Pre Hong Kong Plein Air

Here are a few paintings I did before moving to Hong Kong. These have been sitting on my hard drive for a while and I had forgotten that I had them. They are all oil on amber shellacked paper.

The first was done with Richard Hull's landscape painting group shortly before leaving Utah for Hong Kong.

This was done on the side of the road on the way back from viewing the annular eclipse, which...started in Hong Kong. I went down to southern Utah on a painting trip to view it.

 

This was part of that same trip. The location is called Grosvenor's Arch. It's a little out of the way, but worth the trip.

 

People in my plein air group like to make fun of me for painting the weeds (see the one at top for more weeds). There are at least a couple different approaches to going landscape painting on location outside. One is to paint and simplify the big scene. This is very valuable as a tool for developing a compositional, lighting and general atmospheric sense of the big landscape. It allows you to develop space and abstract your visual perception. If you haven't done it before, the beginning landscape painter is often overwhelmed by the wealth of detail available and quite literally indescribable. Another is to paint the smaller intimate details, like weeds or branches or other small and medium flora. This is, to paraphrase Durand, to familiarize yourself with the alphabet of the landscape. These are the bits and pieces that make up the larger more dynamic space. It's something that I've grown fond of after participating in two Hudson River Fellowships.