One landscape has become two

Last year I went to Denali National Park and made a 16 x 40 painting of the view at Polychrome Pass. I had to put it on 2 panels in order to carry the wet painting-in-progress on the park bus. When I got home I framed them in one frame, but try as I might, I could not make the seam unobtrusive.

I finally took the panels out of the frame, cropped one, and now I have two paintings of the view at Polychrome Overlook. I think it worked out fine in the end. 

This year I will try to return to the same spot to do 2 more paintings. What I have done so far is only a small slice of a great view. 

Polychrome Overlook
16 x 20

Polychrome Overlook 2
16 x 12

oil on linen panels

For more information, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com

Polychrome Overlook

This is the painting I began at Polychrome Pass. When I got the two panels home, I permanently joined them by fixing narrow strips of wood to the back. The result is quite sturdy, and the seam is not very noticeable.

If you enjoyed the photos of the bears and rams on my previous post, you might like to visit my Facebook page to see an album with more photos.

16 x 40, oil on linen panels, joined.

Please direct inquiries to me at: info@carollambertarts.com

Plein Air in Denali National Park, Part II

I only lasted 3 hours on my first day of painting, due to the high winds, and almost gave up. After I got to camp and had a meal, I felt better and decided to stick it out. The next morning the winds were down a bit. By eleven the wind died, the sun came up, and it was a glorious day. In a lull between buses, I had an unexpected visitor. He appeared from around the corner with very quiet steps.

Then there were two.


Over the next hour or so, several rams emerged from over the edge of the cliff. They were making an annual migration, and probably nervous about being at an altitude where bears might turn up.


Before long, there were photographers all over the place. Funny how that works.

I needed to catch the 5:10 bus, and got busy packing. I moved gear to the other side of the road so that I could hail my ride, but had to wait for the rams to mosey along. That's my easel and paint box on the ground.


Turned out they wanted me to move, so that they could comfortably hike up the trail behind my position. I did my best to keep a respectful distance, but soon found myself in a bit of a swarm. Eventually we all got sorted out, the bus arrived, and everyone got to see them again, up on the hill around the corner.

The next day, the weather was back to cold and windy, but it never got as bad as the first day. Here is a photo taken by Mr. Michael Mauro on painting day 3.


I'm particularly grateful that he sent it, because I had managed to damage my own camera. Thanks, Mike! I lasted another 2 days, then headed home to complete the painting in my studio. My next post will show the final result.

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.

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

Tributary of the Thoroughfare

On our sixth and last painting day in Denali National Park, I went back to Eilson Visitor's Center to catch the afternoon shadows. This little river joins up with the Thoroughfare River, which runs roughly parallel to the Alaska Range. What a gorgeous last day!


Mary Bee came down from her hike on a nearby ridge, found me painting, and took this excellent photo.


The next morning we all went back to the north side of the lake for an early walk. We came across this old truck (no, it wasn't abandoned), and wished we could just get in and have our own adventure vehicle. I can't imagine two better people to have adventures with!


Mary Bee caught this photo of Paul and me having one last walk before leaving the park. Just another beautiful morning in one of the most beautiful spots on earth.

This is the last post of the Denali National Park series. Thanks to Mary Bee, to Paul, to friends who helped make this trip possible, and to all of you for being an appreciative audience!


9" x 12" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com

Fireweed in Autumn

These fireweed, gone to seed, were just a few feet from our tent. I admired them every time I walked past, so on our fifth day of painting in Denali National Park, I set up the easel and got to work. I thought for once I would not have the big mountain in my painting, but it got in somehow, just faintly in the background.


Here is a photo of the mountain a few hours later, flushed with alpenglow as the setting sun slanted through the atmosphere. This phenomenon comes on quickly, and the peak of color lasts less than 5 minutes, then twilight sets in. Hard to paint that fast.


Here's the rest of our view that night, the Alaska Range stretching out before us.

9" x 12" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com
$325 plus shipping, unframed

Wonder Lake, September Morning

On our fourth painting day in Denali National Park, we rode the bus to this spot on the north side of Wonder Lake, at the opposite end from the campground. Wonder Lake provides some great reflections of the mountain.


Mary Bee was amused by how carried away I get with the brushes, so she took this photo. Interesting angles! It says everything about how intense this experience was for me.


Mary Bee, looking very focused as well.


Paul hiked along the lakeshore to join us an hour or so into our painting session, and did some sketching, too! This photo by Mary Bee is one of my all time favorite shots of Paul. He really looks like he belongs in that landscape, which he most definitely does!

10" x 8" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com
$240 plus shipping, unframed