For over a month, the little painting I painted in the park sat in my studio. I felt bad every time I looked at it. It was too good to destroy and discard but not good enough to frame and sell. Storing it away was not an option: I knew that its mere existence would cause me pain. (Any time a plein-air painting goes badly, I go through this type of agony.) I felt bad when I walked around Ottawa and saw tulips in various degrees of wilt; I wouldn’t be able to try again for at least another year. Even if I waited a year, I wasn’t confident of being able to do a second painting of the same scene without incorporating the bad feelings from the first experience. I finally decided that I would rework the painting, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to get near it.
Almost as soon as I started painting, I felt better. I had a good time reworking the painting from memory. This was a surprise, since it had always been a fraught and painful experience to rework or retouch a plein-air painting in studio. I had always felt that being in the scene from the start to the end was an indispensible part of creating a plein-air painting, and that completing such a painting from memory or imagination would make it incorrect or disingenous.
My self-imposed requirement that a plein-air painting be started and finished on the spot means that my plein-air paintings are inevitably small. Monet, the ultimate plein-air painter, produced large and extraordinarily beautiful plein-air paintings through a combination of painting at the same site over multiple days and continuing the work in his studio. But I am not a landscape painter. When I’m in my studio, I prefer to paint narrative paintings from memory and imagination. In contrast, I like to keep my plein-air paintings pure. As a result, my studio paintings look dream-like, whereas my plein-air paintings look much more realistic.
In a plein-air painting, the light is of the utmost importance. When I paint en plein air, my main goal is to observe and record the colours. Every single colour in the scene is affected by the light, and if I try to complete a half-finished plein-air painting from memory, I am likely to get the colours wrong. The result is unlikely to ring true.
In this case, however, all the colours were already in the painting. Furthermore, I was much more relaxed than I usually am when working en plein air, since I didn’t have to worry about losing the light. I also think that processing my frustration by expressing it on my blog allowed me to keep it out of the painting.
I am pleased with the result. Here it is:
