunday morning sky.

So the rain finally stopped. Excited, I bundled up in damn near every article of clothing that I had brought with me. Slinging my bag of painting gear over my shoulder, I made my way down to the lake shore.

I surveyed the scene. The blue sky and late afternoon sunshine were peaking through holes in the canopy of gauzy rain clouds.

Settling on an outcropping of rocks, I set up my pochade box and began to paint.

You could always get a job raising sheep or selling gas.

“Are you painting those rocks?”
I turned around to see a man with a camera strapped around his neck standing on the shoreline behind me. He motioned at the huge pile of rocks in front of us as he strained to see the panel affixed to my easel.

“Yes,” I said, trying to stay polite and up-beat. “The weather finally broke. I thought I’d take advantage of it, and come down to the shore.”

The usual self-talk of being an artist started to run through my head. “Perhaps the cold weather had affected my ability to paint rocks. I mean, if this guy wasn’t able to recognize them, maybe I should just pack up. Maybe I should wipe off the canvas and start over. Maybe I’m not ready to be an artist today. I wonder if it’s too late to get a law degree…”

And then the man asked, “Can I take a picture of you and your painting?”

That was it. He really just wanted to talk to me. He really just wanted to be a part of the process. He was looking for just anything to say. Perhaps this encounter with an artist in the wild habitat would add a bit of color and excitement to his vacation.

So I asked, “Do you want me to smile and face the camera, or just keep working?” He opted for the serious artsy-working action shot. He took a few pictures making sure to include the pochade box and painting before leaving me to return to my work.

Gray. Rain. Wind. I’d been at the Big Lake for 2 days of less-than-picturesque weather. But now with this break in the weather, I had managed to produce an okay little paint study.

Back home, and back to the studio.

I looked at the painting. I thought the color was good. I liked the texture and the shape of the rocks.

But I really wanted to play with the study and see if I could bring back some of the feeling…the feeling of being frozen on the rocks…the feeling of the little warmth from the last few rays of sun…and the feeling of having had my picture taken just for being a “real artist.”

From the comfort of my studio, I decided to flip the composition vertically, and to do it in pastel. Why pastel? I guess I love the way that rocks look when painted with pastel. I thought I could do some cool things with the side of a pastel for the clouds. But more than that, by switching to a different medium, I wouldn’t be tempted to copy my study…to simply re-create what was already there only bigger. By switching to a different medium, I could still use the information that was there, but I had to start from scratch and think about the process from the beginning. I would get the opportunity to really plan out the painting, and recycle the study.

In the end, the painting got there. To a place where I am happy with it. So did the rest of my North Shore get-away. The weather held for the rest of the week, and I was able to get in some more painting. I am sad to report, however, that my fame was short-lived that trip. No other photographers were clambering to take the picture of the plein air painter wearing an entire closet full of clothes.

Late FallMarsh, 8x10", oil on panel, by Jeffrey Smith

When I was a little kid, and I’d get out my Crayolas to draw some trees, I kept things simple.   A straight, brown column for a trunk and a tuft of green for the leaves.  Maybe a cloud or a  rainbow was added to ensure that I had used every color in the box, but that was it.  My drawing was done.

Then I got older and started to climb trees.  I realized that they had branches.  It was way more than just a trunk and a green scribble.   So I started including some branches in my drawings.  The problem was that I didn’t understand how to ‘end’ the tree in a picture.  Every drawing that I produced in that period had a straight trunk, branches, and some small clumps of green leaves.   I just kept the tree going until it hit the edge of the paper.  And that was that. Picture’s  done.

Painting outside after the leaves had fallen would have helped me as a young artist to figure out what to do with those trees.  It would have given me an idea of how the branches attach to the trunk. Or what happens to the branches as they grow out from the trunk?  And most importantly, painting outside after the leaves have passed would have given me a view into the anatomy of trees, that is, the skeleton that gives the tree it’s shape–the armature that gives the whole thing a gesture.

gesture line drawn in with thin paint

I decided to start this painting with the gesture of the central clump of trees.  Everything in the natural world has a gesture to it.  A ‘way’ that the trunk grows.  A very specific shape to it all.

When I was in school at The Atelier, a portrait or a figure painting would almost always start with getting a sense of the underlying gesture.  I would ask myself questions like, “How is the model standing?  How is the weight divided between her feet?  Is his head tilted?”

Questions I might ask myself while staring at a plein air painting subject:

• Compared to a vertical line, is this tree leaning?
• Are all the trees in this clump leaning in the same direction?
• Are all of these trees leaning at the same angle?
• Is the tree trunk relatively straight, or does the angle change at  a certain point?
• Is the tree going to fit entirely on the canvas? If not, where will it cross over the edge?
• Where does the shape start, and where does it end?
• Does standing next to this tall, thin tree make me look fat in these pants?

Regardless of subject matter, I have been most successful with paintings that began with taking the time to draw out a strong gesture.

All of  that is not to say that there was anything wrong with the simple brown trunks and green scribbles that I started with when I was a kid.   A painting should begin with a simplified, general shape.  At the starting  point in the painting process, you should be thinking abstract.  As you’re applying paint, think about what your subject and its surroundings would look like if you were cutting the shapes out of colored paper.  The detail is not there, but even at these early stages,  seeking out the gesture or specifics of a shape is what conveys the  character of the subject.

My childhood tress all looked alike.  I had created an idea in my head about how to draw a tree.  My trees grew branches as  I moved on to a new idea about  how to draw a tree based on my experience of climbing them.    Now as I paint, my experience of climbing gives way  to specific shapes and dynamic gestures gleamed from direct observation of trees out in the natural world.

First Touches of Fall, 8x10", oil on panel by Jeffrey Smith

One of the great aspects of living in Minnesota is the drama of all four seasons.   It seems like seasons happen all at once here. It’s suddenly spring, or it’s suddenly winter. But in reality, when you finally take a moment to stop and look around, change happens very gradually, over a period of time. We ease from one season into the next. I had my moment to stop and look around when painting First Touches of Fall.

On the day that I was out, things in the Minnesota River Valley were still, for the most part, in summer mode. Lots of green, a few wild flowers, plenty of birds. But when you really dug into the scene and looked a bit closer, the touches of autumn had started to appear. The color of the green foliage was drifting to yellow. The grasses were becoming shades of brown. A few of the early adapters amongst the trees had even started to enter the realm of orange.

Minnesota River Valley, Plein air set up

On a personal note, this was the first outdoor painting trip where I actually pulled over on the side of the road to paint. It’s one of those things that I’ve heard of people doing…driving around, scouting for a spot to paint, and then just parking the car on the side of the road to set up their easel. I think when I was much younger, I classified this as one of those things that I would expect a ‘REAL artist’ to do. Having done it once now, I can report back that it really was a great time and I think I did feel like a real artist. I got a  kick out of watching people drive by, slow the car down, and strain  to try and get a glimpse at what I was doing. I figured the REAL artist part came in when a couple of cars drove by extremely slowly four or five times.

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The great-big super-important if-you-only-remember-one-thing-about-composition rule.

So what’s the rule? Never make any two intervals the same. That’s it.  Just do that and your paintings will be improved instantly! 

Okay. But what does that mean? It’s all about variety.  Variety is what keeps the painting visually interesting. Look at the space between any two shapes. The distance between those visual shapes should be different than the amount of space between any other visual shapes. This is the interval. It helps to think of your painting in very abstract terms. You’re not dealing with trees and grasses and rivers anymore. We’re talking about green shape, brown shape, light blue shape. The size of the interval between all of those shapes should be different. 

Lessons Learned and the Spice of Life

So on to my “lesson learned” for this painting.   First Touches of Fall gives ample opportunity to play with intervals in composition. Vertically speaking you have the sky, distant hills, river, tree line, and the foreground. All of these shapes could really be placed almost anywhere in the painting, and be almost any size.   The trick when plotting out a composition is to decide what is going to be the dominant thing in this particular painting, and then doing everything you can to support that feeling of dominance.

Let’s think about it in terms of the aforementioned great-big-super-composition rule.  My challenge as a painter was to show the dynamic nature of the sky while keeping the rest of the painting visually interesting and playing a part in the story of the painting.  I took more than half of the canvas to show the sky.  But to keep it from being boring, I was very conscious not to divide my canvas in half.   Comparing the height of the grass shape from top to bottom, it’s less than the height of the tree line. I’ve kept the size of the distant hills larger than the size of the river, but smaller than the tree line. No two intervals or shapes should be the same size.

Now take a look at the trees.  The trees help to give a sense of scale to the composition.  As a viewer, you can judge the majesty and movement in the sky by comparing and contrasting it with the trees.  But get ready, because  here comes that variety thing again. The trees are shapes just like everything else.  And just like everything else, it is important to vary the shapes of the trees and the intervals between the them. That’s what allows your eye to go in and wander.  If the shapes become too much the same, you lose the rhythm that an interesting shape creates, and your eye gets stuck.  Your eye wants to find patterns; it is seeking out and focusing on those things that are the same.

The idea is to keep the eye interested enough to move around the painting.  The goal as an artist is to decide where you want the viewer’s eye to go, and do everything you can to guide it there.

Mississippi River Reflection, 8x10", oil on panel, by Jeffrey Smith

Not a cloud in the sky or care in the world.

Mississippi River, St. Paul, Minnesota

Rolling on the river.

Mississippi River Rocks in Full Sun, 8x10", oil on panel, by Jeffrey Smith

You know how you sometimes stop and think to yourself, “I’m going to have to remember this feeling?” I had one of those moments while I was out painting last Sunday.

I was down on the Saint Paul bank of the Mississippi River with my mother for another plein air painting outing.  The sky was blue and free of clouds.  Wildflowers were blooming on the shore behind us.   Passing boats sent waves of warm water to crash gently against my bare feet and the legs of my tripod.  Then I had a thought:  Summer is almost over.

I would guess that in other parts of the world, the end of summer is not that big of a deal.  In Minnesota, however, it’s not so much the end of summer but the approach of winter that has this outdoor painter concerned.  I’m sure that I can–and will–go out painting after the leaves have fallen and  the flurries have begun;  it just won’t be the same.  At the very least, I’ll have to start to wear more layers.  But who knows, it might be fun to invest in a couple of sled dogs to carry me and my supplies down to the frozen river.  I do suppose that once the snow comes, however, I will have to forgo the part about painting barefoot in the sand.

My pochade box after a morning of painting along the Mississippi River in St.Paul, Minnesota

What about now? Are the good times over?

Until then, however, the weather is beautiful!  And the late-morning sun served up a great challenge: painting rocks in full sun. It was a fantastic opportunity to work on my artist goal of creating visual texture in a painting.

I think it is incredibly important to set artistic goals. Why?  When you start a painting with a goal, you can pick a location or subject matter that helps to support your efforts and goal by providing  challenges that force you come up with solutions.  Additionally, when you find yourself out in the wild and ready to paint, you can very quickly become overwhelmed with all of the visual information around you.  Having a goal helps to prioritize what you are going to attempt in a painting, and what you are going to edit out of your picture.  In this case boaters, fishermen and swimmers came and went, but as you can see, I chose to leave my composition wild looking.

Somewhere between a rock and a hard edge.

For this painting, I wanted to focus on the feeling of the rocks.  Being seen under strong late-morning sun creates strong shadows.  You see this in the sharp, angular feel as the planes or facets of the rock turn away from the sun.

To put it another way, how do you describe the feeling of a rock? Hard, rough, jagged.  How do you describe that visually with paint?  Each plane or side of the rock is going to be hit with more or less sunlight depending on the direction it faces–toward or way from the sun.  With our rocks, as you move from one plane to the next, the transition is very abrupt.  This is where the rough, jagged feeling comes from.  When I was in art school, this was called a hard edge.  In contrast, imagine  you are looking at a smooth, round ball under the same lighting condition.  The light would gradually transition from the full sun on the top of the ball to the shadow on the under side of the ball.  The planes have been rounded out, and the transition from light to shadow is smooth.  Your eye moves from light to shadow very easily.  This is called a soft edge.

Hard edges in painting draw the viewer’s eye.  They call attention.  From a texture stand point, hard edges create the feeling of firmness, and of an abrupt or dramatic change.  A soft edge lets the viewer’s eye glide right on through a painting.  As for texture, soft edges show an easy transition– a feeling of softness.

I was able to capture the feeling of the rocks in the painting above by using both hard and soft edges and contrasting them against one another: the hard edges of the main grouping of rocks is contrasted against the softer brush work found in the sand on the river bank in the lower left of the painting.

Mississippi River Rocks in Full Sun, 8x10", oil on panel by Jeffrey Smith

Some subjects are just worth revisiting.

My Mother and  I took another painting trip back to our new favorite spot, the University of Minnesota Display and Trial Gardens.  I drive by the gardens on my way home from work some days, and I noticed that the sunflowers were in bloom.  Now, if you take a look through my blog and through my portfolio of paintings, you may notice that I have a thing for sunflowers.  I love them! I’m just amazed every time that I paint them that a flower can have such a happy expression.

Painting where the sunflowers grow.

Seeing sunflowers in bloom at the Display Garden is kinda like seeing animals in their natural habitat or at the very least like going to see them at a really great zoo.  You get a sense of the size of the stalks and of the leaves. It’s just so different from seeing them in those black plastic buckets in the floral department of the grocery store.

What I love is that the  photo above not only shows off a bit of the environment that I was painting in, it also shows how things change in a scene as you are painting.  Notice the shadows on the sunflowers’ stalks and leaves.  Notice the background trees.  When I started painting, the sun was behind me and to my left.  That means that both of those areas were being hit with direct sun.  In less than 3 hours of painting,  the sun has moved and both of those areas have fallen into shadow.  Actually, I suppose it is the Earth that moved, but anyways the temptation when you’re outside painting is to paint what you see in front of you at each moment.  If I had done that and changed the value structure of my painting to include the new shadow shapes, I would have lost the illusion.  The illusion in  painting is a feeling that everything shown in a painting is in the same environment, all together at the same time.

Let there be light and let there be shadow.

The lesson, therefore, is to establish a light scheme and then stick with it.  Chasing the light as the sun moves is kinda like drawing a portrait with the eyes facing left, the nose facing straight towards you, and the mouth turned to the right. It just doesn’t look right.  The sooner you can get your pattern of light and shadow drawn out in a painting the better.    You want it to feel like a snapshot. Like one moment.  By establishing the light throughout the entire painting and then not deviating from it, you get a sense of experiencing a place at one particular  moment.  As a plein air painter, that is often my goal behind a picture:  to have the viewer experience a place the way that I did.

Sunflowers in the Garden
8×10″
$200.00

Mississippi River Reflections, 8x10", oil on panel by Jeffrey Smith

Just a quick post to announce a new painting;  I’ve been working on upgrading my website.  I am finding out all I don’t know about web design and site development.  I suppose that I am learning a lot, but I’m taking a somewhat frustrating road to get there.

The above painting was done on a beautiful morning along the St. Paul side of the Mississippi River.  I didn’t know it when I set up, but it turns out that there is an off-leash dog park on the other side of the river.  I was serenaded all morning long by dogs barking and their owners yelling after them.  As a huge dog lover, I thought it was great.  I suppose I could see how a non-dog-person may not have found it so wonderful.