Painting during hunting season

Peter Breugel, Hunters in the Snow. from the Art Renewal Center.

Tonight I am going to answer a question that appeared in the comments. I was asked about painting during hunting season. Here in New England that generally means deer hunting. I don't worry much about the bird hunters. In this area November is deer season and occasionally some body gets shot. Here are a few things you can do to cut down the odds of its being you.
When I first moved to Maine in the late eighties, (I live in New Hampshire now) I was very cautious during deer season and I painted in the villages for the month of November. But as the years went by I grew tired of that, I painted out in the woods and fields all the time, and I wasn't happy to relinquish my painting sites for a month. As I grew bolder, year by year I moved further out into those woods and fields. Here is a bulleted list of tips for avoiding the indignity of getting shot, gutted and tagged.

• Wear hunter orange. I have a truly unattractive stocking cap that I wear. That's a good place to wear your hunter orange. I have an orange sweatshirt made out some weird foam that I hang on my easel. If I wear the thing, the orange reflects from my chest into the painting and that causes me problems judging my color. It is just as good on the easel as it is on me.
• Don't dress up as a deer. I have friends who have deer colored highway worker type suits they wear, then they hold a paper towel. That's asking for it. I can't help thinking about shooting them myself.
  
• Paint on private land, on a farm where you know the owner, and hunters are likely to be refused permission to hunt while you are there.
• Paint in a state or federal park where hunting is not allowed. You still need to wear some orange, but generally hunters don't break these rules as the penalties if they are caught hunting there are so draconian.

• But here is my favorite and it works really well.

BRING A BOOMBOX OUT WITH YOU AND PLAY ROCK AND ROLL REALLY LOUD.

the hunters avoid you like the plague, they know there are no deer around that din. I have had a few of them come upon me in the woods and laugh at what I was doing when they figured out why.

More about winter painting

Paintings this page by Aldro Hibbard, The Rockport Art Association is selling a book about him here.

Before I go into equipment for winter painting I want to do another general sort of post on the subject.

People who hear that I paint outside in the winter are always so sure that it is heroic and that it takes great ability to withstand cold and hardship to do. Thats not usually the case. I get cold EASILY. Yet I am almost never cold when I am painting outside, because I have got the right equipment. There are times when it is 5 or 10 below zero when it IS extreme, but anything above about 1o degrees is very comfortable. In fact I like it when I look at the forecast and the prediction is for cold. Cold days are clear, and have good light. Gray days are warm. So the cold is generally my friend, I want it cold.

What I don't want is wind. You can paint in any temperature if you can get out of the wind. But if the wind is blowing on your face and it is zero or below you are going to be unable to take it for very long. On days with any wind I like to be down in the woods or in the lee of some building. Whatever it takes, you have to get out of the wind when it is super cold.

I used to drive an Expedition that had four wheel drive, and it was a pretty good snow painting car, but it ate too much. Now I drive a Lincoln or my wife's old Volvo wagon, neither one is particularly adapted to off road driving and I don't do any. It can be hard to find a place to park along a winter road, but there is usually someplace. I paint along frozen streams and often at the point where the stream cuts under the road there is a little bridge and the area on either side of that is plowed. There are often plowed areas to provide access to hikers in public access allowed properties.Often I am out in the sticks in Maine or on some country road in Vermont and I park the car and set up behind it. People can see me from a long way out on a straightaway and they go around me.

In the winter it is almost always best to paint with a buddy, on the road it is nice, but in the woods it is essential. A friend of mine fell down along an icy stream in northern Vermont and broke his leg a few years ago, had he been alone he might have frozen to death out there. So you need a buddy if you are painting down in the woods.

There are some things that you need in your pockets when its cold too. You need to have a pair of pliers in your kit, particularly if you are working on a French easel. Your fingers can get cold and you won't be able to turn the wing nuts on your easel to collapse the legs at the end of the day. I also carry matches, you never know when you might need to light a large cigar, and butane lighters quit working in the cold. If for some reason, you were to get stuck out there (I have never had it happen but I guess it could) matches would be a real cool thing to have.I will return tomorrow and post about the kind of clothing it takes to be comfortable out there in all of that lovely snow.

About winter painting

I am going to do a series of posts on winter landscape painting. Before I get to the equipment and the other adaptations needed to paint outside in the winter, I want to talk why you would want to do it in the first place.

Here's a painting by Aldro t. Hibbard* as an example of why. There are great pictures to be made outside in the winter. The potential for designs is enormous. Those big areas of "white" are just great for making arrangements. Pretty much everything in the landscape is darker and sits silhouetted against that white field. Also the snow is woven throughout the whole scene generally so it often unifies a picture. Like white velvet painting!

There is another thing that happens in the winter too, all of that green goes away. That makes the deep woods into a fine place to paint when in the summer it is way to closed in. Big views appear that are only there when you can see through the trees . Village scenes are unified because of the snow on rooftops is common to all the houses and driveways and other ugly ephemera disappear or can easily be made to. In the winter you can stand in the middle of a stream and look up its length like a country road. Below is my old friend Stefan Pastuvov painting along a frozen stream in Maine.

I would rather paint outside in January than July. In July everything is green except for the sky which is blue (with a little yellow in it) in January there are dozens of colors, and they are sophisticated 500 dollar suit colors too. There are heathers and ochers, browns and russets. The pines are green but its not the acidic green of summer and the snow is prismatic. Its not white, it is opalescent. It is very interesting to paint. When you want it lower in value than your pure white pigment, you will have to add color to it to get it there. What color? generally all three. Or you will paint it purple and shoot yellow into it. Or paint it green and lay purple over that, or pink and then, well you see what I mean. The color of snow in the light and in the shadow is vibratory. It is my favorite thing to paint.

Here I am painting in the snow up near Bethel, Maine. There is another good reason to paint outside in the winter though. If you want to be a plein air painter and are only painting outside in the warm months you are only working PART TIME.

You are also missing out on a lot of learning. The structure of the trees is evident in the winter and that's when you learn that. You wouldn't imagine you could learn to be a figure draftsman only drawing the clothed figure. Well, the trees model nude in the winter! A lot of landscape painting is tree painting. They are the figures on the landscape painters stage. In order to learn to draw those figures you need to be out there in the winter studying their anatomy.

There are a lot of what I call inominate colors out in the winter landscape. An inominate color is one that you can't easily name. That is, its not red, or blue, or yellow but a combination of all of the colors. They are everywhere in the winter and learning to make them is fun and teaches a sophisticated range of grays and browns and heathers etc. That puts more arrows in your color quiver.I will be back and tell you more about winter painting tomorrow.

* Aldro from the book Aldro Hibbard artist in two Worlds available through the Rockport Art Association

Odds and ends

Winter in Paris, by Brian Blood

This is the winner of the October Fine Art Views competition. Here is a link to that page. Congratulations Brian. I really like the painting above, it has so much charm and the restrained color scheme is awfully nice. The quiet color and handling made it a charming rather than a mawkishly sentimental painting.

The geometry of the foreground buildings is varied and interesting and the bridge across that open negative space has a great decorative shape.The red and green in the buildings in the foreground are lovely mineral sorts of colors that look well against the grays and ochers of their surroundings. I could use a a winter painting trip to Paris, I know a great place where we could have lunch.

I have been asked about the Gloucester easels and whether the Take it easel is still available. I e- mailed Rosemary whose family business that is down on the cape and she sent me a letter of explanation. Here that is:

Stape;

We went to great lengths to ASK permission of the original makers of the

Gloucester Easel about reviving it. We met with a hearty "go for it" as they no longer had any interest in making it. We could not get copyright or trademark it, originally the "Andersen Easel" as it had been in the country for over 50 years. No one, to our knowledge, has produced it for decades before or since we started making them almost 20 years ago; although the west coast art supplier, Daniel Smith, wanted to produce them, they found could not make it financially profitable,
though they did purchase one from us at that time.

When we can, we hope to order more materials with which to build our HAND CRAFTED original reproduction of the Gloucester Easel which Emil Gruppe made popular in his Gloucester School of Painting so long ago.

Alas, Creative Mark has outsourced our "Take-It-Easel" BUT it doesn't function like the original "Gloucester Easel" that inspired our revival. We correct this. The "Beauport" easels made in China, are finely manufactured . . .the wood is excellent, the holes drilled on a multi head machine are very accurate, and we tune them up to function perfectly!

Here is the really good news:

We offer you the fully functional Beauport Easel for $250 including shipping and a lovely padded carrying bag, including all the extra pegs, extender legs and a wing–nut fastened platform for small works, all the additional parts China sends.
Thank you for your interest and for your loyalty, we are most interested in facilitating your plein air painting success!

Rosalie, Tom and Tobin Nadeau

So, there is how to get a working Gloucester easel. The Chi-com easel will not work out of the box and unless you know a LOT about them it will not be possible for you to get one up and working.

Next week I am going to do the The thirteenth Boston International art show at the Cyclorama in Boston. Here is a link to that. For several years now I have volunteered to help the Guild of Boston Artists with their exhibit. There is a lot of hauling things around to do and lots of hanging pictures up and taking them down, and I am good at those things. I will hang a picture in the show at the Guild booth.

I will see some of you there, I know, introduce yourselves to me, I would live to meet you. It is quite a show and many of the most important galleries on the East Coast and elsewhere are exhibitors. The show specializes in in antique and representational paintings. It is a real good place to see a whole lot of fine painting and learn about the trade. There are lots of fine antique paintings for sale and most of the best known living traditional and realist painters will have work there too.

Park at the Clarendon street garage. It affordable and close, to the Cyclorama building. I will probably do some reporting in the blog on the show for those of you in Australia, Jakarta and Germany.Wait till I tell you why the building is called the Cyclorama building, clue, it was never used to race bicycles!