Ames Pond (2013)
Plein-air with stable light
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Often, travel for us means pretty heavy sightseeing, maybe a flight. This makes painting outdoors difficult because it’s hard to travel with painting equipment (and paintings), particularly if the travel itinerary goes through multiple stops. On this trip we were going to stay in one place, rent a car, go here and there casually. That meant I could bring painting materials, which I kept in the trunk so I could stop if I felt like it.
Mid-week or so we were driving around Bear Island, where we saw no bears. We took an offshoot road after spending a little time in Stonington and ended up along this pond. We stopped to have a look. It was incredibly foggy, lily-strewn, and quiet. So I pulled out my gear and got to work.
I used watercolor board more extensively in the early 2000s, and had a small stock of it left, much of it coated to prep the surface for oils. The board itself is great to paint on, but is thicker than masonite, so it increases storage needs (it’s only slightly thicker, but multiply by 20 or 30 paintings and it starts to add up). While much less flexible than the illustration board it replaced in my usage, it still is not as inflexible as masonite.
My palette was pretty limited, and I substituted Alkyd White entirely for Oil White, thus causing the entire painting to dry to the touch overnight. My blue was Ultramarine, also a very fast drier, so the shadow areas were also dry the next morning.
One expects weather and lighting to change, but a cloudy day, while lacking in the brilliant color and shadow of a sunset painting, can have a nice quiet feel and has the advantage of usually providing hours of relatively stable light. Fog is a different story. It was early afternoon and the fog hadn’t cleared yet, but it didn’t take very long to blow away. It began to settle again and then left for good.
It was around long enough for me to establish things, and the cloudy weather that remained the rest of the day allowed me to continue working on the nearer areas without much change.
Maine at that time of year had tons of mosquitoes and deer flies that accosted me during the trip, so even though it was slightly warmer than I would’ve liked, I covered up as much as possible, but still had a couple of bites on my hand by the time I was done.
Except I wasn’t quite done. I decided I’d check the weather and if it was going to be foggy or cloudy the next day, I’d come back out and give it a little more work, something I never really do with outdoor painting. Sometimes I do a little more in the studio based on photographs. But it was vacation so I had the time and it was enjoyable enough being out there, despite the bugs. The second session was shorter, just shoring up some things here and there really, with fresh eyes.