Speaking of Art Blog

This topic has been brewing on a back burner in me for years now, and I’m finally ready to speak my mind.  It’s about how plein air artists have tried to throw mud on the legitimacy of representational artists.  I am tired of being dissed by some top-notch artists who have a more impressionistic style; just plain tired of it.  I don’t bash them, so I’d really like it if they’d stop bashing me and representational artists as a group, because it’s been going on for a long time now.  And with the new plein air buzz, the smug remarks via social media have gotten worse.  It hurts and it harms the art community as a whole when they make statements such as:

“Artists working from photographs and including every little detail are stuck in amateur mode.”

“Photo realism may show your skill as an artist, but not your heart or your creative expression.”

“If it looks like a photograph, then what’s the point?  Photography has already been done.”

Well, maybe those naysayers need to be educated on the processes I go through when I render a realistic looking painting using a reference photo.  I think they’ll be surprised and hopefully enlightened by what they are about to read here.

Over the years one of my main concentrations in my series of artworks has been on rendering birds in nature.  My husband is a very experienced birdwatcher, and year-round he sets out 3 bird feeders a day on our back deck.  Facing the deck, we have double sets of sliding glass doors, so I am literally within feet of the birds and they don’t even know I’m there.  Plus, we live within 2 ½ miles of the southern tip of Lake Michigan, a top hot spot for viewing migrating birds in North America.  As a result, we get a huge variety of birds at our feeders all year round.  That is all prelude to saying that I have spent years of time carefully observing birds in the wild right from inside my house.  With a walking talking bird encyclopedia telling me the minute differences between birds as I watch them, I have come to know and love all those details about our avian friends.  So, when I take a really detailed close-up photo of a bird with one of my really good Nikon cameras, but the resulting photo still doesn’t do the scene justice, I know how to move beyond the photo to fill in details and lighting and color that my reference photo doesn’t capture.  That’s point number one.

Secondly, I’m not after simply a clone of my photo.  Boring.  I want to show the essence of a bird, the quirky way they might tip their head to the side or the gorgeous sheen of subtle colors that I see in their feathers as the light hits their body or wings.  I want to capture their unique bird-ness. I want to express myself and show my artistic vision of what excites me about a bird.  Oh, and because we have an annual birding festival here in Chesterton, IN with guest speakers and presentations at our national park visitors center, I also have availed myself of the unique opportunity to get up really close to some wild birds such that I can take as many as 40 pics of it from all different angles.  Talk about a plethora of resource materials!  Editing my photos takes an enormous amount of time.  I edit out everything that distracts from my center of interest because I strive to tell a story with my painting based on a photo, not just show all the details.  The bird’s stance, the simplified background, the lighting, and many other factors are all elements that I tweak in my reference photo to tell a singular story.  Sometimes I wind up with a resulting painting that looks quite different from my initial photo.  But does it still look photo realistic?  Yes, usually it does.  Why?  Because I like that style, it’s my chosen artistic style, and THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. 

Over the past twenty years I’ve taken lessons and art workshops from some world-renowned artists who have skillfully taught me how to move beyond my reference photos, what the pitfalls are of copying a photo exactly, and where a reference photo falls short.  I have learned valuable lessons from them that have helped me immensely.  One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that I need to really know my subject well so that I can toss my reference photo aside during my painting process, go beyond what the photo tells me, and express my unique vision and creative heart.  What those instructors haven’t done is to tell me that I’ll never amount to anything as an artist if I stick with mainly using reference photos, or that I’ll be stuck in amateur mode if I develop a representational, photo realistic style.  Their tutelage is about creating art, not forcing any particular style on me.

Because I live so close to Lake Michigan, I’ve also had the wonderful privilege of being able to sit alongside the shoreline of a huge body of water within minutes of deciding to do so.  I’ve watched hundreds of gorgeous sunsets over Lake Michigan on warm summer evenings as I sit atop my favorite sand dune.  I’ve sat within 10 feet of the shoreline and watched the waves either loudly and forcefully crashing on the sand, or gently and quietly lapping along the edge with barely a whisper.  I’ve studied waves and the colors of sunsets and flying gulls overhead for endless hours, and I am entranced by them.  I probably have thousands of pics as a result.  My dunes paintings sell themselves, literally.  Customers tell me all the time that my dune and sunset paintings capture the heart and soul of this area.  Do they look like photos?  Yes, they do.  Are they an exact copy of one particular photo?  Never.  I go after their essence and I inevitably embellish the tale, pushing way beyond the washed-out lights, too-dark darks, and the wimpy colors in my photo.  The photo is just a springboard, my memory jogger.  All my experiences of being right there are what I am engaging with from my memory banks by staring at my edited reference photo at my easel.

Here are 6 examples of my untweaked, unedited reference photos next to my resulting pastel paintings.  BTW, that last image and painting of a lizard is from a pic I shot in New Mexico while I was on vacation.  Did I have lots of experience rendering lizards before?  No.  Because of that, I had to do a ton of research about Twin-spotted Spiny lizards before starting that painting.  I also consulted my dear husband once again because, besides being a birder, he’s also had a lifelong love of snakes and lizards.  He and I had many discussions about the differences between scales and feathers while I worked on that painting.

Birds, lizards, waves, and sunsets do not stand still.  I work slowly.  That’s why I prefer to use reference photos rather than trying to capture details en plein air.  I also work from my own reference photos about 99% of the time.  I think that’s important.  If I’m using someone else’s photo as a reference, like with a commission, it’s not the same for me.  I can do it, but having been there informs me of so many other details that are not in the photo.  Also, sometimes a photo does tell a story so beautifully that I cannot think of a single thing to add.  When that happens, I do not create a painting of it.  It is already complete.  I simply make an enlarged print of the photo and frame that.  Done.

Some purist plein air enthusiasts who are really good at their craft are also being hired these days to jury and judge art competitions.  What I take issue with is when they give a strong preference toward only jurying in and awarding prizes to work that LOOKS LIKE it’s been done en plein air because the artist has a loose style.  What I’d like to ask those jurors/judges is, “Are you sure you can tell that an artwork has been done from life as opposed to using a reference photo in a studio?  Are you really sure?”  I think, if each entrant was interviewed about that, the juror/judge would be really surprised to find out how often a reference photo was used.

What this whole subject boils down to is this: There’s a big difference between being a slave to a reference photo and having a representational, photo realistic style.  Most times the former is obvious, but the latter should be acceptable in the art world.  If an artist shows competence in sound design, composition, color knowledge, edge treatment, and attention to correctly rendering light and shadow, then what difference does it make if their style happens to be tight?  I’m really tired of being discriminated against on my style alone.  It’s not fair and it hurts the art community at large.  If you are a plein air enthusiast, please stop to consider my points here.  Let’s all try to live together and encourage each other no matter what our artistic style, OK?  Thank you.

Tree Root Steps, pastel, 14x11"

At the one year mark of this horrible pandemic, I was thinking today about the good things that have resulted from it in my life rather than fuming about all the losses. I've fumed enough about all the losses already.  It's time to change my perspective.

Cactus Wren, pastel, 11x14"

This is my latest pastel painting, Cactus Wren.  It was a challenging piece of artwork.  The wren was hard enough, but the hollowed out, dried up cholla cactus was really a challenge in rendering detail.  Then there was the background.  While it may look like it was way easier for me to create than the wren or cactus, actually it was not. 

I used to struggle with backgrounds even more than I do nowadays.  And here’s the interesting thing about my background rendering skill:  I never really took a class or received art lessons specifically focusing on rendering backgrounds.  What I have learned about creating them has all come from blazing my own trail through lots of trial and error.  And it’s not because no art instructors out there know how to create backgrounds.  They do know how to do it, and many are extremely accomplished at it.  But what I’ve come to realize is that creating backgrounds is very hard to teach.  Why?  Because every single artist has their own unique background preferences and so they need to find their own way to create them.  It’s almost like set of fingerprints, if you will.  No two artists will render them alike.

So how does an artist go about learning to create backgrounds in a portrait or a still life painting?  Practice, lots of practice.  Many years ago, I started to take note of the backgrounds in artwork of artists who I respected very highly.  What I was drawn to were backgrounds that were blurry but with suggestions of some real-life stuff back there, like some plants or leaves.  So I started to play around with trying my hand at rendering out of focus plants and leaves on scratch paper.  No pressure, just fun.  What I realized while playing is that I was afraid of it mainly because it smacked of abstract art and I knew nothing at all about how to create something abstract.  But the more I played with the fuzzy edged shapes the more I liked the results.  Thus I was discovering and developing my own signature background style that has a lot of abstract undertones to it.

A Slice of Autumn, pastel, 10x20"

My first serious attempt at creating an abstract leaf background in a painting was in A Slice of Autumn (2015).  I went way beyond my reference photo.  It was both scary and fun, but I loved the results.  Since then, I’ve gotten braver with my implied, out-of-focus plants behind my center of interest.  I lay down shapes in muted and bright colors, and then finger blend the heck out of their edges.  I keep an eye on the composition as a whole while I work on the background, and I’m not afraid to occasionally turn up the volume on my color saturation back there.  While the background needs to play second fiddle to the center of interest, that doesn’t mean it has to be dull or boring.

Is that the formula for how to create backgrounds in portraits or still lifes?  Heavens no.  It just happens to be my style.  Every artist needs to figure things out for themselves.  How?  Through lots and lots of practice.  I know of no other way.  Or maybe it can be thought of as colorful playtime.  That sounds like more fun, doesn’t it?  What you need to remember to do is experiment and follow the lead of artists whose background work you respect and love.  Then go play with shapes and colors and remember to have fun.  Soon enough you'll uncover your own signature style hidden there in the background.