PLEIN AIR PAINTING is a way to see again and as Yeats says, “for the first time!” I paint because it’s evolutionary. I paint outside in the open air because it allows me to really see the miracle we are surrounded by, and good painting is a minor miracle; it causes a blind man to “see.” The ordinary is appreciated as a small miracle. Good painting is a rabbit hole; there’s a whole different world just below the surface. Like Alice, the painter falls in and takes the spectator along for what happens next.

Plein air painting is a balancing act, a dance, juggling perspective, light, mood, color, temperature, contrast to maximize subtle tensions without causing chaos. Nature is continuously changing, and thus all the balance of light, temperature, mood, color, edges, and perspective need constant adjusting. A good painting demonstrates this constant changing balance. Nothing is static.

Good painting takes faith in your own intuition, trust in your own experience, and work, work and more work. The process allows the artist to enter, penetrate, be part of nature and create, just like nature does, something unique.

“Looking” is different than really “seeing”. Plein air painting teaches one to “see”. It’s not comfortable; it moves you; it disturbs you. Nothing compares to the spontaneity of nature as it changes constantly, and like sex, you trust your instincts follow the lines, feel the curves, move ahead, give expression to the emotional wind. Plein air painting is a tool; it enables the artist to once again explore nature and the nature of things, be part of it, integrate, feel everything safely and with abandon. It takes skill and practice, but the rewards are always a double bonus for the effort. With experience, the reward of painting becomes the PROCESS itself, and thus the artist’s happiness is liberated from the PRODUCT. Oddly, the more fun and pleasure the artist derives from the process, the better the painting! The artist discovers new crooks and crannies, new feelings and demonstrates new modes of finding things. The artist is simply a great lover, an interested explorer, ready and willing to pursue, like a cat chasing a string, never tiring, enjoying an enthusiastic, healthy imagination. Lack of fear is a requisite. The willingness to gamble is a requisite.

Plein air painting is like falling in love. A new focal point appears in your life. As Yeats says, you really see and feel “as if for the first time”. In love, all the elements of your life are re-directed around this dazzling, hypnotic subject. Art makes big changes happen. Emily Dickenson says “it takes the top of your head off”. Think about it: From the age of the tiny Hobbit to the burly Neanderthal, some variant of the line “Come up and see my etchings!” has been working successfully to change history since the Caveman charcoal artist in the Dordogne to the Homosapien abstract expressionist in the Soho in New York. This same “falling in love” sequence occurs today in any great painting. Think about the Mona Lisa’s, the suggestions trembling in her eyes and quirky lips. Who wouldn’t “come on up” to check out her drawings?

Good art can push all other relationships in your life into a new perspective. Good plein air painting strikes us all at once like a lightning bolt; it knocks us off our wooden merry-go-round horse. Like new love, the fresh “seeing” restructures our lives. A mysterious presence surrounds us. The Mona Lisa doesn’t get old; one afternoon with her and you feel brand new. A good painting is a loaded shotgun with the trigger just pulled but the hammer not yet striking the bullet to cause the explosion; the painting is potential energy which is completed as a work or art when it clicks and explodes in the heart of the Spectator.