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| Cerrillos Heat, 9x12 Oil Available |
Because the Canadian border is still closed, which means I'm not in my summer studio on Campobello Island, I decided to join a few paintouts here in New Mexico. Plein Air Painters of New Mexico is a very active group and offers a full slate of events, and so for my first summer paintout I picked one in Los Cerrillos. Los Cerrillos is a tiny village that sits along New Mexico's famous Turquoise Trail, which connects Albuquerque and Santa Fe and provides a calm alternative to the heady rush of Interstate 25.
The paintout took place at Cerrillos Hills State Park, a little pocket park that occupies a small canyon. Hills studded with juniper and a backdrop of the Ortiz Mountains provide some interesting vistas for the painter. But I didn't want to take too long settling on a spot—the high temperatures that week had been pushing 100, and I knew it would get hot fast. I even arrived early, before the appointed meeting time, so I could get started. (I'm not much of a hot-weather painter, which is why I avoid summertime events like Plein Air Easton.)
For a few weeks at the start of summer, a tiny gnat enjoys waking up right after dawn to annoy early-bird plein air painters. It gathers in a sort of flash mob that can disturb the most focused of painters. The gnats especially seem to enjoy entering small orifices, such as one's ear canals and nostrils. This morning was no different, and I ended up stuffing my ears with bits of paper towels to keep them out.
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| DEET-free repellent is a smart addition to the painter's kit. Also note the bits of paper towels in my ear. |
I didn't paint long. By 9, it was already too hot. But I'd gotten a good painting, so I packed up, greeted the other members as they were just coming in, and then Trina and I headed up to Santa Fe for a couple of days.
Santa Fe sits at a higher elevation than Cerrillos—7200 feet as opposed to 5700 feet—so one would expect it to be somewhat cooler. But it was still too hot with a high of 94. Fortunately, after a morning of gallery-hopping on Canyon Road, we were able to retire to our AirBnB to escape the intense midday sun and heat.
The next day, we drove up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin where we hoped to hike in cooler circumstances and to paint some aspens. The ski area rests at over 10,000 feet, guaranteeing a cooler experience. When we arrived, the temperature was around 68 and never got beyond the low 70s. After hiking and a picnic, I set up my gear in a shady spot in front of nice clump of aspens.
Aspens, like any white or off-white tree, can be tricky to paint. To the inexperienced eye, the shadowed bark often appears much lighter than it actually is, and it's easy to misjudge the value relationships of it and the surrounding shapes. I took my time first working out the values before paying too much attention to getting the color right. I first painted the main tree, putting down what I thought was the correct value, and then painted in values for the immediately adjacent shapes: a patch of shadowed grass, a patch of sunlit grass. I adjusted the values of these three shapes until they related correctly to each other before moving on to other shapes and accurate color.
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| High Aspens, 6x8 Oil Available |
Now we're home again, and I'm looking forward to a monsoon season that we all hope will come soon to cool things down.
