Yesterday, I went out to paint en plein air for the first time in Ottawa. The weather was predicted to be warm and sunny all day, with a high of 22 degrees Celsius, and the tulips were in bloom at Major’s Hill Park.
I had been looking forward to this. Part of the reason I moved back to Ottawa is that I love the way it looks. Having been fortunate enough to live in places famous for their beauty, like Honolulu, and visit places famous for the grandeur of their architecture, like London and Paris, I see something in Ottawa that I have been able to find nowhere else. I want to capture that in my plein-air paintings.
I have painted many plein-air paintings before. Multiple times, I’ve had the experience, towards the end of a painting, of someone approaching me and asking to buy the painting.
What I hadn’t experienced was five or six people separately coming up to me during the course of the painting to say, “Excuse me …, excuse me …, EXCUSE ME!!! May I take a picture of you while you paint?”
As the painting progressed, the nature of the interruptions changed. People would say, “Congratulations!”, “Good job!”, “Very pretty” or “That’s an amazing painting!”; ask questions like, “When did you start that painting?”; or, most thoughtlessly, ask to take a photograph of the painting.
In total, even though it was a Monday afternoon and I was in a relatively secluded area of the park, I was interrupted approximately twenty times. As a result, as impressive as the painting appears at first glance, it is a distracted painting. It is not up to my standards and will probably end up in the garbage. I’m not sure what gives people the idea that they have the right to ruin a painting. Why is a photo that they are going to post on social media and immediately forget about more important than a work of art that is intended to last, literally, for centuries?
Is it that people think painting does not require attention or focus? Let me be clear. If you see an artist who is able to paint and talk at the same time, one of two things must be true. Either the painting is formulaic, or the artist has taken a photograph of the scene and plans to do the real work later, in the studio.
I don’t work from photographs. I also don’t normally touch up plein-air paintings in the studio. When working en plein air, I am in a state of total concentration. Painting may appear to be a simple matter of applying paint to canvas, but in fact, each and every colour in a painting needs to be mixed individually. Most of the colours in my paintings are mixtures of four to six pigments in different ratios. Sometimes, I pick up four pigments without thinking consciously, mix them, and get exactly the colour I want. Other times, this initial colour is far off the mark, and I need to make multiple adjustments. That’s just for one colour. Nearly everything that appears to be uniformly coloured to the non-artist, such as skin, asphalt, grass, or the sky, is in fact made up of at least three different colours, and each of those colours needs to be mixed individually. All this colour mixing requires focus. If I am interrupted, my train of thought is disturbed. I forget what colour I was mixing, or where I was about to apply the colour I just mixed. Interrupting me is therefore not unlike interrupting a surgeon or an air traffic controller. The stakes are smaller, but the level of attention required to accomplish the task successfully is the same.
Furthermore, when painting en plein air, time is of the essence. The light is constantly changing. Just as one becomes aware of the hills in one’s neighbourhood only when one decides to start bicycling to work, the changing of the light is something one only notices when one paints. Sometimes, I start a painting while it’s sunny, and after an hour of work, clouds move in, and everything looks completely different. Other times, clouds are predicted, but they dissipate sooner than expected, and I am forced to work from memory. Even when the cloud situation is constant, the sun is still moving across the sky, and its colour temperature is changing. Any interruption slows down a process that needs to occur quickly if the result is to be any good.
The biggest problem with the interruptions was that they made me angry. Anger is a natural reaction to disrespect.1 While I understand that the people who interrupted me did not intend to be disrespectful, they were, in fact, being disrespectful in prioritizing their desire for a photograph over my desire to paint, and in assuming that I was not engaged in serious work but rather a pastime or a form of street entertainment. I did not want to be angry, but I felt angry, and what frustrated me was that the painting would suffer as a result of my anger. Media depictions to the contrary, a painter must be in a state of calm focus to be able to work productively. And if a painting is to be great, it must ultimately come from a place of love: love for nature, love for humanity, and love for art. Anger, frustration, and distraction during the painting process muddy the love that initiated the painting.
If you see an artist painting or drawing, wait for the artist to make eye contact with you first. If they don’t initiate eye contact and don’t seem to be inviting you in for a discussion, then they are trying to focus on their painting and will not appreciate an interruption. If they are interrupted too many times, they will no longer feel safe and comfortable enough to paint in public. If you want to see artists painting in your neighbourhood, please treat them with respect and consideration.
More importantly, try to set aside your phone or camera and actually live in the moment. Your photograph of an artist will not capture the reality of the artist; it will not recreate what it feels like to be there, taking in the scene that the artist found worthy of painting. That moment is fleeting and will soon be gone forever. That is the nature of time, which no phone or camera has the power to change.
- Theodore I. Rubin, The Angry Book (New York: Touchstone, 1969). ↩︎