Crowdsourcing Lights for Plein-Air Nocturnes

On Instagram, Paul T Levin asks: "James, you did a video about plein air nocturnes a while back where you talked about good lights but I can’t find it. What do you recommend if I may ask?"

I answer: I don't know to be honest, since everything is changing so fast in the LED space. Anybody have a suggestion for good book light or headlamp with adjustable light levels?

Cleve Page answers: "I got a Lumecube 2.0. It has adjustable light levels and there are attachments like barn doors or snap-on color filters. It's an excellent product. It also has 1/4-20 threads so you can add it to a separate structure. It's more pricey than a headlamp, but it's much more capable."

Fiona Fleming adds: "I just purchased a Vekkia 19 LED Music Stand Light with a nice substantial clip, and a flexible arm…the light alters to warm, medium or cool and can be directed right onto the surface. I haven’t road tested it on the easel at night yet, but I might tonight! It charges with a USB cable."

J. Owens says: "(There are) a few different headlamps for camping and I believe most have adjustable levels. Mine is a PTEC, (Princeton Tec) it has three levels along with a red light."

Drew Baker I've mused about putting something using srtip LEDs from Waveformlighting. My thinking is a very high CRI source would be a better approach than something with tunable temperature and questionable CRI.

Edgeprogear sells a light for their pochade boxes. It's essentially a Vidpro LED-230 on a gooseneck, with a bespoke mount for the Paintbook. (At least, that's what mine is.)

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Brian Meyer I paint at night, at concerts, etc. Basically I have bought every light you can get. The ones I prefer now are rechargeable, which can last 2-3 hours.

The last one I got is the best so far, its designed for musicians, its battery on bright lasts an entire session of 5 hours, and it goes from 4 to 3 on its power display, I have used it two sessions in a row without recharging.
(photos from Brian Meyer)

Vekkia clip-on book light.

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• The issue with most lights is the bulb is exposed, which is blinding if you have an audience, this light has it in a recess so all the light is directed towards the paper. Prior to this I was setting up a hood.
  
  Julie Bloch I got little clip on rechargeable LED lights that are tiny. I bought 2 for my plein-air backpack.
  
  Damian Kinsella I try to limit the light as much as possible so these do well to not give me so much light that I lose the sense of what I'm looking at. Eric Merrell brought up the idea of taping a piece of vellum over them and that diffuses the light a bit more and warms it up slightly as well (depending on the vellum). They don't work well with my Yarka rig, but for a Gurney-style flip easel they're practically perfect.

The kit I purchased can run off the included 12-hour lithium batteries so this would allow painting on location far away from any other electrical source for an extended period of time.

Although I haven't used them for an en plein air nocturne, I do plein air oils and am always looking for an efficient means of transporting my gear. I can envision these old bones including such a light in an excursion. The kit essentially could be doing triple-duty (copywork, studio painting, and night painting on location) if I decide to try a nocturne. Their use in conjunction with polarizing filters on the lights and camera lens makes a remarkable improvement when copying art. Because of such versatility, they may be worth consideration.

I paint at night, at concerts, etc. Basically I have bought every light you can get.The ones I prefer now are rechargeable, which can last 2-3 hours.

The last one I got is the best so far, its designed for musicians, its battery on bright lasts an entire session of 5 hours, and it goes from 4 to 3 on its power display, I have used it two sessions in a row without recharging.

Royal Super Bright 29 LED Music Stand Light, Clip On Orchestra Piano Lights, Infinite Levels Dimmable, 

Good for extra light, like on your palette and paint mixing areas, or as a backup main light. Its also better light, good for when recording with a GoPro.

Always plan on the batteries dying and have a spare.

How Sacrificing Detail Can Add Mood

In a new YouTube video I show how I painted this moody morning scene in gouache by sacrificing detail and emphasizing light effects.

My goal is to capture a fleeing light effect by using a warm priming color to achieve a "photographic" lens flare. Halfway through, I paint over the whole thing with a glaze to reduce detail. The glaze is risky because gouache reactivates when it's rewet, and to be honest, it's kind of a disaster for a while.

Here are some takeaway quotes about the theory of sacrifices: 

“Nature instills sentiments in the spectator through the selective sacrifice of details in order to improve the overall effect.” 

--The Theory and Practice of Water Colour Painting: Elucidated in a Series of Letters

“Painters without experience often weaken the effect they wish to produce by a prodigality which multiplies uselessly the figures and accessories of a picture. It will not be long before they learn that, the greater the conciseness and simplicity with which a thought is interpreted, the more it gains in expressive force.” 

—Jules Breton, The Life of an Artist: An Autobiography, 1890

Landing the Spirit of St. Louis

A replica of The Spirit of St. Louis comes in for a landing just past the tower at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Ken Cassens is at the controls.

Cassens is the Aerodrome's veteran mechanic, builder, and pilot. This replica has the fuel tank in front of the pilot, just like Charles Lindbergh's original, but the tank blocks the pilot's view forward.

(Click right arrow below to watch video of the aircraft in flight.) 

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A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

To see the small grassy airstrip, Cassens maneuvers the plane so that he looks out a side window as it slips sideways.

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Read more: 

Lindbergh’s Airplane (or a Close Replica) Takes to the Skies

Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome

 

Surrounded by Memory

This man was sitting by himself at the diner. I liked the cool colors of the walls and his jeans, in contrast to the warm-colored notes of his scrambled eggs and his face.

The painting is gouache and watercolor in a watercolor sketchbook and it took about an hour.

The words written around him with a fountain pen are a short poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

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A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

Peter Brown Paints a Street Scene

 Urban plein-air painter Pete "The Street" Brown shares his thoughts as he paints a London cityscape.

(Link to YouTube) 

He talks about the difficulty of choosing a motif and his ideas about "mapping out" the shapes with a brush on a piece of toned MDF board or canvas.

The video shows how he builds up the image with blocks of tone rather than with lines defining boundaries.

MDF Board, (11 x 14 in,)

With Bierstadt on a Painting Expedition

In 1859, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) organized a painting expedition in the high country of the Rocky Mountains. He sought out the help of William Byers, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, a "mountain tramp" who knew his way around. 

Byers recalled how the artist "said nothing, but his face was a picture of intense life and excitement. His enthusiasm was badly dampened, but the moment he caught the view, fatigue and hunger were forgotten. He said nothing, but his face was a picture of intense life and excitement. Taking in the view for a moment, he slid off his mule, glanced quickly to see where the jack was that carried his paint outfit, walked sideways to it and began fumbling at the lash-ropes, all the time keeping his eyes on the scene up the valley."

Byers waited patiently for Bierstadt to finish the color sketch, which the artist thought had taken fifteen minutes. Byers said: "You were at work forty-five minutes by the watch!"

The artist produced one sketch after another, each time exceeding his estimate of how long it would take.

“Wait twenty minutes while I sketch this storm.” They waited, but twenty minutes flew by, and he was still at work. Thirty, forty, and fifty minutes, and then an hour was gone, and the artist, absorbed in his work, was earnestly engaged in transferring the natural sublimity before him to paper. At the end of an hour and a half the artist completed his sketch."

According to Eleanor Harvey in her book The Painted Sketch, 

"'It was claimed that the artist’s recording “every detail of so wide a view in time—sketches, each limited to twenty minutes, and each noting the time of day, and consequent relative position of the sun, is one of the secrets of M. Bierstadt’s success.' He also developed a reputation early in his career as a prolific artist in the field, evidenced by the weight of his accumulated materials.”

Books:

Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West 

The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature, 1830-1880 by Eleanor Harvey

 

Henry Wheeler's Barn

Henry Wheeler’s barn has a horse weathervane. The electrical line goes to a small electric milker. 

I've sat in the hayloft on a summer day. It's peaceful and quiet up there with a bright sunbeam slanting in the hayloft door. 

One of the sheds has old wagons and carriages parked inside it, almost as if they're ready to return to the roads again in case those newfangled automobiles give up the ghost. 

Olana Eye Shows Famous View

Olana, the home of landscape painter Frederic Church has installed a  live skycam on its tower. Called "Olana Eye," it lets anyone stream the famous view of the Hudson River at any hour and in any weather.

Frederic Church, The ‘Bend in the River’ from Olana,
c. 1870-73. Oil on academy board, 10 1/16 x 12 7/8 in. 

Church frequently painted the view looking southwest from his tower.

Frederic Church, "Winter Sunset from Olana"

Typically his sketches were small and rapid oil studies, capturing fast-changing effects of light and weather. His paint application is relatively thin, working to finished effect from top to bottom and from background to foreground.
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Link to Olana Eye

Church's Palm Trees

Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900, oil sketch showing the top of one palm tree, with a glorious crown of palm fronds, beside a pair of coarse, scaly trunks belonging to two different palm trees, June 1865, oil on paperboard

I'm guessing he painted this over a prepared gradation for the sky color. Click on the image to get the full study.

Easels in the Sacristy

John Singer Sargent, Pavement of St. Mark's, 1898

In late-nineteenth-century Venice, worshippers and tourists had to share St. Mark's cathedral with painters. According to artist and ambassador Maitland Armstrong, the artists were given an honored place:

"In San Marco the artists were privileged; we could sit and paint wherever we pleased, no one ever interfering with us; we were allowed to store our easels and canvases in the sacristy—there were so many of them that it looked more like a studio than the robing-room of a church... Never was there a more delightful place to work in."

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Quote from Day Before Yesterday: Reminiscences of a Varied Life by Maitland Armstrong, 1920

Painting reproduced in The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914

Tips for Painting Realistically in Gouache and Watercolor

In this new Youtube video I sketch of a pile of snow along a country road using gouache and watercolor.

I start in watercolor, applying the paint wet with big brushes, and gradually shifting to a more opaque approach. I use drybrush effects to capture the texture of the gravel road. The gouache goes on thickly for the highlights and accents.

Gouache and watercolor squeezed out from the tube can be used in combination for any kind of plein-air painting or urban sketching.

WATERCOLORS
Ultramarine blue
Raw sienna
Cadmium yellow
Perylene maroon
GOUACHE
Titanium white
Ivory black
Set of gouache primary colors

Burger Hill, from below

Burger Hill near Rhinebeck commands a lofty vista of the Catskills and it’s a favorite sledding spot in the winter.

Drayton Grant Park at Burger Hill,  Oil, 10x18 inches. 

Looking up at it from its base, it presents a smooth curve against the sky, a pure abstraction found in Nature,
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Previously: View from Burger Hill

Painting the Background for Ophelia

In the summer of 1851, Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt traveled to the Elwell River in England, each in hopes of painting the background for an ambitious picture that they had planned in their heads. 

Millais wanted to paint Hamlet's Ophelia drowning in a stream, and his plan was to paint the background first.

Following the advice of critic John Ruskin to capture every detail faithfully—“rejecting nothing—selecting nothing”—Millais dutifully recorded the "flowering rush, river daisy, forget-me-not, willow herb, meadowsweet, and the wonderful tangle of brier bush with its multitude of dog roses in bud and bloom."

According to a 1923 biography: 'They were up by six o’clock and at their selected spots by eight o’clock, where they painted until evening, returning to their lodgings about seven o’clock; Hunt had to walk four miles and Millais two to their respective painting places. 

'In a letter to Mr. Combe, Millais gives an interesting description of the trials and difficulties of the time : “I sit tailor-fashion under an umbrella throwing a shadow scarcely larger than a halfpenny for eleven hours, with a child’s mug within reach to satisfy my thirst from the running stream beside me. I am threatened with a notice to appear before the magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay; likewise by the admission of a bull in the same field after the said hay be cut; I am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water and becoming intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that lady sank to a muddy death, together with her (less likely) total disappearance through the wrath of the flies. There are two swans who not a little add to my misery by persisting in watching me from the exact spot I wish to paint, occasionally destroying every water-weed within their reach.’’'

'Their lodgings were far from comfortable; their hunger had to be appeased with an unvarying diet of chops, until Millais writes that he has taken such “an aversion to sheep that I feel my very feet revolt at the proximity of woollen socks.”'

The process of painting the background on location took more than two months.

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Quotes from 'John Everett Millais: Master Painters of the World' by Arthur Fish, 1923

Previously on the blog: Ophelia by Millais

Thunderstorm Coming

A hard rain is coming. If I don't finish soon, my gouache painting will be ruined. (Link to video on Facebook)

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Free PDF with gouache materials

Downloadable video tutorial: Gouache in the Wild
They're also available as DVDs on Amazon.

Exhibit Review of 'Frederic Church: Painter's Pilgrimage'

In 1867 Frederic Church and his family headed east across the Atlantic to Europe and the Near East, looking for new inspiration. After painting volcanoes in South America, jungles in Jamaica, and icebergs in the North Atlantic, he turned his epic vision to the old world.

Evening on the Sea, oil on canvas

He brought his oil paints and sketchbooks with him to capture the color and drama of what he would encounter. 

The grand cities of Europe such as Rome and Venice had been painted by many artists before him. He was looking for vistas that hadn't been thoroughly documented. That led him to Athens, Jerusalem, Syria, and Petra.

View of Baalbek, 1868, oil and pencil on board

The exhibition "Frederic Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage" explores this late chapter in Church's career, and it is currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. 

It includes over 70 objects, including pencil sketches, oil studies, large studio canvases, architectural studies, costumes, sculptures, and bric-a-brac, all of which evoke the exotic romance of the life of the artist-explorer.  

Travel to that part of the world was not easy. A steamship line had just been opened up to Athens from Rome, and the road from the port of Jaffa to Jerusalem had just been built to accommodate wheeled vehicles. To get to the rock-cut city of Petra, Church hired local guides and traveled by camel. Church wrote that he nearly fell off when the animal rose to its feet and pitched forward. 

Standing Bedouin (probably February 1868)
Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

Church's guides helped guard him against zealots who were suspicious of artists making graven images of the sacred sites. An artist in a previous expedition had been killed. Church stopped to make a quick sketch of the Roman-style architecture "but our guide was much exercised thereby and made significant motions that it was unsafe I might be fired at." (Quoted from book "The Painted Sketch")

The Urn Tomb, Silk Tomb, and Corinthian Tomb, Petra, 1868, oil on paper mounted to canvas

Church only spent a few days in Petra, but he worked from sunup to sundown. His studies of the architecture are marvels of close observation, precise detail and efficient brushwork.

Parade Entering the City, Jaffa, 13 x 20 1/16 in. (33 x 51cm)
Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

He painted his studies in oil over a careful pencil outline on the paperboard surface. Most of them are relatively small, painted for his own reference, and were not intended for exhibition.

Erin Monroe, Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, said the response to the exhibition has been fantastic. She included some sculptures, costumes, and ephemera from the Atheneum's collection to the exhibit to bring the 19th century ambiance to life. 

If you haven't been to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, they also have a strong collection of Hudson River School painters in their permanent collection.

The show Frederic Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage was organized by the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and this is the last stop in the tour, ending August 26th. The softcover catalog is 228 pages long and has large color reproductions and an informative text. The book The Painted Sketch is the best one to get if you're interested in 19th century oil sketch practice.

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Previous and related posts:

Frederic Church's Oil Sketches

Church's Parthenon Sketches

Church and the Mirror

Book: The Painted Sketch

Will that van stay parked?

It's grocery day, so while Jeanette does the hunting and gathering, I am out in the parking lot scouting for a new slice of ordinariness.

Here's a short video (link to video on Facebook).

I use two tripods, one for the sketch easel, and the other for the camera, which is held out on an extension bar. The camera I'm using is a Canon EOS M6 mirrorless, which has a built in time lapse function.

Here's my setup (product links below). The casein underpainting color is just a random page; I didn't paint it for this particular composition. I just like to have a few pre-primed page in the book. The priming gives unexpected energy to the colors.

The sky is overcast, making the sky flat and nearly white. With overcast lighting, there's no clear light side or shadow side. On the van, the planes that face more upward receive more light from the sky and are therefore lighter. I liked the fact that the white on the hood of the van was the brightest white in the composition.
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Resources
The brushes are from a pocket travel brush set and I'm painting in a Pentalic Aqua Journal with gouache over the casein underpainting. Everything is attached to the homebuilt sketch easel. I made a video explaining how to make one.
Full-length painting tutorials on Gouache, Casein, and Watercolor.

Also available on DVD from the manufacturer or from Amazon
Casein starter set
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