A Hit of Plein-Air
Painting the outdoors while outdoors isn’t always so relaxing
[This transmedia project was created for JTC 326 Online Storytelling, demonstrating multimedia skills including video, podcast and written blog post.]
Meet Lori LaBissoniere, a painter who likes landscapes most, but who lives in the kind of rainy, cold places where an easel under open sky isn’t often a good idea. Not to say that Lori never paints or sketches outside. She does, especially in summer. But she’s realizing that she’d like to do that more.
Afterward, and while still completing the piece, Lori sat down to talk about her experience working on the waterfall painting, and her vision for what might lie ahead. Have a listen:
On another occasion, Lori kicked back with some popcorn to watch a documentary on British artist David Hockney as he attempts plein-air painting for the first time, and elevates it to a new level. Read along below:
Lori makes popcorn, as if we were going to watch a Hollywood movie. She adds coconut flakes to hers and cracks a lemon La Croix. We then sit on the bed with her laptop between us, the external disc drive plugged into it, and a DVD starts spinning and humming.
“This is almost old-school,” she says. Lori LaBissoniere, a painter in her spare time, is almost 41. She remembers VHS.
The film begins. “A Bigger Picture,” it’s called, a documentary on the English painter David Hockney, who is most famous for painting pools and the like in his adopted home of Los Angeles. The camera will follow Hockney through three years of plein-air painting on his home turf in East Yorkshire, England.
“Painting as an extreme sport, something he’s never done before,” the narrator says with a British accent. Lori chuckles. She has been challenging herself lately to paint more outdoors, using nature as her guide rather than photos of nature. She’s also a lifelong snowboarder, but dismisses the “extreme sport” label.
Soon enough we are watching Hockney dab paint on a square-meter blank canvas. His assistant pushes sandbags around the legs of the easel to steady it in the wind.
“Well, right off the bat he’s got better technique than I do,” Lori says. “Imagine having an assistant in the field, to deal with the easel and get the paints and brushes all ready. That might make me paint outside more.”
Hockney is painting landscapes he loves from childhood, but Lori doesn’t see as much beauty in them.
“The camera can’t get the beauty of this,” Hockney says.
“Yeah, it takes some imagination,” Lori replies.
Lori lives on the western flank of Mt. Hood, in Oregon, in something close to temperate rainforest. Her surroundings are dramatic, instantly recognized as beautiful, but it’s the rough, wet weather that keeps everything so green. She has summers for plein-air sketches, but rarely creates her paintings while standing in the woods or beside the mountain’s conical mass, exposed to the cold, rain, or snow.
A close-up shows the canvas fluttering in the wind as Hockney applies paint with brush.
“The canvas is moving while he’s trying to paint, like he’s on a boat or something,” Lori says. “He’s clearly open to interpreting his environment rather than trying to be precise. I like that.”
Lori pops more popcorn into her mouth, eyes fixed on the small screen. We keep the volume high to compensate for the crunching.
“See how quick it changes,” Hockney says as he stands near an open field, under an overcast sky. He’s adding color to clouds.
“Yeah, maybe if you were painting L.A. or someplace where the weather hardly changes, it would be easier,” Lori says. “If you look at clouds here, or a cloudy sky with different layers of gray and light, you’d see different paintings throughout the day. But painting takes time, so, often the landscape you’re capturing is gone by the time you’ve got it sketched out and ready for paint. That’s why photos can help.”
Lori paints mostly landscapes, and she typically uses a screen — her laptop, iPad, or phone — as reference. Sometimes it’s because she can’t take her art supplies out in inclement winter weather, but she can snap a photo. Other times she’s looking for inspiration to create fantasy mountain scenes, incorporating the image into something entirely her own.
Hockney is out painting in November now. He’s wearing fingerless mitts, a frumpy warm hat, coat and scarf, and tall boots. Lori says she is impressed by the man, in his late 60s, out there “getting it done” despite the elements that make the studio beckon.
In January, Hockney keeps at his plein-air commitment. “It’s very cold,” he says. “It makes you work fast. You also don’t want to work sloppily because it’s cold.”
“Speed is not rush,” Hockney continues. “If you get it right, you’re trusting your first instinct, which most people don’t trust. I’ve recognized that often the good work I do is done very quickly.”
“Dang,” Lori says. “He’s got a point. I like to work quickly, but I’m also always second-guessing myself. Maybe if I worked super fast I could paint more outdoors during different times of year here.”
Hockney’s whole plein-air act is fast. He and his assistant set up the easel and a table for the paints and brushes, then Hockney paints for a few hours, and when he’s done his assistant holds the canvas up against the scene it represents.
“So cool, the way he paints from instinct, entirely onsite, and then gets to see his work compared to the real thing,” Lori says. “I also like how he uses such large canvases. It’s like a large-format camera for landscapes, it just makes more sense.”
Yet again, the theme returns to Mother Nature’s relentlessness. Hockney, standing near some woods, says: “By the time you get the paints out, it wouldn’t look like that. It changes every day, every hour.”
“Exactly,” Lori adds.
The narrator mentions that Hockney goes for the “special effect” of each day he’s out painting. At this point in the film, he’s working on pieces composed of multiple canvases, panels forming one giant painting. He’ll take them out at different times of day to get a variety of “special effects.” Hockney is painting under some leafy trees and gets frustrated: “The fucking sun is coming in!”
Lori laughs. “I can’t believe how he puts himself in these places at all times of year, painting the same places over and over but in different seasons,” she says. “He is prolific, not just as a famous artist but also in the way he goes after a subject.”
Still struggling with the capricious weather, now in fall, the narrator tells us Hockney is “painting times of day in fleeting weather.” He’s been up since daybreak, trying to capture mist. Again, Hockney sounds dejected yet accepting of Yorkshire’s fickle nature.
“The moment the sun comes out it lifts the mist,” Hockney says. “I watched it all just disappear in front of my eyes. It blew away.”
“It’s beautiful light,” the filmmaker comments off-camera.
“Yes,” Hockney replies. “But that’s not what I’m painting now. I’m still painting the mist. You paint with memory even when you’re here. This thing is objective. We always see with memory.”
“Whoa, I like that,” Lori says. “We always see with memory. I should write that down.” By now she has finished her popcorn and La Croix. Lori lies back, marvelling at the scale at which Hockney is working.
“I don’t know how he blends the light from different days into this one painting, or collage of paintings,” Lori says. “I think this documentary shows not just his amazing ability to deal with plein-air painting but also his incredible talent as an artist.”
Asked if she could work with multiple canvases to create one collective piece, she sighs. “Right now, I find it hard enough to finish one painting completely outdoors,” Lori says. “But I have done some pieces like triptychs, which involve multiple paintings that work together. I haven’t done anything like that, though!”
We see Hockney touching up some of his plein-air pieces back home. The narrator says: “He’s working in the studio as much as outdoors. It’s more about painting than about what he’s painting.”
Lori likes this comment, too. “Painting is an impression, it’s an interpretation. You get as much as you can in the field, but then you take that home with you, and if you’re trying to really create something good, like he is here, you have to complete it in the studio, for sure. It’s a creative space, the studio, and your mind works differently in there. Maybe it’s like the recording studio for a band, versus playing live. It’s more serious, and that typically leads to more polished and professional work.”
Back in the English countryside, two of Hockney’s six canvas panels blow over in the wind as he’s standing back looking at his work. He and his assistant scramble to assess the damage and stand them upright. Hockney goes back to work on them.
“He’s hurrying to finish before spring arrives and the leaves appear,” the narrator says.
“God, three years of this?” Lori says. “He’s nuts! I can’t believe he never even painted en plein-air before this. That just shows you how adaptable he is as an artist. That’s inspiring. Maybe if I live in Hawaii one day I can just paint outside all the time. But — I mean, look at him — I guess I could do that here, this fall and winter. But my hands get so cold!”
The film ends with the development and installation, in London’s Tate Modern, of Hockney’s largest-ever painting: a 15 by 40-foot view of deciduous trees in winter, comprising 50 canvases, each done en plein-air. “Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture en Plein Air pour l’age Post-Photographique,” it’s called.
“Beautiful . . .” Lori says. “And knowing how it all came together, outdoors. I’m sure, when you’re standing in front of it, it feels real. I think if he painted that entirely in a studio you could tell, and people wouldn’t be as interested. But he’s a genius. It would still hang in the Tate. I need to paint more like him.”
The DVD finishes playing. Lori’s artistic mind, though, has just started to spin.
Have your own plein-air images, or wish you could paint a landscape you recently saw? Post your art, including photos, on our Insta. COMING SOON
