How I Came to Plein Air
It was once a great farming country of tobacco and wheat. The gentle, rolling landscape of Maryland. It is full of the colors of American history. It is not a gaudy, over-the-top landscape like California. It is a settled place of oak and sun-dried hay, of old farms and fields. Fields that still remember the blood of revolution and the war between the states.
For 27 summers and winters I was of this place. I raised two of my three children there. Here, I began to think about landscape painting because of it. In my mind, I mixed the colors of the bare winter trees or the hazy summer skies.
Seasons there were simple and direct, either all green or all gray. In Spring, it burst with an abundant green shout of ‘Here I am!‘. It slowed one down with the thick, stand-still air of Summer. Then it trimmed itself down to bones in Winter. One learned to hunker way down in those winters or keep moving. But in the summers you never moved too fast. In the summers, long slow walks, rambles, through field and forest. The walks brought the beauty of this subtle place to rest in your heart, in your body.
Sweat became a constant fact in the hot and humid, buzzing stillness of the place. It had a stillness which, at any moment, could crack apart by operatic thunder and rainstorms. The only way to survive the extremes of this place was to be of it. Have it in your body and you in its body and, somehow, the two of you becoming one thing.
The landscape in Maryland depended upon season for its visual beauty. It is a simple landscape, everywhere oak woods, squirrel and deer, insects, and more insects. One had to pay close attention to see the beauty. Even to the point of grabbing a handful of weeds and dirt and peering into it with all your might.
You didn’t live in the countryside, you became enmeshed in its abundant life. Those long walks that became such a part of me, taught me how to see. As I walked, I mixed the colors of what I saw on my mental palette. I noticed how the trees, at dusk, go from grays at the ground to burnt orange near the top. All against the pale yellow-blue evening sky. To me, the beauty of this transition was worthy of all my effort to learn how to paint it.
It was in this plain-spoken landscape that the thought arose. I determined that I must learn to paint landscapes.
