Paintings

Plein Air

Tips for Plein-Air Painting

Plein Air is a French term meaning “open air.” Plein-Air oainting is basically painting outdoors. Some artists who are renowned for this technique are Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renior who were French Impressionist painting masters. Modern day artists today still use this technique. In fact, many professional painters go out together in nature together in early mornings and catch the colors of the sunrise. This helps inform the colors they use in future paintings. These types of sessions frequently last the entire day. When it comes to plein-art painting as a whole, there are some points to keep in mind for the ultimate success and enjoyment.

1. Weather and Apparel: When painting outside, be sure to dress in the appropriate layers. After all, weather conditions do change rapidly at times. Protection from the sun is also really important. Use a good sunscreen and apply it regularly throughout the day. Consider wearing a brimmed hat. You might also think about wearing pants with shorts underneath for those unexpected weather chances. Same goes for t-shirts and long sleeves.

2. Painting Supplies: Typically, pan-type watercolors are the best type of paints for plein-air painting. They are easy to work with and tend to dry fairly quickly. It is recommended to bring along paint cups as oppsed to tube paints because these become covered with a thin skin when they begin to dry out. Cups can be capped and used easily at later dates. Be sure to supply yourself or your group with a container for water and brush cleaning. You also want to get yourself a small fold-up stool. Make sure it’s light weight and comfortable for all day sitting. Be sure to bring extra clothes, brushes, towels, and plastic bags as well.

3. Easels: Easels come in all shapes and forms. They can come as a suitcase or include a tripod with a supportive H-shaped frame. You probably want to purchase a plein-air easel case that will conveniently store your canvasses, your paints, and your other materials. When you are choosing an easel be sure that it’s collapsible, easy to transport, and that is as light weight as possible.

The best tip for plein-air painting is, find the best location possible. This type of painting is all about capturing nature’s beauty, its light, and it’s colors. Be sure to peruse around before making your decisions. You want the most beautiful landscape you can find, with lots of trees, flowers, and wildlife. Remember, early morning sunrises are the best!

About the Author

Milton Avery?

I have a few questions about the painter Milton Avery. There are a lot of sources that aren't very clear about some things I'm looking for. ^^;;

1. Did he work surrealistically, formalistically, expressionistically, or realistically? I dunno, it just seems that he's very unconventional, but my assignment is looking to place his paintings into one of those four categories.

2. Did he work in plein air?

Milton Avery ranks among America's great color-poets. He considered art as a vehicle neither of polemic nor of narrative, but of poetic reverie. In his pursuit of an aesthetic vocabulary that would embody his own gentle and quiet relationship with the world, he invented chromatic sonorities that had never been experienced before. With contentment and harmony as his guide, he created a color poetry of gripping beauty and lyricism ­ a poetry free of clamor and aggressive force but possessing, nonetheless, an unequivocal strength and certainty. The pictorial world he created was one of stillness and subdued emotions. Subject matter was of less concern to him than the creation of mood, which he achieved through a deft combination of luminous color and structural monumentality. With a vocabulary of simplified forms and radiant color harmonies he created pictorial reassurance in the essential harmony and tranquility of the world.

The modernity of Avery's achievements is all the more impressive given the aesthetic climate in which he developed. Born in 1885 in upstate New York, Avery came of age as an artist in the 1920s, when the country's experiments with non-objective form and color had been largely abandoned in favor of a more representational pictorial engagement with everyday life. This was as true in New York City, to which Avery moved in 1925, as it was in Hartford, Connecticut, where he had trained as an artist. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, the country's aesthetic conservatism became even more pronounced as artists felt increasingly obliged to address the country's devastating social conditions.

By 1929, Avery had already established himself as an artist committed to the formal values of painting. In an art world dominated by social and political art, he seemed a solitary figure. Although color as a vehicle of emotional and spatial effects had become an accepted pictorial strategy in Europe, it has yet to fine a secure foothold in America. Avery's exploitation of it served as a beacon for artists like Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb who were struggling to forge an aesthetic apart from social realism. For them, as for others, Avery's willingness to exploit non-associative colors in the service of emotional expression reflected courage and singularity of purpose. As Alfred Jensen noted when citing Avery as one of the five most important 20th century American artists, "Avery brought color to America.[1]

Yet unlike the young artists who extended their color experiments into abstract realms, Avery never abandoned his loyalty to observed reality. His art remained a celebration of the world around him. His arguments against modeling and photographic depth placed him in the forefront of his generation's formalist vanguard ­ as did the degree to which he pushed the structural component of his paintings to the edge of abstraction by flattening his color shapes and minimizing their number. Nevertheless, he retained the principle of never inventing imagery. He pushed the boundaries of representation while simultaneously affirming the realist's mission to "capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea. [2]

Avery's first mature paintings date from 1929, four years after his move to New York City. In such works as Sunday Riders, he tentatively began to dispense with illusionistically rounded volumes and modeled forms in favor of simplified, interlocking shapes of homogenous color. Still linked by inclination and friendship to the American academic community, however, he only sporadically forayed into the non-realistic color palette that would ultimately distinguish his work from that of his realist contemporaries. By the mid-thirties, color had become a substantial ally. So singular was Avery's willingness to engage in non-representational color harmonies that, in 1935, his art elicited the praise of the distinguished critic, Henry McBride and the attention of art dealer Valentine Dudensing, who asked Avery to join his gallery. Alliance with Dudensing had a major impact on Avery's career. Not only did Dudensing's support give him a larger measure of financial security than he had known previously, it also placed in him in frequent contact with the work of European artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso whom Valentine also exhibited. Encouraged by their example, Avery extended his experiments with saturated color and simplified form. His color became much bolder as he accentuated the mood of a situation by discarding the constraints of naturalistic hues and favoring a high-key, non-naturalistic palette. The importance he placed on color and formal simplicity inevitably elicited comparisons with the work of Matisse ­ comparisons which incited Avery's annoyance and denials of influence. While the two artists unequivocally shared an aesthetic vision, they did, in fact, differ greatly. The reserved quietude and stillness engendered by Avery's soft, lyrical hues contrasted markedly with the voluptuous hedonism of Matisse's more saturated palette and arabesque detailing.

The year 1944 saw a change in Avery's aesthetic ­ a change which owed, in part, to a new gallery alliance with Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg had fled to New York from Europe in 1940, bringing with him an inventory of paintings by the most renowned members of the European avant-garde. Eschewing the American system of commissions, he agreed to buy twenty-five of Avery's paintings twice a year. Freed from the strain of financial uncertainty, Avery quickened the pace of his work. Always prolific, in 1944 he produced the largest number of paintings of any year in his career. More importantly, Rosenberg's proclivity for taut structure and architectonic solidity encouraged Avery to emphasize these aspects of his work. He replaced the brush paint application and graphic detailing that had informed his previous efforts with denser, more evenly modulated areas of flattened color contained within crisply delineated forms. The result, as in Three Friends, was a more abstract interlocking of shapes and a shallower pictorial space than he had previously employed. Avery retained color as the primary vehicle of feeling and expression but achieved a greater degree of abstraction by increasing the parity between recognizable forms and abstract shapes.

As the forties advanced, Avery's concentration on color and the simplification of shapes became increasingly intense. His sharp reduction in the number of elements in his compositions, gave shape equal importance to color. As before, color set the emotional tone, but now Avery's choice of colors and their combination became more striking and daring. Discarding extreme value contrasts in favor of closely allied color harmonies, he blended multiple layers of thin paint into evenly toned areas. The result was an inner luminosity as if colored light was emanating from within the canvas.

The formal economy and emotional depth of Avery's compositions accelerated following a heart attack in January, 1949 that left him physically fragile for the remainder of his life. Although he had simplified shape and reduced detail as early as 1944, he now seemed to see such parting down as a means to express more universal qualities of experience. By broadly generalizing contours and minimizing shapes and graphic details, he transcended the particular factual accidents of his subjects and captured more generalized relationships. He perfected the technique of applying thin washes of paint one over another to create veiled, slightly mottled fields of color. Boundaries, too, assumed a new importance as Avery developed means of creating soft hazy delineations between color shapes so that they appeared more like slivers of radiant color than like abutted color areas.

Despite the aesthetic success of works such as Waterfall and Sun Over Southern Lake, Avery's critical and financial fortunes in the fifties were at a nadir. As Abstract Expressionism came to dominate critical debate, Avery's retention of recognizable imagery and his proclivity against metaphysical rhetoric set him apart from the era's most revered artists. Dropped from the Rosenberg Gallery, he nevertheless persevered in his vision that a poignant and powerful art could be fashioned out of every day subject matter.

In the summer of 1957, Avery's unique union of vanguard color and structure with quotidian subjects took another major shift. While summering that year in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he enlarged the scale of his work ­ a development which allowed for the grater impact of color. Along with his expansion of scale came a further reduction of compositional elements and more closely allied color harmonies. The homogenous color areas of previous work now yielded to shimmering, mottled tonalities produced by modulating multiple layers of turpentine-thinned paint with rags. Avery's creation of a situation in which light could reflect from a base color up through darker hues allowed for an extra-ordinary degree of luminosity and radiance.

The lyrical elegance and poetic grandeur of these canvases catapulted Avery to a new level of critical acclaim. Clement Greenberg's 1957 laudatory article on Avery was followed by other favorable write-ups and a 1960 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But just as Avery's achievement began to be finally acknowledged, his physical condition, which had deteriorated steadily throughout the fifties, became serious. In October 1962, he suffered his second heart attack. Although he lived for four more years, he remained frail and rarely moved far from the oxygen tanks that he needed to get him through the night. On January 3, 1965 he died in his sleep after ten months in intensive care, vir

En Plein Air - Irradia

Tags: air, art, artist, painting, plein, plein air easels, plein air frames, plein air painters, plein air painting, plein air painting techniques

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.