Artist, Judith D'Agostino, posts her current plein air artwork.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Oceanside Harbor
This is my first painting a this kind of scene. I really enjoyed painting it and want to do more. I was painting with the California Art Club and Scott Prior of California was painting with us. He helped me understand what to do with background detail. I learned a lot that day.
I have been painting en plein air since 2005. I had started doing this when I decided that my studio paintings needed a dose of reality. I never thought I would fall in love with the process but here I am, still painting plein air and still trying to get my "gear" straight! My studio paintings are better now but all I want to do is paint outdoors. I hope you will enjoy this blog and the comments and photos that I present.
I am an artist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I recently moved here from San Diego and am enjoying the light of the area, beautiful clouds and sunsets. I paint landscapes, figures and still life but primarily landscapes. Weather permitting, I prefer painting outdoors. Once I have a good field sketch, I will take that back to the studio to make a larger version. I paint every day and try to post something new here or on my website as often as possible. You can also see a full compliment of my work at my website, http://www.dagostinofineart.com. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have at judith@judithdagostino.com. Thanks for looking!
Painting the Landscape En Plein Air En Plein Air is a French phrase meaning “in the open air” and it refers to creating art on location. In the 1800’s the artists known as Impressionists were the first ones to go outside of their studios to investigate the effects of sunlight on subjects.
• The roots of painting from life are found in 19th-century Europe. Englishman John Constable believed the artist should forget about formulas and trust his own vision in finding truth in nature. To find that truth, he made sketches outdoors, and then elaborated on them in the studio. • Around the same time in France, in a small village outside Paris called Barbizon, a group of artists focused their attentions on peasant life and the natural world surrounding it. Like Constable, Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet challenged conventions of the day, choosing everyday subjects rather than the traditional cliches and presenting them in natural settings, the information for which came from sketches made in the field. • Painting from life is a pursuit unlike any other painting technique. It challenges artists to concentrate every sensory nerve on the information in front them. They absorb it all, from sight to sound, from temperature to atmosphere, and then channel those feelings from head to hand, re-creating the vision in paints on paper or canvas. • These realists, as they came to be called, laid the groundwork for the mid-19th century revolution in France that took painting from life to its logical conclusion. Lead by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edouard Degas, Auguste Renoir, et. al. the impressionists espoused the belief that you should trust your eyes. Using newly developed theories of how the eye physically registers color, they maintained that what you saw in nature was not form, but rather light on form. And light could be conveyed by color. To prove their theories, they took their paint tubes and easels outdoors, where they re-created the world as colors which suggested light. Rebuffed at first for what appeared to be unfinished paintings, the impressionist vision soon became a standard for truthfully conveying the outdoor experience. • Painting en plein air (in the open air) would forever change how we see the world. Artists in the United States were attracted to the concept, and many, like Californian Guy Rose, traveled to France to study with Monet. Suddenly, places with remarkable light were of particular interest to painters, including the both the East and West Coasts, and the American Southwest, where painting colonies formed. The goal of teachers and students alike was to capture the light and colors peculiar to the place.
Plein Air Painting Workshop with Judith in Tuscany
I am offering a plein air class through Tuscana Americana Workshops. To see more about this workshop go to: My Workshops.
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