Gurney Journey

Jamie Wyeth painting in Maine, 1994. Photo by David Alan Harvey

Painting outside is a public spectacle. People like to stop and watch and chat, which can be OK most of the time. But what do you do when you want to screen out those distractions? Jamie Wyeth has a novel solution, according to Daniel Grant:

'Perhaps winning the prize for oddest looking is Jamie Wyeth who kneels inside a four-foot high, seven-foot long three-sided wooden bait box when he goes outside to paint on Monhegan Island, Maine. (He puts a heater in during cold weather.) “My box is mainly for privacy,” he said, noting that “I find it extremely bothersome when people talk to me while I’m painting. If I don’t say anything to them when they ask a question, or if I tell them I don’t like to talk while I’m working, then I feel terrible that I’ve been rude. Inside the box, people see that I clearly don’t want to talk, and they eventually scurry away.'

Related posts:
Top Ten Ways to Deal with Curious Spectators 
The Problem of Curious Spectators
'Can I Borrow Your Paintbrush?'
Your Experiences with Spectators

It's possible that this scene came readymade, but it's also possible he painted the house and trees of the river scene, and then grabbed the steamboats, rowboats, and ducks in other places and added them to the half finished painting.

I love the way Boldini is so playful and daring in his paint application. He appears to be using a variety of brushes: big ones, small ones, new ones, and old ones.



Sometimes students want their set of brushes to be all new and fresh, but experienced painters also cherish their worn, splayed brushes.
 This painting of a riverside laundry appears to be a plein-air study.

This related work is also small (13 x 20 inches), but it might have been completed in the studio using plein air sketches as reference notes. I'm just guessing here, and if anyone knows more about this, please share in the comments.

If indeed Boldini composited elements in these paintings, he would have started with the idea in sketch stage, and then built the picture from elements he found. It's like what Ansel Adams said about camera work: "You don't take a photograph, you make it."
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Book about the exhibit of Boldini's French Landscapes: Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris (Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute)

Old tow truck, watercolor by Jeanette Gurney

We had such an enthusiastic response to our previous painting challenges, such as the Food Truck and the Weed Painting Challenge, that many of you asked for another opportunity.

Hejung Park with Beargguy on the Jack-in-the-Box

The artists were from various departments, including visual development, lighting, story, and matte painting.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody! Here's a view across the Burren near Kilfenora, County Clare, Ireland.

From an 1892 F. W. Devoe and C. T. Raynolds Company catalog.

Nineteenth-century sketching umbrellas were usually between 28 and 32 inches across, made of grey linen fabric. The clamp at the top allowed for the umbrella to be tilted to the side to block the sun or spill the wind.

The 48-inch support pole was made in two or three sections that screwed together, with a steel-tipped end that could stick into soft ground. The height was ideal for a painter sitting on a folding camp stool.




Modern umbrellas are a larger, made from a white nylon material, with an adjustable goose neck and a clamp that attaches to the easel, since soft ground is not always available. The white material is better than the light-blocking silver or black umbrellas. Those force your work to be lit by the light bouncing up from the ground, which is often strongly colored and prone to glare.

Any umbrella attached to an easel has a tendency to blow over when the wind comes up at all. One option is to attach the umbrella to a free-standing C-stand ballasted with sandbags. It's less likely to blow over, and if it does, it won't take the painting with it.

Do you have a story about problems with a sketching umbrella? Please share them in the comments.

Previously on GJ: White Umbrellas
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Southland Sunset, oil on panel, 8 x 10 inches

The sun is behind two layers of clouds in this sunset study. The higher deck of clouds creates a thin layer of diffusion around the sun, which keeps the sun's brightness from being too intense to look at. There's just a small window through to the blue sky at upper right.

This sunset obeys three rules that usually apply:
1. Colors gradate to higher value and higher chroma approaching the position of the sun.
2. Hue shifts in broad bands from pale yellows higher up to reddish oranges near the horizon.
3. Foreground elements are not black. They maintain color identity in the darks. This is a big difference compared to how the camera sees a scene like this.

These effects intensify as the sunset proceeds until the sun passes below the tangent line of the earth, after which we would enter a dusk phase.

Any given phase of a sunset lasts no more than 10 minutes, so painting a scene like this from life requires a well organized palette, separate brushes for each color group, and accurate anticipation about what phase is likely to come next. I did not use a light on my palette for this one.
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More on painting sunsets in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Amazon)
Also available signed from my website (USA customers)

This alpine landscape by Calame is one of the early plein-air studies currently on exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

Alexandre Calame ( Swiss, 1810–1864) oil on paper/ canvas, 17 3/4 x 12 in. (45.1 x 30.5 cm)

Gilles-François-Joseph Closson (1796–1853) View in the Dolomites

Closson's painting is even smaller, just 4 1/4 x 9 5/8 inches, painted over a careful line drawing in pencil The pencil drawing is still visible in the lower right.

The landscape show is very small, just 12 paintings. So on its own, it's not worth a trip to the Morgan—except that there are a couple of other fascinating shows going on.

One of the major exhibits is Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, which includes examples of her elegantly handwritten manuscripts. I was also impressed with her early artwork, which was accomplished and diligent.