Category: retouching paintings

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Is it still plein air?

When do your touch-ups cross a line and make your work a studio painting?
Autumn, by Carol L. Douglas
Earlier this season, a reader asked me what I do with work that doesn’t sell at plein air events. Most artists use this work to sell elsewhere. Occasionally, however, we’ll bring home stuff that’s so site-specific it has no place in our current inventory.
Earlier this month, I painted a Moorish tent at Winterthur. It was one of about twenty garden follies they’d set up for the season. The pink, orange and turquoise confection flapped proudly in front of a blazing panorama of trees. However, nobody else seemed as amused as me; the painting garnered nary a second look.
To make the change, I had to remove the brush marks from the folly. First, I carefully applied a small amount of mineral spirits, taking care that they didn’t run.
Yesterday, I excised the tent from the painting. I didn’t replace it with another focal point; I just let the landscape find its own structure.
It was necessary to get rid of the brushwork on the tent and the summerhouse so that they didn’t eventually appear in the surface as pentimenti. Because this painting is only a few weeks old, I was able to soften the paint with mineral spirits, and then carefully scrape down the top layer until it was flat. 
Gently, gently. You just want to take down the ridges.
It wasn’t necessary to remove all the paint, just the ridges. If you do this, be careful to confine the mineral spirits to the area you want to correct. It will soften both good and bad passages indiscriminately. And don’t press while scraping; you’ll distort the canvas.
Bye-bye, Moorish tent!
Then it was a matter of mixing some new green to fill in the area. If you aren’t careful at this point, you’ll end up repainting half your canvas trying to get the color right. You aren’t mixing a wall paint, so you’ll need to mix a few tightly-analogous colors. Then make sure you use a similar brush to the one you used originally.
This painting probably has about fifty added brushstrokes from the original. Is it still plein airfor the purposes of jurying? I used no additional reference, and the modification, although striking, was small. I think it counts, but I’m interested in what other people have to say.
Penobscot, by Carol L. Douglas
The second painting I changed was one done in Santa Fe in April. At the time, I realized that a few brushstrokes would convert this to Penobscot Bay. It has been curing too long to open the surface and flatten it. It didn’t need that, in fact. It does not have one single bit of solid paint over the old painting; every change was made by glazing. Again, there was no reference used and very little paint. However, the subject has changed completely. Is it still plein air? I don’t think so because the finished work has no basis in reality.
Sunset, by Carol L. Douglas
The third painting I included because it has had absolutely nothing done to it. I painted it with Poppy Balser on a brilliant, cold evening at Rockport harbor last month and tossed it on the pile to be finished later. Pulling it out, I realized it needs nothing. It’s bright and fresh and perfect as is.
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I’m my own restorer!

Mount Rundle, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

While the storm raged outside my studio yesterday, I retouched paintings from my Canada trip. I’m nearly done with this task.

I’m working on paintings whose emulsion was damaged by being stacked before they were completely dry. There isn’t much thinking involved, since I did all that on site. I just mix the proper color, fill in scratches and smears, and restore the original appearance.
A typical smear.
How did they get banged up in the first place? I had wet-storage for about a dozen paintings. Generally, after that, work is dry enough to be wrapped and binned with wax paper liners. It may have been the constant cold, but for some reason, they weren’t setting up very fast. I was constantly shuffling paintings to keep the wettest ones to the top.
No Northern Lights tonight, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas
In addition, the roads were jaw-breakingly bad in many places. Part of our daily routine was to check the tailpipe and repack the back of the truck. All that bouncing meant that some things were inevitably going to be damaged.
Muncho Lake, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas
In only one of these paintings did I make a material change. That was to add reflections on Muncho Lake. I knew they were there at the time, and they were important for the composition. However, Mary was sick, sleeping in a motel room at Toad River. I’d been gone all day and that was long enough.
Avalanche Country, oil on canvas by Carol L. Douglas
I don’t have much need for reference pictures at this stage. Since I didn’t take many, that’s a good thing. In comparing my trip photos with my paintings, I notice how blue all my photos look, and how vague the structures of the mountains are. It seems to me that my little pocket Panasonic camera perceives atmospheric haze more than my aging eyes do.
Chugach range from Anchorage, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas
My eyes, my camera, and my monitor are all subjective observers, so none of them can be called objectively “true” at the expense of the others. It’s just another caution about painting from photographs, and another thing to ponder in regards to Truthiness.
I also started my second studio painting from the trip, of the Athabasca Glacier. That day, there was a ferocious, ripping wind. Even with an airtight hood, my ears rang. My easel spun helplessly on its tripod. There was no way to paint on site, so I settled for a hike and some photographs.
Underpainting of Athabasca Glacier, by Carol L. Douglas
This underpainting is not an abstraction, just a vast simplification. It reminds me a little of Rockwell Kent. Having no real desire to go down that road, I sigh and tell myself this is probably the high point of the painting.
Before anything more can happen in my studio, however, I have a driveway to shovel out. The morning dawned clear, still and cold, as if denying that it had ever stormed yesterday. “Liar!” I shout up at the sky, but to no avail.
Shovel I must. I’m having lunch with a student visiting from Tennessee. Later, a friend from Alabama is stopping by to teach me how to make biscuits. Maine is an out-of-the-way place to be the Crossroads of America, but a lot of the time it feels that way.