one corner of artist Walt Gonske's secluded Taos, NM garden   2007  photo by Jim Severns

Jim says I see things differently than other people. When he's talking about the family budget I bristle when he says that . Bless his heart. My dear husband and all those "other people" can't help it if they don't see these things correctly.
But when we're on location and I'm painting, I suspect he's right. I do see things differently— I "see" a painting subject with all my senses. That's one of the things that makes plein air painting a fuller experience than studio painting. Regardless, I try to carry the smell of musty earth, the taste of smoke on the wind, the prickle of the western wind on my skin into the studio with me. Remembering the cawing of crows on a distant cliff can be as important to a painting as the color of the sky that day. But there's no substitute for being there.

An example:
This past June, I spent a week in Northeastern New Mexico, painting with Albert Handell. His paint-alongs are just that—he chooses two locations a day, tells the small cluster of registered participants where he'll be painting next, and then everyone scrambles to their cars to follow Albert or get lost along the way. (Jim became a popular alternate lead driver. Old pilot trick: he programed each new location into our GPS.) Once at the designated locale, everyone chooses a subject then has at it. (Albert limited our time at each spot to 3 hours, never to return.) Often we spread so far apart, I never saw the others until we broke up for a critique. Rarely did any two of our ten participants choose the same spot.  The exception was the morning we clustered in plein air oil landscape painter Walt Gonske's garden, Walt having kindly agreed to host his friend Albert's group.

Now for a confession: I hate heat. Ever since a bad experience at taekwondo instructors' camp in the Arkansas hills one August, I haven't processed heat well. Then there's the whole skin cancer issue. Heat makes me grumpy and mean, and standing in full sun between mid-morning and mid-afternoon is something I avoid like melanoma.

The week of Albert's long-anticipated mentoring workshop, Taos experience a record heat wave. Five days in the mid-nineties at 7200 feet became a weather nightmare for several of us less heat-tolerant artists. Then we painted in Walt Gonske's wonderfully lush garden. It still wasn't cool, but it contained patches of actual shade. New friend Mary Winter of Santa Fe and I dashed to claim a spot where the shade promised to hold awhile. My only subject criteria at that moment was that I be at least partially shaded most of the morning. (Mary, sporting more of a plan, wanted to paint flowers.)

Heat wimps Lindy Severns (front) and Mary Winter paint in Gonske's shady Taos garden. Photo by Jim Severns 2007

Once set up, the sun at my back, I started thinking about compostition. Honestly, I do generally think about that rather important element before setting up. But only when I'm not worried about heat stroke. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and found myself facing a gate in the adobe wall surrounding the intimate garden. Poppies and delphinium and daisies added fragrant (the sense of smell) spots of color to the dominant green masses. I don't like to paint green masses very much, (it's a desert-dweller thing) so I immediately mentally zeroed in on the flowers. Flowers aren't really my thing either, but they sit with me better than green masses.
I very much like painting adobe. Adobe is alive, with its irregular texture and the intrinsic soft shadows and color variations that play across that surface. Notice I'm speaking sensually now, in terms of touch. I stood on soft grass looking at a wall sculpted from mud and straw, plastered over by hand. And the sculpted arch of the gate hosted a strong cast shadow. The wall looked hot, like the unshaded parts of me. The gate, with its nice shadow, looked cooler, and cast shadow makes a good design element. Still not sketching, I mentally included the hot and cold gate in my composition.
As for my sense of sight, the sky that morning was typical Taos turquoise blue. I prefer clouds, but the pink adobe wall contrasted interestingly against it, and I knew I could bounce that blue into the shadowy foreground instead of using so much green. So I widened my imaginary compostion out to include the sky.
 As birds in the willow behind me sang and twittered, (the sense of hearing) I realized much of the charm of Walt's delightful garden came from feeling enclosed in a protected space. We'd temporarily escaped the sun burning the surrounding sagebrush flats, the traffic that has stolen much of Taos's historic magic. Intuitively, I tilted my composition to recreate this impression of seclusion in a protected world. I didn't want the viewer to go thru the gate.
All these thoughts and sensations occured in less than a minute or two. There are some analytical thoughts that go into a piece, but I don't like to think a painting to death before adding paint to paper.
Starting on the actual painting, I used Nupastels to draw in the only unforgiving design element, the wall and gate. (The vegetation masses can be moved and changed at will. You can't go terribly wrong with vegetation shapes.) Using rubbing alcohol and a cheap brush, I washed over this Nupastel. This lightly fixing of pigment into my Wallis paper gives a watercolor wash-like base to add pastel onto. For something like adobe, this gives me an interesting headstart on color/texture variances. And with the time limitations on any plein air painting, the Nupastel wash affords a valuable timesaving shortcut to massing in color and value. For that reason, I also Nupasteled in my sky and splashed sky color into the foreground and the adobe. Just because I think it's fun to do that.
The rest of the three-hour morning, I spent getting to know Mary in the way of brief swatches of conversation used by seriously working artists, moving into the ever-vanishing shade, and layering soft pastel strokes over my Nupastel washes. I tried Albert's technique of blending those hateful vegetation greens into a soft mass, then adding distinct strokes over that for definition. Adjusted the poppies into a compostitional dance to keep the viewer inside the painting. This is as far as I got in three hours:

"Respite" an unfinished plein air pastel 9" x 12" on Wallis museum paper  Lindy Severns   2007