Plein Air Vs. Photos

The following letter that I received from artist Robert Genn is reprinted here with his permission. Thank you Robert for this letter. In reading it I am reminded of my own experience and your description is so wonderful it makes me chuckle.

Dear Sharron,

An excellent Quebec painter, Lorne Bouchard, once gave me some advice. He told me that a painter needs to work from three sources--from self-generated photo reference, from life, and from the imagination. "All painters," he said, "favour one or the other, but all three are needed to gain maximum feeling--and this goes even for abstractionists and those others who glean their motifs from their minds."

This advice came at a time when I was chronically "P.D." (Photo Dependent). It took me another decade to realize the value of Lorne's advice. I'd always thought that photos, used properly, had the coded information needed to make patterns and design decisions. Furthermore, photos side-stepped what I saw as the rigmarole of live observation. This all came at a time when I was struggling with perceived limitations of my pictorial imagination.

Then I saw the light. Flirting with plein air, I was returning from outdoor sorties and encountering photo-based as well as imaginary work in my studio. I saw barrenness and lack of elan. I realized that works conceived theoretically and outside the real world were somehow lacking in the truth I was after.

The outdoor connection has something to do with walking on the loose flints themselves, the feelings of change, atmosphere, and the effects of timing. Last week in the Queen Charlotte Islands, left alone to my own devices on a remote beach, I was set upon by some fancy weather. After a blast of rain had me under an umbrella, I moved into the nearby forest for shelter. I was soon overtaken by a pervasive "Scotch mist" that turned out to be a remarkable moisturizer of the acrylic palette and canvas. "An inconvenience is an unrecognized opportunity," I remembered from Confucius. The paint on the canvas moved around on its own. The effects were like nothing I'd done before. Point is, I'd never have figured this out from a photograph or from the wiles of imagination.

Looking and seeing on location, or working from life, adds a living presence to work. Gathering becomes an event. Life reboots visual memory. If you add life to self-generated reference and the muscle of imagination, better work is more likely to appear.

Best regards,
Robert
Robert's web site is a www.painterskeys.com