Artist Journal: Going Big in Marceline

Gouache and I have an understanding. I keep things small, and gouache behaves itself.

Gouache doesn’t really lend itself to large-format plein air painting, at least not for me. It dries quickly on the mixing surface. I’ll mix up a big, juicy puddle of color, put down one nice stroke, and by the time I’m ready for the second one, the paint on my palette has already started drying.

Spritz it with water. Mix again. Paint.

Spritz. Mix. Paint.

It’s not impossible to work large, but the larger the painting gets, the more complicated that little dance becomes. Five by seven inches is a pretty comfortable size for me. I work around that scale a lot. Even eight by ten can start to feel surprisingly large when I’m working outdoors in gouache.

So my painting friends have gotten used to recognizing my work from a distance.

It’s small.

Imagine their surprise at the Paint Marceline plein air event yesterday when, toward the end of the afternoon, a few of them asked where my painting was hanging.

I pointed.

They looked.

Then looked again.

“That’s yours?”

Yep.

At 18 inches wide, it was the largest plein air gouache I’ve ever painted.

Apparently I was feeling adventurous.

A Different Plan

Marceline, Missouri, is a small railroad town in northwest Missouri and, of course, famously associated with Walt Disney, who spent part of his childhood there. I’ve attended the Paint Marceline event for the past two years, and I arrived this year with a fairly definite plan.

I was going to paint the Disney Museum, which occupies the town’s former railroad depot. I’d already cut my painting surface to a size I thought would work and had even sketched out the composition I had in mind in my sketchbook.

Then I arrived and discovered several other painters already working on the depot. Suddenly I wasn’t feeling it.

That’s one of the nice things about painting on location. Plans are useful, but they’re not binding contracts. I wandered across the street and noticed the railroad crossing and the houses beyond it. This was more interesting. The houses were simple shapes, but the way they overlapped was anything but simple. Angles and rooflines bumped into one another, with dark masses of fully leafed-out trees behind them. It was a very horizontal arrangement, and the more I looked at it, the more I liked it.

In fact, I thought it might work better than the composition I’d arrived with. So I set up my easel in the gravel at a street corner and started painting.

In direct sunlight.

In August.

In Missouri.

Clearly, I’d made some questionable decisions.

Starting the Painting

I almost always mark my painting surface into thirds before I begin. It’s the familiar “Rule of Thirds,” but I don’t think of it as a rule so much as a useful way to organize the composition. It gives me a few important intersections and lines to work with as I decide where the major shapes should fall.

I used to begin with a fairly careful pencil drawing. Eventually that started to feel too formal for the way I wanted to paint.

Then I moved to a pen, which encouraged me to loosen up and simply establish the important outlines without worrying too much about accuracy. Eventually even that became unnecessary.

Now I generally start with a medium round brush and a mixture of ultramarine deep and burnt sienna. I use the brush to block in the important lines and shapes. I’ve already got a brush in my hand, which seems a more natural way to go directly from drawing into painting.

For this particular painting, I decided I needed to establish the weight of the trees first. I often work from background toward foreground, but the weight of the trees was such an important part of the composition that I wanted to get those values established before worrying too much about the sky.

That left me with the houses. The houses were what attracted me to the scene in the first place, and they turned out to be the most challenging part of the painting. I spent roughly half of my three-hour painting session working on them.

Not because there were a lot of details, but because there weren’t.

The challenge was to simplify the shapes while still making the surfaces readable. Small changes in value and temperature could make the difference between a roof plane turning toward the light or disappearing into the surrounding shapes.

It was a lot of looking.

And a lot of repainting.

Fewer Colors

A few months ago I decided to push my limited-palette experiment a little further.

I’d already been working with a relatively limited palette: two reds, two blues, and two yellows—a warm and cool version of each—plus titanium white.

Now I’ve gone even further.

My current palette is ultramarine deep, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and titanium white.

That’s it.

One practical advantage is that fewer tubes of paint means less weight. Tubes of paint are surprisingly heavy when you’re carrying an easel, water, brushes, and everything else down a gravel road.

But the bigger advantage is what happens to the painting.

With so few colors available, I’m less tempted to chase the exact color I see. Instead, I’m thinking about relationships.

Is this lighter or darker?

Is it warmer or cooler?

Does this shape sit in front of that one?

Can I make the color convincing without trying to reproduce it photographically?

The funny thing is that the palette doesn’t feel nearly as limited as you’d expect.

Burnt sienna is brown in the tube, but it can read beautifully as red. Ultramarine and yellow ochre can produce an extraordinary range of greens. The colors have a natural harmony because, well, there aren’t that many of them to begin with.

I like the way they behave together.

The Last Things In

I saved the sky and the railroad crossing signal for near the end. There were a couple of reasons for that.

First, I didn’t want to spend the rest of the painting carefully “cutting” around those shapes. It seemed much easier to establish the surrounding shapes first and then drop the pole and crossing bar into the painting afterward.

But there was another reason. The crossing bar looks white.

It isn’t. It’s sitting in shadow.

That meant I couldn’t really know how dark it needed to be until I had established the values around it. If I’d painted it white at the beginning, I would have spent the rest of the painting trying to make everything else work around an arbitrary value.

So the pole and signal waited. By the time they went in, I could judge them against the painting rather than against the real-world object.

Three hours or so after I started, I was finished. And I had somehow managed to make an 18-inch-wide gouache painting in the middle of a Missouri summer.

I’m still not entirely sure what possessed me.

Another Best of Show

The other surprise came later.

For the second year in a row, my plein air painting at Paint Marceline received Best of Show.

I’m particularly amused that it happened in Walt Disney’s shadow.

I arrived intending to paint the Disney Museum. Instead, I crossed the street and painted some houses, trees, a railroad crossing, and a bit of the town that had caught my attention.

That’s one of the things I enjoy most about painting on location.

You can arrive with a plan.

Then the place gets a vote.

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Hey! Sometime this autumn I’ll be sharing a new gallery of paintings and sketches I’ve been working on, in and around the Missouri River Bottoms. This is a part of my world that continues to draw me in, year after year and I’m looking forward to sharing that world with you. Hopefully, we’ll also have the e-commerce thing worked out by that point in time also. Stay tuned!