Landscape painting has a timelessness to it. Go to Horseneck Beach or the Westport River or meander through the dunes and the beaches of the Provincelands of Cape Cod and you will see a landscape that seems to have escaped time. Go there as a child and return as a senior citizen and the water and the beaches and space and the openness still surrounds one as it did decades ago. For me, painting the landscape is to capture this timelessness. It is being inspired by a scene and so captivated by it that I need to transform it and give it another reality on the canvas.

Look out across a marsh near sunset and see the angle of the light illuminating and highlight the vastness of the landscape in the high drama of light and shadow and gradually, after the sunset and as the light fades, the landscape becomes a series of grays and browns. In nature, it is the light that creates color—on the canvas, it is the color that creates light!

Painters work with color, and it is a thrill to capture the light of the landscape through mixing the paint and applying value and hue next to value and hue; thus capturing a marsh in the brilliant spotlight of the setting sun. It is a thrill to have a canvas before you and to capture miles of vista and the drama of the sunlight and clouds and claim it as yours. The artists who painted the landscape in 1850 and the ones who paint it in 2008 see the shoreline and the water or the marsh bathed in sunlight and capture the same timelessness again and again.

Paint a woman dressed in the contemporary clothes of 1850 and another in the contemporary attire of 2008 and the difference is immediate; but a painting of the marsh by the Westport River captures the evocative scene in all of its beauty and renders it timeless.

It is always an exciting time when an artist starts his or her painting season. Some go on sabbatical, some go off to Europe or enjoy a sojourn in another local for a few weeks or a few months and it is always an exciting start.

It is an exciting time for an artist because the artist arrives with his blank canvases and at the end of his stay, the canvases bear the fruits of his labor. I know one artist who told me that he went to the Adirondacks for a month or so of painting and when he returned, he couldn’t find anything good in any of them. He never connected with the place on canvas it seems. However, when it does work out, the artist at the end of his painting season sees the excitement of his painting season visible on the canvas.

We are ending the winter and marching towards spring. The grays and browns of winter will evolve into the fresh greens of spring. This, too, could be the end of a painting season and the start of another. For studio artists it will lift the spirits as it does for everyone, but for the landscape artists attuned to the changes in nature, it is a heady time of contained excitement.

The Plein air painters will be out in the landscape capturing the play of sunlight on the lay of the land or the sea shore. They might do their studies outdoors and then return to the studio for the final touches or they may return time after time to the outdoor scene. Regardless of the venue, for some, the seasonal painting will come to an end and another will start. Their lives are measured in the collection of finished paintings at the end of these painting sojourns and their excitement builds since it is the start of another. It is a cycle that renews and rejuvenates and creates a personal legacy of time used in creative endeavor visible for all to see.

I saw an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. of John Constable’s six-foot paintings and studies. For the first time, his studies and the finished paintings were shown side by side. It was a revelation: The studies were the same size as the finished paintings, and they showed the immediacy of the artist’s hand with their brush strokes and the drama of light and darks and swirls of colors.

The finished paintings were more rendered with the color more tonal and the light less stark and the brush strokes less brazen. I found the studies more powerful, and they appealed to me more. It was still somewhat amazing that he started new paintings rather than use the studies as “under paintings” and thus refine and paint them until he considered them “finished”.

Sketch

Finished

Several times while painting this winter I liked the “starts” so much that I would stop and begin another painting, leaving the “start” as a study. I feel that the freshness of the image that is captured truly speaks to me; so rather than continue and refine and complete all of the canvas, I would leave it and being another that I’ll take to completion. I can always cite Constable as the reason why.

I have seen paintings of friends and say it has everything—don’t touch it—but they weren’t satisfied because it didn’t respond to some lesson or such that they had learned, and then they would end up slaving over their painting. I was even present once when a couple was ready to buy a painting but the artist didn’t want to sell it to them until he had worked on it some more. I thought that it was foolish of the artist not to sell it then and there because it obviously captured something that spoke to these art lovers.

Spring is here and soon the landscape will be speaking to the artists who are inspired by nature; and I hope that they will listen to their inner voices, stop, and keep the study as it is when it captures the essence of what the artist wishes to capture. If you feel strongly enough about the study, let it be, put it aside, keep it as it is and then start another painting of the same view. Keep painting that one until you feel that it is “finished”. It is your painting, your hand and your vision that is being manifested on canvas, and if the painting speaks to you unexpectedly but it isn’t “finished” in the way that you would normally finish a painting, then feel free to keep it as a study, think of Constable and consider him your guide.