Painting and Birding 'round the Long Island Sound

I've been busy lately on a studio landscape painting, based on a visit I made back in June to the Olympic peninsula on the Northwest coast.  The trip was an amazing one, but because I was an adult leader for a group of teenage naturalists, there was no time for painting.  I did take a lot of photographs, however, and this painting on the easel is based on a few of them.  As a plein-air painter, it is unusual for me to work from photographs, but it is occasionally necessary and often instructive.

Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park June 2011

I find that the practice of painting from life has affected the way I look at the world, and also the way I look at photographs.  Most people very easily accept a photograph as a very true representation of reality, but the more one spends time working directly from life, the more one is aware of the limitations of the camera.  There is an art to photography of course, and the very best of them reveal as much of the hand and heart of the photographer as the most expressive painting; but for most people the camera is merely a recording device and is trusted uncritically to capture the "way things are."  The lens becomes a surrogate for the eye and often replaces the act of looking.  Really looking.  Looking the way one looks while drawing or painting from life trains the eye to  see around things, to almost feel form and space, to internalize exterior space, and the act of translating this into a flat image requires decision-making that, while subjective, can be as revealing of the truth of the experience as the cold objectivity of the camera lens.  When using a photograph as the primary source for a painting,  I attempt to use it not as a template to copy, but as an aid to memory; taking me back to the real location, where memory and imagination can attempt to recreate the experience.  The training obtained by hours of painting outdoors can then kick in,  and it becomes an exercise in painting ones memory of a place more than it is copying the shapes and tones of a photograph.

This was a 9x12 "quickie" done in the studio to put myself in the "plein air" mindset.  I had already done a number of small thumbnail sketches and decided to compose the scene a bit differently than in the photo.  As interesting as the rocky stacks are, my feeling for the place was more involved with atmosphere, and thus I wanted the painting to be more about the air between the stacks than the stacks themselves.  Therefore I've mentally "walked closer" to the near stack, so that its peak is cropped by the edge of the picture, downplaying it's dominance; now it is a foreground element and separated from the "background".  This also chops up the negative space a little differently and I think more interestingly.  I heightened the atmospheric perspective in the middle ground and strengthened the intensity of the light in order to draw attention to the space between the stacks.  I was also concerned about the emptiness of the lower right corner and so placed a log there, derived from another photo.  The idea was to have something defining the foreground plane and adding scale.

I haven't taken step-by-step photos of the progression of the painting, but several things happened as I blocked in the final 24 x 30 canvas.

One major decision was to add birds, an idea that had always been in the back of my mind.  Because my interest lay in the air between the stacks, I decided the bird or birds would inhabit that area, and because of the scale of the view, the birds would have to be large.  Brown Pelicans, which were present at the actual site, were the obvious choice.  I had many sketches of them done in San Diego last summer, so I scanned them into the computer and did some arranging.  This is my usual practice when dealing with flocks of birds- in photoshop I can put each bird in a different layer and move them about at will, changing scale as needed.  Pelicans often fly with synchronous wingbeats, but that breaks down when they begin to change direction, and for this picture I thought such a stage would be more appropriate.  Here is my final arrangement of the central portion of the flock.

I also found the entire painting too weighted toward the left, and begin pushing and pulling the forms around.  This changed the shape of the foreground stack and pushed the distant one more to the right.  As the painting became more resolved, I began questioning the need for that foreground log.  It had always bothered me a bit naturalistically, as in reality the logs were pushed higher up on the beach.   Not only that, but its position did not relate well to the wave direction indicated by the sand ripples.  Compositionally it seemed too distracting, especially now that the birds were in place.  Once again to the computer, where I tried out some edits and decided the painting could do without the log-  the ripples and some small stones or shells could do the job without creating such a heavy, distracting form.

Here is the painting right after removing the log.  It's getting close but not there yet.  I'm working under a deadline for this one so I will have to wrap it up quickly... stay tuned!