Plein air in Denali National Park, Part I

Right after Labor Day I made my annual plein air painting trip to Denali National Park. In past years I have camped at the west end of the park road, and concentrated on the views in the vicinity of Wonder Lake. This year I stayed on the east end, car camping at Teklanika campground, and riding the green buses west to my painting site.

I also changed how I worked. Previously I painted as many small panels as I could during my week in the park. This year I decided to go for the big picture. I set up at Polychrome Pass on the first day, and spent the entire time on one painting.


Because I was riding the bus with all my gear every day, I needed a way to carry a large wet painting without completely disturbing the paint, my fellow passengers, and the wonderful bus drivers. My solution was to use two 16 x 20 panels. I clamped them together to make a 16 x 40 surface, and packed them in a 16 x 20 panel carrier for the trips to and from camp.

I also ordered a new easel, and I was really happy with it. This design is called a Take-It-Easel, and is beautifully made. The first painting day was difficult, with wind gusts up to 40 mph. My easel was steady! The weight of my paint box anchored it well. I went for the original rather than the cheaper knock-offs, and am glad I did.

I also carried a piece of heavy cardboard, measuring about 10 x 30, to help brace the outer edges of the panels. That was the most awkward item to carry on the bus. However, once the panels were clamped in place, all was well. Until that moment I had to throw big rocks on whatever I needed to put down to have a free hand.

Here's my notebook with rocks and my foot, since both hands are holding the camera. No matter how hard the wind blows, I make my Munsell notations. For those who are interested in such things, the view was very much in the 5YR range, with some variations in the YR and R hues. Luckily, I used my notes from last year to mix up and bring what I needed.

I chose Polychrome Pass primarily for that great sweep of glacial plain, with rivers, mountains, snow, skies, and weather. My second reason was human presence. Every one of the many buses traveling the park road stops at Polychrome Pass. I met 50 - 60 friendly and enthusiastic people a day, had my picture taken about 20 times a day, and ran out of business cards. Next time I'm bringing at least 300.

I figured that, because of the many buses, the wildlife might choose to be elsewhere most of the time. As much as I like to see wildlife, I preferred to see wildlife at a respectable distance.


Once I had spent a few days there, my attitude shifted a bit. There was a bear close by for several days, and I am sure the bear knew of my presence, but like all the other bears in the area, my bear was too busy putting on fat for the coming winter to indulge in idle curiosity. Just in case, though, I kept the bear spray on a belt around my waist.

Before long, just about everyone in the park knew about the crazy woman standing out in the wind 5 or 6 hours a day, easy to see from a distance in her bright yellow rain gear.

Many thanks to Mr. Rob Chambers for the photo at the top of the post, and to the kind person who took this one with my camera! More photos in Part II, coming soon.

A wildlife commission

I don't think of myself as a wildlife artist, but every now and then I get a commission for a wildlife piece.

The task is to depict the subject accurately, in a characteristic pose and setting, with a sense of life and liveliness. I don't think it's at all easy. My hat is off to artists who dedicate their careers to this work.

The bird in the painting is a Bohemian Waxwing. We get them in flocks during the winter. They love the mountain ash berries above all others.



This is the painting at the beginning. It was a second beginning. There was actually another start, which I discarded when I realized I had misjudged the composition. I started over on this new panel. The good thing about starting over is that it goes much faster once the problems have been sorted out.



When I was a volunteer at our local wild bird rehabilitation center, I made some sketches of a bohemian waxwing who was our guest. I used other references to pin down details, especially the color notes. If you look closely you will see my Munsell notations for various parts of the bird. Waxwings have the most beautiful subtle coloring, with very gradual transitions from one hue to another. Their plumage has a fantastic smoothness.

I have not posted for some time because I was traveling out of the country. Now I am about to make my annual trek to Denali National Park, so I hope to have some good photos to post in a few weeks.

6" x 8"
oil on linen panel
SOLD

Soup and Crackers, in several steps

This is the third of a 3 painting commission. The other two were posted on the blog here and here.

This was the most challenging of the three. Everything in the painting is manufactured, and such objects have to be completely correct in detail, whether in their brands, fonts, and colors, or simply because they are made with precision. This painting also required me to show more kinds of materials and textures than either of the other two. Below are some progress notes.

The first application of colors; some parts still show the underpainting. I had to leave the cracker wrapping paper for later, since the translucence depended on the final colors of the objects behind the paper.

The monochrome underpainting.

The final drawing, arrived at in consultation with the clients. In hindsight I wish I had taken more time on this step, especially on the fonts. Later, I spent a lots of time adjusting the way the lettering moved around the curved surfaces.

A color study based on my color analysis with the Munsell chips. Some colors changed and became more complex in the final piece, but this gave me a place to start, and allowed me to show the clients the direction I was going.


The basic palette, though that deep yellow never got in. It was on a part of the cracker box that did not show in the final composition. I mixed these colors in quantity and stored them in plastic syringes. I was so glad later that I had taken the time to do that! This project stretched out over 4 months, but every time I sat down to it I could reconstruct my palette in minutes.

8" x 14" oil on linen panel
SOLD

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 6, McKinley in Autumn 2

On the last glorious sunny day I hiked back down the McKinley Bar trail, hoping the frost had not entirely wiped out the colors we saw on our rainy day hike. No such luck, the trees were going brown, though there was still color in the low vegetation.


While I was working, two young men from Fairbanks/North Pole, Chad Odom and Diego Servan, hiked down the trail and stopped to talk and take pictures. Many thanks to Chad Odom for these photos of me and my set up.


They were interested in how I set out the paints on the palette. I explained my strings of color, arranged by hue, value, and chroma (for more on strings, see my post of 8/18/10.) . These were colors I premixed and tubed for the trip. You can see some reds and yellows from the Munsell soils book, and some blues and greens from the Munsell student book. It sure is easier to squeeze colors from a tube than trying to mix them on the palette while fighting off bugs!


As I worked on the painting, it occurred to me that I was in danger of falling into heavy cliche territory: big mountain, autumn colors, reflecting pool, perfect, right? Or maybe not, maybe too much like a cheap postcard????

Luckily, there was a broken up tree just to my right, which relieved a bit of the perfection. Those familiar with paintings of McKinley will say, yes, but the mountain with dead tree in foreground is also a cliche. Point taken, but my tree is even more broken up than most, so I think it does the job.


Here is an oil sketch, McKinley Bar Trail Reflection, by Mary Bee Kaufman, painted at a nearby location, but before the colors were completely gone. I like how the trees, with their variety, shadows, and reflections, create visual interest, and how the soft edges portray the indistinct boundaries of the marsh stream. The whole effect is light and delicate.

This is the final chapter of our plein air trip to Denali National Park. Look for a link to Chad Odom's blog here soon. He is about to start some world travel, and will be posting more of his excellent photos on his blog as he goes.

McKinley in Autumn 2 is oil on linen panel, 10" x 12"

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 5, Gorge Creek

Continuing the account of our September plein air trip in Denali National Park:

We thought we were going to have sun when we took the early bus to Eilson Visitor's Center, but the sky remained overcast. However, the views from that spot are so fantastic, we didn't mind that the big mountain was hiding again.

The colors of Denali in autumn are both subtle and exciting. It would have been easy to get carried away with the excitement, and miss the subtlety. Here is where my Munsell soils book really came in handy.


I hope my notes are legible in the photo. Essentially, I was able to make fine distinctions about what I was looking at, and note the specific hues, values, and chromas for reference.


I kept the notebook where I could see it while I worked (it's just under my right elbow here.) When the light conditions shifted (or, in this case, when the rain came) I was able to stay on course.

That's Eilson Visitor's Center on the right, I like the way it harmonizes with its surroundings. Thanks to Mary Bee Kaufman for these photos.

12" x 16" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 4, McKinley in Autumn 1

When the mountain comes out, it's compelling. I mean, you can't not look at it, and if you are a painter, there is definitely a pull.

I recall reading that McKinley rises 18,000 feet out of the plain, from base to top 8000 feet higher than Everest. (Everest is on a higher base.) On some clear days I can see the mountain from the end of my street in Anchorage, across hundreds of miles. However, many visitors never see the mountain, it is so often shrouded in clouds.

So we felt pretty lucky to have conditions like these.

As soon as I set up my easel and had a preliminary sketch, I pulled out my Munsell books and made color notes. My notes helped me maintain control of my values and chroma, essential for painting atmospheric differences across a view of about 30 miles.

The regularity of nature comes through in the value notes. The mountain in light was obviously the highest value, 10 if not 10+; in shadow it was value 8; the lower mountains, 7-8 in light, 7 in shadow; the middle ground grassland, 6 in light, 5 in shadow. Near ground grasses, which were more chromatic, and had more contrast, were value 7 in light, 3-4 in shadow. By continually returning to my notes, I stayed out of trouble.

Here is a little color study Mary Bee did on the same day, of the mountain, seen from above Wonder Lake. She calls it Wonder Lake View. I like how she created an ethereal feeling of space, distance, light, and the slight chill of autumn, by using various low chroma, high value reds and blues.

McKinley in Autumn 1 is 8" x 16" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 3, Sapling

After three days of rain, and rainy day projects, the weather cleared and we headed out to paint. I was still thinking about the foliage we had gathered, and wanted to put all that practice matching colors to use. I also wanted to capture the last of the summer colors before they faded away (which began immediately, following a wind and a frost.)

Now I need to put in a correction to the last post. That gorgeous red leaf was not a blueberry leaf, it was a bearberry leaf. Mary Bee alerted me to the error, at which point I hit my forehead and uttered "Duh uh!" Considering all the blueberries I ate, . . . oh well, this is the result of writing blog posts when one ought to be sleeping.

The blueberry leaves, while also gorgeous, are much smaller and a bit lower chroma. In my last post I was going by my notes for blueberry leaves. In fact, we noted the bearberry leaf within this range: 5R 4 - 4.5/10.5 - 12. We mixed it by adding a lot of cadmium red and cadmium orange to my 5R 4/8 pre-mixture. Sorry for the confusion.

In the painting of the yellow sapling, you can see how the bearberry leaves stand out like little red beacons, growing low to the ground, while the blueberry bushes provide the slightly lower chroma backdrop. I was very glad to have my color notes when I got home, they helped me to complete areas of the painting that needed adjustments.

SOLD

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 2

After our first days at Wonder Lake, during which we stayed dry in our tent, hiked down to the marshes in the rain, and ate blueberries, Mary Bee had the brilliant idea that we should gather autumn foliage for a full-on color analysis. Her curiosity was up after watching me compare the landscape colors to my Munsell color references.

Here is our set-up, under the shelter of the picnic area, still in our rain gear. Every so often we would have to step out from under the shelter just to get the best light, so we were happy to stay covered up.

Munsell notations allow one to record the value (relative lightness or darkness) and chroma (relative brightness or dullness) of a given hue, or color.

We collected several varieties of red leaves and berries, shown here arranged alongside the 5R page of the Munsell student book. This book only provides hue pages at the "5" level. (There are levels from 1 to 10 within each hue.) The "5" reds represent what one might think of as the most straighforward, common reds. (Same for "5" greens, yellows, etc.). This book did not show all the varieties of red one could find in nature, but luckily we were able to match our samples to this page.

Before we left for our trip, I mixed and tubed some 5Red at value 4, chroma 8. That's the white tube of paint laying on the 5R page. The paint in the tube corresponds to the rectangle in column 4, three rows from the bottom.

One of my questions was, is it useful to pre-mix a middle range color, as a basis for quickly mixing similar colors in the field?

Here is a blueberry leaf, turned to an intense red for autumn. Comparing it to the 5R samples, we decided it was somewhere in the area of 5R 5/10 and 4/11 (value 5 or 4, chroma 10 or 11). Then we set about mixing up that wonderful color.

We matched the blueberry leaf by adding cadmium red medium, cadmium orange, and titanium white to my premixed 5R 4/8. However, if I had not had that tube, mixing the first three ingredients plus a bit of alizarin and possibly some burnt umber (to keep it out of the chroma stratosphere) would have done the job.

Carrying extra tubes of paint into the field can be cumbersome. In future, I will pre-mix colors based on the notes from this experiment, but only a few, and only small tubes.

We matched and took notes on all the red leaves and berries: bearberry, dwarf dogwood berry, dwarf dogwood leaf, and fireweed leaf. The brightest was dwarf dogwood berry, at 5R 5/14, the dullest was fireweed, that long leaf, at 5R 4/9 - 10.

Here we are attempting to mix up something for this yellow cottonwood (or poplar?) leaf. When we took this photo, the chroma of the paint was a bit too high, so we toned it down with some yellow ochre. We figured it was 5Yellow Red 6 - 7/10. We mixed cadmium orange, cadmium yellow pale, titanium white, yellow ochre pale, and alizarine to get the final match.

We used the 5Green Yellow page for soapberry, green willow, and alder leaves. We used other pages to find lichen, and some wonderful blackish purple leaves as well. The lichen was interesting, a beautiful pale neutral, high value, low chroma yellow (5Yellow 9/1.5). The purple leaves were dramatic, dark and deep (5Purple, 2/2).

Mary Bee did a wonderful job of documenting our process with these photos. She said later that, having done this exercise, she felt much more in control of her color mixtures, which helped in her plein air paintings. I was very glad to have done this work, because it helped me to avoid using too-bright colors for the foliage in my paintings. Of course, for our paintings, we also had to take into account the light and atmospheric conditions in which these plants appeared.

Dear readers, you have probably heard enough about Munsell notations for a while. Thanks for your patience! Next post, paintings.

Denali Plein Air Trip Part 1

On September 7th my friend Mary Bee Kaufman and I headed into Denali National Park with plans to spend a week doing plein air painting, just as we did this time last year (see earlier posts for that trip.)

I also wanted to see if my Munsell reference books would help me to see and mix colors more accurately. I brought the Munsell Soils book, used by geologists to identify and classify soil samples by color. The range of color samples in the book seemed perfect for the high, dry, autumn tundra we were going into. I also had the Munsell student book, which contains higher chroma samples than the soils book.

(If you are unfamiliar with the Munsell system, please see the two posts that precede this one.)

The bus ride to Wonder Lake campground takes approximately 6 hours from the park entrance. The weather was wet at the beginning, then cleared a bit, but by the time we reached Polychrome Pass the clouds were moving back in.

It rained steadily for the next 3 days. We were glad that our tent was snug and dry. We even had cots and a wood stove. Mary Bee wrote in her journal, I sketched her portrait . . .

Then we took a hike out the McKinley Bar trail, a relatively easy destination that starts a short distance from the Wonder Lake campground. The nice thing about rain is that the colors are vivid in the moist atmosphere. The ground vegetation in this very marshy area was diverse and wonderfully delicate.

And there were thousands of big, fat blueberries.

So we kept an eye out for bears, but we thought a moose sighting would be more likely. They love to stand in ponds and chew the grasses. We saw no moose, but a few days later a bull, a cow, and a calf were spotted in this area.


Never go camping without a big umbrella.

The following day, we launched a big project. After collecting many samples of the local foliage, we set up our notebooks, my Munsell books, our specimens, and our paints in the picnic area (tables and a nice roof). For the rest of the day, we analyzed foliage colors, mixed them, noted their position in the Munsell charts, and wrote down our findings. We knew this exercise would pay off once the sun came out and we were painting again.

This story will be continued in Part 2

Report on Graydon Parrish color workshop, Part 1

My apologies for going so long without a post! First I was traveling, then my computer went in for repair. Finally I am back up to speed.

From July 19 to August 6 I was at Grand Central Academy in New York City, at a workshop on Munsell color theory, taught by artist Graydon Parrish. The Munsell system allows the artist to think about color in a systematic way, according to value, hue, and chroma (chroma refers to the intensity, or luminous strength, of a given color.)

Here is instructor Graydon Parrish giving a demonstration on identifying hue, value, and chroma. After this, we all got closely acquainted with our palette knives, for hours, no, weeks of color mixing.

We created "strings" of color at various levels of chroma, value, or both. My palette, below, shows three strings of high chroma blue-green, yellow-red, and red. Along the top and right edge you can see a string (slightly contaminated in one spot with red!) of a neutral tone, from darkest to lightest.) The writing above each dab of color is the Munsell notation for the value and chroma, in the given hue. One outcome of this training is, you can always match paint you mixed at some earlier date!

I mixed these strings for the "spheres" exercise. We painted 3 sets of 3 spheres. (First we painted the spheres we used as models, then we painted them in 2D.) The first 3 are neutral, with local color in the dark, medium, and light ranges of value. The second 3 are yellow-red, or flesh tones, in low, medium, and high chroma. The third 3 are high chroma spheres in three different hues. This was actually pretty difficult.


The sphere exercise applies to a number of practical problems in our paintings: the representation of volume, of changes in value, of changes in chroma, and of very high chroma objects.

The photo above is of artist Ruza Bagaric's lovely sphere work.

In another exercise, artist Marge Grinnell created strips, painting each with color she had mixed, then she used them as models for her painting, in which she explores the value and chroma variations that occur in light and shadow.

Artist Victoria Herrera worked on this study of a lily, using the Munsell approach.

These lessons will pay off as we work on our own compositions. I know my approach to color will change with this and further study. For one thing, I have a new ability to create, use, and appreciate neutral tones in any hue, and at any value. I have long admired the subtle use of neutrals in paintings from earlier ages, and will now try to introduce more neutrals into my own paintings.

More on my New York fun in Part II.