What I'm watching this week
Mr. Turner — directed by Mike Leigh, 2014. Timothy Spall as Turner, barely speaking, sketching constantly. There is a scene where he ties himself to a mast to observe a storm at sea, and you understand immediately that for him there was no gap between the need to see something and the need to record it. They were a single act. Watch it for the visual intelligence. The biography is beside the point. The Britts know how to do movies like this. "Little Dorrit" and "Downton Abbey" live in my brain forever.
There is something about the British face; not always beautiful, but real, puffy, often crooked, redish, alive. Their movies feel more authentic. Less powder, more wrinkles.
The outdoors is God's palette. I try to go out every year and bring a small bottle of vodka to add to my water (to my water, silly!) so that my watercolors don't freeze in the deep, lonely New England winter.
There is something apocalyptic about climbing the hill, knowing you may meet a moose and no human.
What changes when there's no wall to lean the board against?
Almost everything.
The sky changes every ten minutes. The paper is too small for the landscape. Wind is an active participant, and it will decide what dries first. The light you started with is not the light you're painting in twenty minutes later. There is no controlled water source, no flat surface, no ideal distance from the work. Your tripod—shaky.
And the paintings come out with something the studio paintings don't always have: urgency.
Not urgency as a virtue in itself, as I don't think working fast makes better art by default. But working before the light changes, working with what you have and not what you wish you had, working in a body that is cold and slightly awkward, because your fat coat isn't stretchy— this produces a different quality of decision. The self-consciousness burns off. There is no time for it. You make the mark, and the wind moves the wet wash slightly, and you either fight it or you follow it, and following is almost always correct.
It is a different state, and it teaches things the studio cannot.
Turner made over 300 sketchbooks. Many of them became finished paintings; many of them didn't. Some pages are just observation — light on water at a particular hour, the angle of a cliff, weather. He kept the record even when nothing would come of it directly. The sketchbook was not preparatory; it was a practice. I am trying to make mine the same.
What I read this week
Turner's sketchbooks, via the Tate archive, the Switzerland volumes from 1802. Browsable for free. What gets me is the speed of the marks and the certainty of the value structure: he knew, even in a three-minute sketch, exactly how the light was working. I don't have that certainty. I'm using the field journal to build it. Deliberately, badly, repeatedly, until something starts to become automatic.
What I love this week — two things, because I cannot help myself
Sable Travel Watercolor Brushes — 3pcs Kolinsky Sable
Travel brushes close for a reason: the point is protected in transit, and you're not going to ruin a good sable on the way to the location. These Kolinsky sable travel brushes have the snap and water-holding capacity that matters in field conditions — they perform like brushes twice their price in a controlled studio. Three sizes in the set cover most plein air needs. The protective cap means you're not fishing through your bag for a destroyed point when the light is happening right now. I've gone out with these and nothing else and made paintings I'd stand behind. That's the test.
Strathmore 483-5 Softcover Watercolor Art Journal — 8x5.5in
Wire binding so it opens completely flat. 140lb cold-press pages that handle washes without warping badly. Small enough for a jacket pocket. The softcover survives being sat on, rained on, and set face-down on stone. The paintings inside are different from studio paintings; they are looser, not wrong, less concerned with what they'll look like finished. That is the point of them. You're not making finished work in the field. You're recording something true about what you saw. And in New England, there is always a hallelujah-scene somewhere. The journal holds that record in a form you can return to, which is the whole argument for the practice.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
- J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours — Tate — the full searchable archive of Turner's field work. Spend an hour in the Switzerland sketchbooks from 1802. The certainty of the marks. Free to browse.
- Tips for Plein Air Painting with Georgia Mansur — Daniel Smith — the practical side: what to bring, what to leave behind, how to work when the light won't hold still. Sensible and specific. She talks about simplifying, which is the only option in the field anyway. And look at her blues!
- John Muir Laws — Field Journaling — naturalist and artist; his approach to field recording is the most rigorous I've found outside of dedicated natural history training. The overlap between scientific observation and aesthetic attention is exactly where plein air painting lives.
What I'm working on, studio bits.
Took the travel kit to northern NH last week — salt marsh, low tide, the particular blue-grey of January water in New Hampshire light. The journal paintings are studies; they're not works. But one of them has something I want to bring back to the larger format: the color of the mudflat in shadow, which is a near-black with an undertone I can't yet name or reliably reproduce. Cinnamon? Looking for it now, in the studio, with more time. The field gave me the question. The studio is where I figure out the answer.
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” — H.D.Thoreau, Walden.
