Quality or Quantity?

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*Never AI, always human. Any errors are my own.*

Quantity or quality? You have a choice. https://mchesleyjohnson.substack.com/p/qualityor-quantity

Work Habits

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*Never AI, always human. Any errors are my own.*

This column came out while I was traveling, so I'm not sure if I posted it here. If not, here it is! mchesleyjohnson.substack.com/p/work-habits

Is Art a Struggle?

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Is Art a struggle?  Find out here.

Free Post: Truth in Painting

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Free column on Substack:  Some thoughts on truth in painting: https://mchesleyjohnson.substack.com/p/truth-in-painting

Paint...or Take Photos?

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Some history here, and advice. https://mchesleyjohnson.substack.com/p/paintor-take-photos

It Doesn't Get Much Simpler Than This

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Here's what I'm doing lately to clear my head and refresh my soul: https://mchesleyjohnson.substack.com/p/simple-pleasures 

What Does "Painting to See" Mean?

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

An explanation of what I mean by "painting to see."  Read it here on my Substack.

Motivation and the Artist

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Click Here to read this post on my Substack blog.

Preserving Paintings for the Next Millenium—and Beyond

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Image: Redo-Sanchez, from Wikimedia Commons. License.
Breylon Immersive Virtual Monitor 

Will your paintings outlast you?  Even after one lifetime, many paintings start to show damage.  Nothing's worse than having a bright sunset fade to monochrome tints or for the surface to become disfigured due to alligatoring.  (Here's an exhaustive list of all the things that can happen to an oil painting.)  To ensure the physical integrity of our work, we artists are admonished to use archival materials and procedures.

Some paintings have outlasted their creators by centuries.  The oldest surviving oil paintings are nearly 1400 years old; these are Buddhist murals made around 650 AD in Afghanistan, but they are in poor shape.  Looking a bit better are the Fayum portraits, painted in encaustic in Egypt in the 1st century AD.  Even much older are some frescos, also in Egypt, lining a Bronze Age tomb from 3500 BC.  They've survived over 5000 years!

What helped these priceless artworks survive was a combination of things:  the right materials, the right painting process and the right environmental conditions. If I use the right materials (maybe a wood panel sealed with Gamblin's PVA sizing plus an oil ground) and the right process (painting fat-over-lean with lightfast pigments) and store the painting under the right conditions (perhaps a climate-controlled museum), how long can I expect it to last?

The problem with physical objects is that they break. You can't avoid it. I worked in IT for many years, where I learned about something called MTBF or "Mean Time Before Failure."  Every hard drive was stamped with "MTBF" and a number, which would give me an idea of how reliable a drive was.  The engineers who designed the drives expected them to fail at some point.  As they say, sh*t happens—even if you do everything you can to ensure that it won't.  

If I do everything I can, maybe my painting will last as long as the Mona Lisa.  But is there a way for it to last thousands of years?  Perhaps even milllions?

Prompting these thoughts is a book I read recently.  In the first half of Scatter, Adapt and Remember, science writer and science fiction author Annalee Newitz outlines several possible scenarios of global catastrophe, from asteroid strikes to thermonuclear obliteration and pandemics.  In the second half, she presents several possible solutions, such as colonizing other planets or even uploading our brains to robots.  As I read, I started to wonder how our cultural artifacts—our artwork—would fit in.

Perhaps someday science will find a way to take a painting and preserve it for a million years.  But as I noted earlier, anything physical will eventually deteriorate.  (I do worry about all those frozen heads in cryogenic tanks, waiting for resurrection.)

Maybe there's a better option.  What if we scanned the artworks and preserved them digitally?  We already have high-resolution 3D scanners and printers, and this technology will continue to improve.  I predict a time when the printed copy will be indistinguishable from the original, right down to the finest brush hair embedded in the paint.  The original could delaminate and eventually turn to dust, but we could print another copy whenever we wished.  

But does it make sense to create yet another physical copy that will someday also turn to dust?

And what about that digital scan?  Is it protected from the whips and scorns of time?  Not at all.  It's a binary code not stored in some virtual place but on physical hardware as a set of voltage or magnetic charges.  And remember what I said about a physical object.

Even so, the best bet to ensure that a painting survives is to keep it digital and put it in the metaverse.  (By the way, the term "metaverse" predates Mark Zuckerberg by three decades; it was first used by fiction futurist Neal Stephenson in his novel, Snow Crash, published in 1992.)  Here's my own possible solution for an end-of-the-world scenario:

Over time, the technology for virtual reality will improve, and we (or some future generation) will be able to experience the painting in its perfect, original (but virtual) state in the metaverse.  To make sure that there will always be some kind of physical platorm available to support this virtual world, we'll have a continually-maintained, continually-running infrastructure of self-healing computer systems, all run by artificial intelligence.  This physical platform may be on Earth or Mars, or in some distant galaxy, far, far away—or perhaps it'll be everywhere, buried in the fabric of space-time.

Unless, of course, some of the cosmologists are right, and the entire universe will eventually collapse in the "Big Crunch" to a dimensionless point.  And what did I say about things physical?

Maybe I'll just keep painting the way I do and let future generations figure it out.

Will Art Vandalism Save the Planet?

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

Monet avec Pomme Purée
(New York Times; Letzte Generation, via Getty Images)

We've all seen the photos in the news several times now:  a couple of protestors in a museum, hands Super-Glued to the protective glass, with yet another famous painting doused with soup or oil or paint.  

Anger rises in my gullet every time I see this.  Most of the paintings we see in museums have great cultural and educational value and, quite often, great beauty. Here are some of the paintings that have been attacked:

• Johannes Vermeer, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (Netherlands)
• John Constable, "The Hay Wain" (UK) 
• Pablo Picasso, "Massacre en Corée" (Spain)
• Claude Monet, "The Artist’s Garden at Giverny" (Sweden)
• Botticelli, "Primavera" (Italy)
• Vincent Van Gogh, "Sunflowers" (US)
• Francisco de Goya,  "La Maja Vestida" and "La Maja Desnuda" (Spain)

and so on.

But like beauty, cultural and educational value often lies in the eye of the beholder.  For the protestors, clearly the value of the paintings lies only in their utility in helping them raise awareness and spread a message.

What message?  It really doesn't matter--it could be anything.  What does matter, however, is that these works are being attacked and exploited.  Granted, I agree that the protestors' message is important.  Climate change is real, and one of the secondary causes is the oil industry.  (What's the primary cause? you may ask.  Overpopulation—but that's a blog post for a different venue.)  And although apparently none of the paintings have been harmed, other than damage to protective glass and frames, the risk is there.

To my mind, the protestors are undercutting their message.  Rather than raising awareness of the peril of Big Oil's contribution to climate change, the message becomes one about the peril of activists choosing the wrong way to go about it.  Their message is much weakened by this behavior.

At one of the protests, a participant said:  "When there’s no food, what use is art? When there’s no water, what use is art?”

One might ask instead, "When there's no art, what use is food and water?"  Art is what makes us human; food and water merely make us animals.

Here are a couple of good articles on these protests:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/vermeer-glue-soup-climate-protest-outrage/671904/ 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/27/climate-activists-glue-art-trend/

Bog Meditations

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**Authentically Human! Not Written by AI**

One of Campobello Island's bogs.  Can I paint this to my satisfaction?

Well, let's start with some sketching...

...and move on to some color...
(5x8 gouache)

For many years while living on Campobello Island, I focussed on the shore:  rocks, water, islands, fishing boats, views both distant and close.  After all, isn't this what one comes to an island for?

But Campobello has more than that—it has bogs.  A bog sits away from the shore, often behind a barrier beach and its companion brackish pond.  Sometimes, the bog occupies a spot that was once a kettle pond, a watery depression in the earth left behind by a chunk of melting glacial ice.  Over time, bog plants take root.  As time passes, decaying vegetation builds up and compresses into peat—a process that takes thousand of years. 

In this deepening richness, many species enjoy a slow existence:  dwarf versions of trees like black spruce and tamarack; sphagnum moss and reindeer moss (actually a lichen); plus baked apple berry, cotton grass, rhodora, leatherleaf and bog laurel.  And because the bogs have carnivorous plants like sundew and pitcher plants, I'm sure there are some tiny animals living there, too, although I haven't seen them.  There are birds a-plenty.

Bog laurel

Tamarack

Rhodora

Leatherleaf in bloom

This season, I'm finding myself turning away from the shore and inward to the bogs.  (Perhaps mirroring the psychological turning inward that I seem to be undergoing this year.)  As I saunter on the boardwalk that the more-accessible bogs have, I often linger to look.  A visual artist, I am easily seduced by texture and color—both of which the bogs serve up in spades.  The bog is a wild tapestry, tightly woven out of the thinnest of threads, and my eye wants to pick apart this dense fabric to enjoy every inch.

Seeing this beauty is one thing; painting it is another.  My enjoyment of the seeing is so great that I'm afraid I will fail in the painting.  At this point, I am engaging only in making quick gouache sketches for color notes and pencil studies of the dwarf trees.  Will I go beyond this to something more ambitious?  I'm not sure yet.

Two 5x8 gouache sketches for color notes

Minimalist Plein Air: Perhaps a Solution

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Is your studio filled with clutter like mine?  I'm organized,
but it still is a lot of stuff.  And worse yet, I have two studios!

Back when I was just a writer, the clutter of my occupation was very little:  a typewriter, a ream of blank paper, and a box containing my output.  Well, okay, there were also drawers of drafts, some on blue paper, some on yellow—you writers of a certain age will remember all that—plus file folders of research material and rejection letters.  But I pretty much kept my business within the bounds of my physical desk.  These days, a writer can keep all that on a thumb drive—or better yet, in the Cloud.  A writer could literally live in a cardboard box on the street with nothing more than a smartphone. 

But then I became a painter.  For those of us who engage in non-digital visual arts, this requires stuff, lots of stuff, stuff to make more stuff.  Technology hasn't helped us one whit on this; you can't be a painter and live in a cardboard box.  So now, I have jars of tired brushes that should be thrown away but maybe not, because I might some day need the one that looks like it's been gnawed down to the bone.  Boxes of exhausted paint tubes out of which I might squeeze a pinhead of paint if I took a hammer to them.  Shelves of finished canvases that haven't yet sold or might never sell and perhaps should be painted over.  Drawers crammed with the detritus of an active, artistic life:  pastel sticks and pastel nubs; virgin erasers and eraser crumbs; sketchbooks, both large and small, some with very good sketches, others with very poor ones.  And then pencils and crayons and pens and—oh my! as Dorothy exclaimed.

Yet, there is hope.  I have occasionally been accused of all-too-seriously suggesting that a painter really only needs one canvas and a camera.  Make a painting, snap a picture of it, and then scrape out the canvas so it's fresh for the next one.  Paint, photo, wipe—and repeat.  Over time, a painter could have a digital archive of thousands of paintings but only the one canvas, which he recycles as needed.  You could almost live in a cardboard box with this approach.

Of course, I said that tongue-in-cheek.  On the other hand, I am learning that, for me, painting is more about the experience and not the final artifact, so maybe I'm onto something.

Recently, I had another idea.  Busy in the studio on a painting that featured some autumn foliage in my canyon, I decided I needed to hike out to the location for more information.  As I stood on the rim, gazing down into a beautiful collection of fall color, deep in the moment, it occurred to me that I was actually building the painting in my head, with each observation adding another stroke to my mental canvas.   What if I took this to its natural conclusion, refining the process of painting until I had moved it out of the physical dimension and into some transcendental plane?

What if, whenever I felt the urge to paint, I just sat quietly, never picking up a brush, never mixing a color, but instead simply observing with a painter's eye?  Would that be enough?  This minimalist would like to think so, but, no. There's something about picking up a brush and mixing paint that is also satisfying. I don't think I could give up the physical component of painting.  And then there's the communication aspect.  As much as the experience is most important to me, it's also satisfying to share that experience—and the only way to do that is through the painted canvas.

So,what's the solution to decluttering my artistic life?  My grandfather was a farmer and, having lived through the Depression, never threw anything out.  When he passed away, we found in his barn countless gallon glass jars containing screws and bolts and nails, boxes of gaskets and oily wrenches and bits of wire.  Everything, all of it used and probably bent, torn or broken, was sorted and neatly organized.  Still, did he really need to keep all of that?  In a way, he was an artist, too, since he could fix anything—not just because he was creative but also because he had the odds and ends to make it happen.  So, yes, I suppose he did need to keep all of that.

And maybe I do, too.

Art that is Authentically Human

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The Simple Pleasure of Pushing Around Paint

I've been doing a lot of reading about artificial intelligence (AI) and how artists and other creators are worried about its impact on their world. Although there are a few cheery types who say AI will only make things better, many in my extended circle do indeed worry. Money-making opportunities for commercial artists, journalists and programmers will be harder to come by as ad agencies, newspapers and Big Tech turn to AI for their business needs.

But as a creator of "fine art," do I care? I certainly feel sympathy for those who may soon be out of work. The art I create, however, is authentically human—and I think there will always be a market for that. Can an AI churn out marketable art that might be described as handcrafted, handmade or artisanal? It might look that way, but you couldn't label it as such without tampering with your moral compass. (For the record, I've never liked the word "artisanal"—to me, it suggests a corporation trying to market factory-made cheese as if it were made by a family farm.)

Fine art or craft, it doesn't matter. While you might buy a pretty but mass-produced coffee mug at Walmart, you might pick up a more beautiful, handmade mug at a craft fair. I'd rather have the mug made by a real potter, as it is embodies the character of the artisan who made it. (I love finding the ghost of a fingerprint fired into the clay.) I'd treasure this authentically-human item, whereas if the Walmart mug breaks—oh, well.

Certainly, the technology for creating 3-D printed paintings, ones that look like the real thing right down to the brush stroke, is almost there. In the very near future, you'll be able to buy an exact reproduction of a Van Gogh sunflower painting, scanned in at a zillion DPI and printed with real pigments like chrome yellow. Now, plug an AI into this technology, and even a person with no talent could create and "print" an oil painting—one that looks as if an actual human wielded the paint brush.

Yet these works won't be authentically human. Even though they'll be created from a vast data set that includes lots of authentic, human-made images, they won't in themselves be authentically human-made.

Will I be able to tell the difference? I don't know. But I bet there'll be a cooperative effort by artists and artisans to have "Authentically Human" stamped on everything they make, and a "Made by AI" label stuck on all the rest.

But let's step back a moment from all this worry. Why did I choose art as a career? Certainly, I had to make a living. But there was more than money involved in my choice. I love to hold a brush. I love how paint first resists the brush and then softens to accommodate it. I love how the brush, the paint and I all work together, intimately, in the process. As I've said before, for me it's more about the process than the product. As long as I continue to work in this way, with simple tools and a simple process, and with a minimum of technology, I'll be happy.

AI and the Writer: An AI Offers Thoughts on Writing as an AI

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Here's an illustration I created through the Stable Diffusion AI

(I'll be continuing my series on Color shortly!  But this was so interesting, I wanted to share it.)

Yes, I know—this isn't exactly about plein air painting.  But in my Instagram feed, I have been getting a slew of ads for companies that want me to use their AI-bots to write my blog posts.  Trust me, I would never, ever, hire even another human to write my posts.  (Yes, that is another service I've been approached with.)  Yet curious, I looked at some of the writing samples from the AI.  I was not impressed.

So I asked my friend, ChatGPT, over for another cup of virtual coffee.  What, I asked, are the negatives of using an AI for writing a blog? I figured a little self-criticism might be good for him.  Here's what he said:

Artificial Intelligence has been widely used in many fields, and one of them is writing blogs. While AI-generated content has the potential to increase efficiency and productivity, it also has several drawbacks that cannot be ignored.

One major issue with AI-generated content is that it lacks originality and creativity. AI algorithms are trained on existing data, and as a result, their output is often formulaic and lacks the unique voice and perspective that human writers bring to their work. Additionally, AI-generated content may contain grammatical errors, typos, and awkward phrasing that can negatively impact the credibility of the blog and its author.

Moreover, the use of AI for writing blogs can also result in a loss of personal touch and emotional connection between the writer and reader. Blogs are often written to share experiences, opinions, and ideas with a wide audience, and the use of AI to create content can result in a disconnect between the author and the reader.

Additionally, AI-generated content can also perpetuate biases and misinformation. AI algorithms are trained on existing data and may incorporate these biases into their output, leading to the spread of false information. This could have serious consequences, particularly in the context of sensitive topics such as politics and health.

In conclusion, while AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we create content, it is important to consider the negatives associated with its use, particularly in the context of writing blogs. We should weigh the benefits against the potential drawbacks and use AI with caution, ensuring that human writers are still an integral part of the process.

So, there's hope for me as a blog writer.  

AI and the Painter, Part 3: An AI Offers Thoughts on Creating Art as an AI

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Self-portrait of my painter friend AI, DALL-E

(I'll be continuing my series on Color shortly!  But this was so interesting, I wanted to share it.)

The other morning, I started thinking:  If an AI is so smart, can it give an honest critique of itself?  So I invited my buddy,  ChatGPT, over for a virtual cup of coffee. I asked him if he had any thoughts on the negatives of using an AI to generate fine art.  Here's what he said:

Art is a form of expression that has been around for centuries and has been used to reflect the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of artists. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has provided new tools for artists to experiment with and has also opened up new avenues for generating fine art. However, there are several negative aspects of using AI to generate fine art that need to be considered.

First, there is the issue of authenticity. Art has always been about the personal touch of the artist, their individual style and the emotional connection they have with their work. By using AI to generate fine art, this personal touch is lost, resulting in a homogenized form of art that lacks originality and character. This not only reduces the value of the art itself, but it also undermines the very essence of what makes art valuable and meaningful.

Second, there is the issue of copyright and ownership. If AI is used to generate fine art, it raises questions about who owns the rights to the work. Is it the artist who created the algorithm, or is it the AI that generated the work? This is an important issue that needs to be addressed as it has implications for the commercial viability of AI generated fine art.

Third, there is the issue of creativity. Art is a form of self-expression that requires creativity and imagination. AI algorithms can generate art, but they lack the human touch, imagination, and creativity that make art so valuable. This means that AI generated art is often formulaic, lacking the emotion and depth that is so essential to great art.

Finally, there is the issue of emotional impact. Art has the power to move people, to make them feel a range of emotions, and to challenge their perspectives. However, AI generated art is often lacking in emotional impact as it is created through algorithms rather than through personal experiences and emotions.

In conclusion, while AI has the potential to revolutionize the world of fine art, there are also several negatives associated with its use. The loss of authenticity, ownership issues, lack of creativity and emotional impact are just some of the challenges that need to be considered. Until these issues are resolved, it is unlikely that AI generated fine art will ever replace the work of human artists.

I think ChatGPT's thoughts should give us artists hope. 

AI and the Painter, Part 2: A Path Forward

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"Cottonwood Days" / 12x16 Oil
Based on AI-generated image

In my previous post on AI (Artificial Intelligence), I wrote about what AI image generation is and how it works.  In this post, I'll share an idea of how AI may be useful to what I call the "get your hands dirty" painter.

First, let me say that, for me, AI can never replace what I do as an artist.  Making art is all about touch—holding a brush or pastel stick, stirring a pile of paint with a knife, drawing an expressive line with a lump of charcoal.   You get none of this tactile satisfaction when you feed prompts to an AI.

Yet I have a curious mind, and recently I wanted to see if the technology could help an artist like me.  In the studio, I use reference material gathered in the field—photographs, pencil sketches, color studies—to create a work that is more "considered" and finished than a painting I can do en plein air.  Would it be possible to use an AI-generated image as another reference for painting?

I proposed a process:  Submit a few field references to the AI along with a text prompt describing the scene, and then use the generated image to paint from.

On Midjourney, the AI platform I'm experimenting with, there's a large community of artists.  Most of them, it seems, work purely digitally and using text prompts only.  (A text prompt might go something like:  "Dragon and mountain from Tolkien, intricate details, Frank Frazetta style." See below for the result.)  Others feed the AI sketches along with text prompts and then fine-tune the result through image editing software like Topaz.  After an informal poll of users, I determined that few or none are doing what I wanted to do, which is to use the generated image as a reference for painting in traditional media.

Here's the grid of four images generated by the Midjourney AI from the dragon prompt.  Interestingly, there seems to be a signature on the top left image—a telling clue, letting us know that parts of the image may have been scraped from the Internet from another artist's work.  Or did the AI add it all on its own?

Prompting with an image is easy.  Prompting with text, not so much—especially if you want to send the AI down a certain path.  You can get all kinds of wacky, nightmarish results if you don't consider carefully your choice of words.  Although there's an abundance of documentation on using Midjourney, I will say that this platform is not for the novice computer user.  Even with many years as a systems analyst, programmer and all-round computer geek (yes, I had a life before art), I found the learning curve steeper than I had hoped.  I won't get into all the technical bits here, as that's not my goal.  But I do want to share with you the process and the results of two experiments.

Experiment 1:  Image Prompt (color study, pencil sketch) + Text Prompt

Here are the two images submitted, one a color study, the other a pencil sketch:

Here is my text prompt:

impressionist oil painting of a rocky cliff with faint candy stripes situated by a calm lake, clouds bathed by sunset light 

Here is the first result, a grid of four images:

I decided not to paint any of these, as they are too different from the actual scene, which is more accurately depicted in the color study.  I also thought the trees were a little strange, if not downright frightening.

Experiment 2:  Image Prompt (color study, photo) + Text Prompt

Here are the two images submitted, one a painting, the other a photo:

Here is my text prompt:

cottonwood trees, autumn, impressionist style oil painting

Here some results, grids of four images:

I decided to take these three: 

And referred to them in creating the following painting in oil:

"Cottonwood Days"
12x16 oil

I like the painting I made, and I think the experiment was successful.  But honestly, I might have been able to do pretty much the same by just looking at fine paintings of scenery on the web or in Southwest Magazine if I truly needed the inspiration—and I wouldn't have had to learn how to write a useful text prompt.  Will I use the AI in the future?  Probably not, but if this sort of thing interests you, go for it.  Let me know how it goes.

What I've Learned After 20+ Years of Teaching Plein Air Painting Workshops

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Me, teaching in York, Maine, many years ago.

You often hear teachers say:  "I learn as much as my students do!"  And it's true.  Students always bring something new to my plein air painting workshops.  It might be a piece of gear I'm not aware of, a hack that I find useful, or a technique that's new to me.  But over the years, I've learned two things that far exceed the importance of any of these.

First, I've learned respect.  My students are incredibly motivated, overcoming any handicaps they may have.  When I was younger and just beginning to teach and had a high percentage of seniors in my workshops, I used to ask myself:  "What's wrong with some of them, that they can't hike a few hundred yards and struggle with carrying their gear?"  (I was always kind, though, and helped as much as I could.)  But over the years, seeing these students deal with everything—and without complaint—has opened my eyes.  For them, the call to be in a place of great beauty where they can experience and respond to the landscape in a satisfyingly personal way is a powerful one.

Second, I've learned patience.  I get students of all abilities, and the ones with the least always seem to try the hardest.  Some come with the most rudimentary of painting skills; and many simply can't draw.  Despite their lack of skill and experience, they are, like my seniors, incredibly motivated, and they want to do it right.  So, although I know time is passing and the shadows are moving, I stand by their side and show them how it's done.  (I remember very well what it was like when I was new at this.) For these beginners, they are eager to learn so they, too, can experience and respond in a satisfying, personal way.

So, thank you, students, for teaching me respect and patience. These are more valuable than anything else I've learned.

---

By the way! Just a reminder about my book. Beautiful Landscape Painting Outdoors: Mastering Plein Air is the perfect gift for your beginning painter friends -- and the advanced painter will enjoy it, too. And hey, it would also make a nice gift for yourself! You can get it at Amazon. (While you're waiting for your copy to arrive, you might like to watch the video interviews I made with several of the artists.)

And don't forget my May workshop at Bluebird Studios in Santa Fe. Santa Fe is an awesome place to hold a plein air painting workshop -- great scenery, but also lots of extracurricular activities like galleries and museums! Details here.

Last but not least, my 50% Studio Sale on Southwest paintings continues through December 24th. Check out the artwork here.

Autumn Abstract -- And What About Abstraction?

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Autumn Abstract
14x11 oil

Over the course of my painting career, I've often wished to move from realistic representation to the more abstract.  It doesn't suit my impatient nature to depict scenes that are better (and more easily and more accurately) captured with a lens.  Of course, there's a market out there for realism, and it's hard not to paint to the market.  And certainly, because painting is a craft, there's something satisfying about getting skilled enough to depict every grass blade and twig.  But in my soul, this isn't what I want to do.  I want to paint an abstracted impression.

So I came up with "Autumn Abstract," a 14x11 experiment in oil.  You'll note in the image above that I still haven't managed to unglue myself from realism—the painting is obviously of a tree in autumn.   Still, it's a departure for me.  When I paint a tree in full foliage, I usually "mass" the leaves so they hang together in leafy boughs and look very much like a tree seen through squinted (or myopic) eyes.  Here, I've tried to avoid that, preferring to suggest the masses of leaves with just swatches of color.  For the tree, I've left out the twigs—I don't paint those, anyway—and have removed most of the branches.  Maybe my next tree will have even less of the tree and more of the abstracted "treeness."

Abtraction is prone to laziness.  I've seen many abstract (or non-objective) paintings that have hardly anything to them.  A splash of color, a brush stroke—nothing more.  It's as if the painter was proud of his laziness.  But I want to create a painting that looks like I labored over it, to make it look like it's worth something.  Worth the effort of a viewer to study, worth the leisure of the viewer to enjoy, and perhaps, worth enough to even buy.

Yes, I've heard that good art should look effortless, like it was born wholly-formed.  But I can tell when I look at a seemingly-effortless good painting that much study, practice and thought went into it.  It smells of sweat, not of laziness.  It doesn't matter whether it's a landscape, portrait, still life or something conjured up out of the artist's imagination.  

Here are some notes about "Abstract Autumn":

• I painted this almost entirely with a 1" foam brush, the kind you might use to paint the mullions of a window.  The very last bit of paint went on with a painting knife.
• I purposely took my time with this painting.  I painted it over several days, trying to carefully consider what path best to achieve my vision.  (My vision:  I wanted to represent the intense colors and warmth of a tree in autumn.)
• The first phase consisted of thin washes:  Indian yellow, transparent earth orange, quinacridone magenta.  (All colors are from Gamblin.)
• Once I'd finished this first phase, I took a hike.  I went out to the canyon behind the studio where the color of the oaks was peak.  When I reached the end of the canyon where the color was best, I stood perched on the canyon's lip and spent several minutes just observing color.  The canyon's end is called the "bathtub," and it's a deep pocket that's been carved by summer rains and melting winter snows.  A huge ponderosa pine is fixed like an axle in a wheel  in the center of this tub, and at its base the oaks have gathered.  It was a spiritual moment, with clouds sweeping alternate waves of shadow and light into the canyon.  My attention to the colors was broken for a moment by the sudden appearance of a lone bald eagle, being chased through the canyon by a pair of ravens.  My plein air experiences are often filled with this kind of memorable event.
• Back in the studio, I started the next phase:  glazes of phthalo green, sweeps of dioxazine purple, and then all that warmth punctuated with  a few notes of cool radiant blue.
• The final phase:  more transparent earth orange, cadmium red deep, cadmium red light, olive green, permanent orange and cadmium yellow light.
• After a few days of letting the painting rest, I made a few adjustments with the knife.

I put together a short video of shots of the different phases. You can view it here:  https://youtu.be/0BNRJRr00gc

Painting What I See v. Painting What I FEEL I See

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Painting What I Saw...

...Painting What I FELT I Saw
(both 5x8 gouache)

Do you paint what you see?  Or what you feel you see?

I learned recently the distinction.  I was in Taos at my painting retreat, sketching in gouache.  I was seated on my three-legged stool before the Rio Grande Gorge, observing the scene, adjusting color mixtures to match what I saw before me.  Now, the Gorge is awesome enough on its own—an 800-foot-deep ragged slash through an endless plate of black lava, with the river a mere spider-silk thread far below—but on this day, dramatic storm clouds flew, and brooms of grey rain and yellow sun-rays swept the land.  I wanted to capture the drama.

But when I stepped back from my 5x8 sketch, it wasn't there.  The colors and shapes were right and, yes, I'd painted what I saw, but I hadn't painted what I felt.  

I sat back down on my stool and tried again.  This time, I didn't worry about accuracy of fact.  Instead, I tried to pay attention to feeling as I mixed color and placed shape next to shape.  I can't quite put this into words, but here it goes:  I felt like an untrained singer trying to hit the right notes in a choir by listening to the other singers around me, and then by modulating my voice until it slid into perfect harmony.  If you've ever sung with a group, you know when you hit the right note.  For me, this is painting what you feel you see versus simply painting what you see.

Stalking the Wild Aesthetic

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Back in the 60s, when the “back-to-nature” movement was drawing its first breath, a little book came out:  Stalking the Wild Asparagus.  It was written by Euell Gibbons, who long advocated eating wild foods.  (It's unfortunate that he appeared in a Grape-Nuts commercial nibbling on pine needles, making him the butt of many jokes.)  Having foraged all his life to supplement what one gets from the local grocery store, he believed we all could benefit from many plants long forgotten by farmers.  But he also believed partaking of this wild banquet provided a respite, a temporary liberation, from an increasingly-industrialized world where one could buy a complete dinner frozen in an aluminum tray.

While foraging for a topic for my blog, the phrase, “Stalking the Wild Aesthetic,” budded in my mind.  I have no idea where it came from; perhaps it sprouted from a now-buried memory when, as an adolescent and voracious reader, I'd enjoyed Gibbons' books.  The words “wild” and “aesthetic” certainly apply to plein air painting, but I wondered what Euell Gibbons had to do with it?

Consider his quest for a temporary liberation from an overly-industrialized world.  For those of us who paint the natural landscape and not cityscapes, outdoor painting is certainly that.  But it is also a respite from an increasingly-technologized world, a world flooded with easy imagery and drowning in selfies.  Even so, while on the mini-vacation that plein air painting gives us, many painters post pictures of themselves working on-location.  Lately, I've been trying to avoid this practice, as the act violates the delicate shelter of quiet observation I've intently built while painting.  (Sure, leaving my smartphone at home would solve the problem, but I often hike to areas where one might step on a rattlesnake, run into a mountain lion or stumble off a cliff.)

That's good for the “wild” part, you say, but what about “aesthetic?”  Well, how many of us go for the postcard view?  Our choice is often the easy one, fed by an aesthetic we share with other plein air painters, drawing its nutrients from decades of viewing “pretty” pictures.  Of course, there's nothing wrong with this, as there's a reason that kind of image appeals to us.  Sometimes it's nostalgia for an era we'd like to recreate; sometimes it's an aspiration to a classic ideal; sometimes it's the desire to emulate another painter we admire.  Unfortunately, this doesn't help us develop a unique and personal and—perhaps wild—aesthetic.

Over the years, Euell Gibbons was at times a carpenter and cowboy; a boat builder and beachcomber; a Communist and later, a Quaker.  “I became a Quaker,” he said, “because it was the only group I could join without pretending to have beliefs that I didn't have or concealing beliefs that I did have.”  His life was an expression rooted in individuality, qualities that each of us should aspire to.  

Perhaps “Stalking the Wild Aesthetic” isn't such an unreasonable description of what we do when we take our easel outdoors.