Susan Abbott - sketching and painting plein air

I caught up with this post The Travel Bug by Susan Abbott on her Painting Notes blog.

You can see her recent watercolour sketches of Paris on her blog A Painting Year and on her website (see below) - plus her plein air oil paintings. What I really like about her watercolour sketches and paintings is how she has a very consistent and recognisable colour palette and the way in which she keeps all her colours fresh and never muddy!

Plein Air Watercolours by Susan Abbott

For those planning plein air painting this summer check out her blog posts about painting plein air which she wrote last summer:

• Plein Air 101 - provides a number of tips for effective working plein air
• Plein Air 102 - covers her kit for watercolour and oil painting plein air

Wolf Kahn - 6 good reasons not to paint a landscape

There's a 2002 Forum Network lecture by Wolf Kahn - highlighting 6 good reasons not to paint a landscape - in which he discusses landscape painting.

Wolf Kahn, an influential modern landscape painter, explains why people become artists, despite the apparent impracticality of art.

Wolf Kahn - 6 good reasons not to paint a landscape

His lecture is organised around the six reasons he puts forward which are:

1. There's no ideology these days to back up landscape painting
2. It's all been done
3. It's far too polite - it ends up in hospital waiting rooms and corporate boardrooms
4. You're mistaken by the public to be a lover of beauty
5. You're mistaken to be an environmentalist
6. There's no politics in landscape painting

There's a link which indicates you can download the audio file of the lecture to listen to as a podcast.

Thanks to Loriann Signori who highlighted this on her blog today.

The lecture is on The Forum Network which is a public media service of WGBH in Boston

So - did you listen to the lecture?  What do you think?

Happy New Year! (plus a landscape art reading list)

Happy New Year to all subscribers to and readers of The Art of the Landscape.

Tomorrow this blog - and this project - is one year old.  This was the very first post on Saturday 2nd January 2010 - Introducing the The Art of the Landscape Project

A View in the Alps

John Ruskin - 1835
Private collection
Painting - watercolor
Height: 21 cm (8.27 in.), Width: 27.5 cm (10.83 in.)

Very early this morning we had a powercut in the area where I live.  This morning when I woke up I discovered they hadn't even started to fix the problem - which made a very grey day even greyer.   I couldn't see to read - having discovered last night that my torch wasn't where it should be!

Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlass
by John Ruskin
Pen, brown ink, ink wash (lamp-back) and bodycolour,
47.7 x 32.7 cm.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England

That's when I discovered that an ipad screen with a nice light background - such as can be found with a good downloaded book - doubles as a torch!  It certainly makes for very easy reading in the middle of a power cut.

Which is how this morning I came to be reading an ibooks version of John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing and most particularly how to draw trees and landscapes while I ate breakfast.   

(In brief, Ruskin was the man who championed the landscape art of JMW Turner and fostered the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.  He also was an inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founding of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.)

When the power came back on I decided to see which other books were available through ibooks and discovered I could access a number of works including

• The Stones of Venice
• Modern Painters
• Lectures on Landscape

Modern Painters (1843) is book on art by John Ruskin which argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters. The book was primarily written as a defence of the later work of J.M.W. Turner. Ruskin used the book to argue that art should devote itself to the accurate documentation of nature. In Ruskin's view Turner had developed from early detailed documentation of nature to a later more profound insight into natural forces and atmospheric effects.

Ruskin added later volumes in subsequent years. Volume two (1846) placed emphasis on symbolism in art, expressed through nature. The second volume was influential on the early development of Pre-Raphaelitism. Ruskin also added third and fourth volumes in later years.

I then took at look at the Project Gutenburg site - and found that has a lot of his writing (and associated images) is available to download in various formats - see links at end for just some of them.

So one of my New Year's Resolutions will be to read Lectures on Landscapes!

The Field behind Ruskin's House at Denmark Hill by John Ruskin
1860. Watercolor.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Ruskin's theories about art

Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.^[10] Certain principles, however, remain consistent throughout his work, which Clark summarised as:

1. Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanizing as economic man.
2. Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognized for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
3. These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
4. The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life.
5. Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function.'
6. This fulfillment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and cooperating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
7. Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
8. Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.^[11]

I'll finish with another winter landscape - this time by John Ruskin - painted from his home at Brantwood overlooking Coniston water in the Lake District. 

Study of Ice Clouds over Coniston by John Ruskin

You can visit Brantwood - said to be the most beautifully situated house anywhere in the Lake District - between March and November. 

It also has a regular schedule of art exhibitions - many of which relate to explorations of the wonderful Lake District landscape.

Links: Project Gutenburg - files to download

• Lectures on Landscape
  Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 (English) (as Author)
• Stones of Venice [introductions] (English) (as Author)
• The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) (English) (as Author)
• The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3), (English) (as Author)
• The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) (English) (as Author)
• Modern Painters Volume I (of V) (English) (as Author)
• Modern Painters Volume II (of V) (English) (as Author)
• Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) (English) (as Author)

How to draw a tree by Edition Handdruck

My friend and ace artist/draughtsman/printmaker Martin Stankewitz (Edition Handdruck) produces delightful plein air pen and ink drawings and then fabulous monotype and giclee prints from the drawings and sketches.

Martin is very fond of drawing trees and recently he's been sharing his enthusiasm for drawing trees in a number of different ways

He's been very busy creating a whole set of resources and different ways in which people can share what's learned.

How to draw a tree is a visual summary of my experiences in drawing and sketching trees from life.

Rather than teaching a drawing method the little booklet shall encourage the reader with example drawings, mainly in pen and ink, to own explorations and to use the own handwrite.

The text concentrates on important aspects of tree drawings as proportions, trunk and branches and how to depict foilage of trees.

How to Draw a Tree

These include:

• a blog called How to draw a tree
• a book about How to draw a tree

How to Draw a Tree - the blog

the book cover of 'how to draw a tree'

PLUS a whole suite of 'how to draw a tree' sites aimed at helping people improve their skills in drawing trees.

• How to draw a tree - tree drawing
• How to draw a pine tree
• How to draw deciduous trees
• How to draw coniferous trees
• Forest diary - keeping a nature sketchbook

To give you a taster, the first of these includes:

• Learning by doing - tree drawing from LIFE
• Three critical points in depictions of trees
• Rythm and patterns in foliage
  
• Some tricks that help to get a convincing tree drawing
  
• How to draw the trunk of a tree
• plus some examples of how he applies basic principles in his own drawings in different media
• and some examples from well known artists from the past and the present

"How to Draw a tree" is a gold nugget of art education - and in my view is it's well worth investing some time in studying what he has to say. I need to improve my tree drawing and I'm going to be reading it from end to end more than once!

motifs from Martin Stankewitz's 'how to draw a tree' information websites
copyright the artist/printmaker

Martin is German and he lives in Maulbronn in southern Germany. However his English is excellent and his advice and information is very easy to understand. He also includes a 'translate into English' option on all his blogs.

Overall, I think his resources are a really refreshing change from all the normal 'how to draw a tree' books which seem to be produced these days. I highly recommend exploring all the resources Martin has to offer.

Other landscape blogs by Martin include:

• Edition Handdruck - for the original fine art prints he produces
• Wandern und Zeichnen - hiking and drawing
• A year in the vineyard

Plus you can purchase his original monotype prints or buy reproductions of his fine art prints

Art postcard Tree landscape by editionha
postcard printing by Zazzle.com

Charles Reid's 5 Tips for Painting Water

Water is one of those subjects which can be difficult to master in any media. It's always good to get tips from those who have mastered their media as well as the subject matter.

Today's post comes from the Watercolor Artist blog via the South Africa Society of Artists and their post Charles Reid's 5 Tips for Painting Water

watercolour painting by Charles Reid

Here's a little gem we plucked from our archives:

Charles Reid's best tips for painting water:

1. Water should be painted with hard edges between the light from the sky and the reflections from trees, buildings or boats.
2. Paint wet-in-wet within the reflections but rarely where the reflection meets the sunlight.
3. For distant water on the horizon, try moist Antwerp blue or peacock blue (Holbein). Sometimes I use ultramarine violet if the horizon line of the sea seems very dark.
4. In shallow water, use diluted Antwerp blue, peacock blue or Winsor blue. These are all transparent blues that retain their color identity when diluted.
5. Sometimes water near the shore can turn a delicate turquoise green. You can add turquoise green to your palette, or simply mix diluted cadmium yellow pale or lemon yellow with one of the diluted blues to achieve the same color.

I can certainly recommend Charles Reid's books about painting in watercolour - as can others. See my information site about The Best Books about Watercolour Painting for more information.

Advice and information from The Watercolor Artist is also available as follows

• as a newsletter - by subscription email (see the box top left in the link)
  
• in pdf format as a digital download. This is the June edition.
  
• via subscription to their RSS feed for The Watercolor artist' articles

The History of Landscape Painting - a new resource

I've just published The History of Landscape Painting as a new resource for all those interested in the development of landscape painting everywhere in the world and across the centuries.

Learn about the development of landscape painting

Find out how landscape painting has developed across the centuries and different continents. This resource for art lovers identifies
* major movements in the history of landscape art
* famous landscape artists from the past
* famous art schools associated with landscape painting
* major subjects for landscape painting; and
* (in the future) popular locations for landscape art

This site is part of the The Art of the Landscape project and as such is a work in progress with new sites being added all the time. In effect it's the open access version of the ning site. Plus it can be bookmarked, tweeted and logged on Facebook.

I kept putting off publication - I wanted to add more, tweak more etc - but then remembered that this was supposed to be a project and that I don't know all the answers!

Feel free to identify useful websites for the site to link to

London Through the Eyes of Foreign Artists

Townscapes are an important type of landscape. A series of talks seeks to inform about London Through the Eyes of Foreign Artists. These are organised by Gresham College which is an independent educational institution based in Barnard's Inn, Holborn.

The first one, which I missed, was on Monday this week. Foreign Artists in 16th Century London was about the foreign artists, such as the German, Hans Holbein, and Netherlandish artists such as Hans Eworth and William Scrouts who were working in London in the sixteenth century.

The next ones are much more about artists who have portrayed the landscape of London and in particular the River Thames.

The cover of Canaletto
by JG Links (Phaidon).

The book cover is part of a painting
Canaletto, London, The City seen through one of the Arches of Westminster Bridge, c. 1746. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland

Canaletto: Grand Designs is the title of a talk given by Martin Gayford at the Museum of London on Monday 8th March at 1.00pm

In 1746 the great Venetian artist, Canaletto, moved to London following the market and wealth for his work. Nine years later, he left the city attacked by the critics as repetitive and a fake.

What was 18th Century London like to be the centre of such hope and disappointment? How did Canaletto feel about the city, and how are we to assess these views today?

Monet: The River of Dreams is a lecture by Professor John House (Walter H Annenberg Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art) on 15th March at 1.00pm at the Museum of London.

Claude Monet visited London numerous times between 1870 and 1901, painting some of his most important works in the city.

Why was he repeatedly attracted back to the foggy and overpopulated urban capital when his impressionist work was otherwise so concerned with light and nature? What was the city like when he visited it in the 1870s and 80s? How was he received by the London art establishment at that time?

The final lecture - which i'm less interested in is Feliks Topolski: Eye-Witness to the 20th Century