Painting a Sense of Place
August 24, 2019
The afternoons are quickly disappearing away into a blaze of red and amber sunset indicating it’s time to start the fire and get ready for our weekly guest artists and collectors. Here at the Grand View Ranch, we are experiencing the first chill in the air reminding us that my favorite time of year will soon be upon us, Fall. We are fast approaching our Fall plein air painting workshop here in Mt. Shasta and our friends that are joining us around our campfire tonight are eager to attend this year’s three-day event again. In our last workshop, we talked about putting a Sense of Place in our paintings and one of the students asked if I would revisit that topic again. I poured some wine into my tin cup and paused for a moment. The group grew quiet; I paused for a moment….. since I thrive on that moment of silence where I have everyone's attention. To me that moment is like an empty canvas waiting to be a fine work of art.
These days of digital photography, fast cars, instant soup, and the internet, we are often removed from our subject. Even when we visit a place, we never connect with it as the old painters did in the past.
Snapping Photos of Passing Views
I was talking to a well-known artist and he confessed that on one visit to Yosemite he actually drove through the park with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand reaching out of the window with his camera taking pictures of the park from the car going 30 miles an hour. I know many artists that travel with spouses and their experience is much the same from the passenger seat, snapping photos of passing views of the sky and vistas without stopping, just to get to a preset destination as fast as they can travel. Once we get to where we are going we are enticed to see everything we can, squeezing in every view before returning to the dining room and wolfing down some dinner before the crowds come in.
Thousands and Thousands of Photos
We live in amazing times. People travel the world more than any other generations before us; we witness more spectacular events and are stimulated by more visual sensations in one minute on Instagram than our parents would have seen in a year. Artists have at their fingertips more photos of places to paint from via the internet. If that’s not enough we capture photos freely filling our smartphones with thousands of photos capturing images in hope that someday we will render them on canvas in the studio. And yet our art feels less connected, less inspired, and less important to us than ever.
Fundamentals of Landscape
Artists in the past would travel days to get to one destination and spend a week within a 5-mile radius and experience the magic of Sunrises and Sunsets and the effects they incurred at the location where they were. These artists were educated in the fundamentals of landscape painting. They had knowledge of color, temperature, and composition. One of the rules they stressed is the law of thirds. Every painting must have a background, middle ground, and foreground. The foreground is where the viewer is located and it's here where the artist places its viewer firmly on the ground to give them a “Sense of Place”.
Viewers Experience
When we paint we are aware that we are on the solid ground surrounded by rocks and bushes and surrounded by the environment; tree, rocks, and bushes, etc. As we view the scene, we don’t mentally crop dangling branches from above or from the sides and we don’t have trees come up into our view that are not actually there. A sense of place is a foreground that includes the viewers experience of being there; what they are standing on, what’s beside them, and at times what’s behind them.
Feeling Like Your There
When we are using photos as a resource we often hold the camera out in front of us cropping the foreground. We chop the foreground trees cutting them in half along the sides leaving branches that are not even attached to a trunk. The photographer is also totally unaware of what’s above them and include dangling branches that come out of nowhere from trees that are not even in the scope of the scene. When these compositional “faux pas” are made, it's a telltale sign that the artist is using photos as references and is not schooled in composing a composition. Furthermore, when painting a big vista like The Grand Canyon the artist makes the mountains too large, leaving no hope for a foreground and the viewer is left feeling that they are in a hot air balloon. It's OK but not the same effect as if the viewer is included along the rim, giving him a feeling like he is there.
A Space for Everything
To create a sense of place try stepping back from the subject and include a proper foreground. In my workshops in Mt. Shasta, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite I have the students first paint the foreground and then place the features in scale with the foreground. This will make sure that there is enough space for everything. In creating a Sense of Place by painting the foreground in your painting it is important that the artist include proper lighting that is consistent with the feeling of the rest of the painting, being sure that the foreground includes the same kind of lighting effects featured in the middle ground. Often the foreground can be used to enhance the viewer's experience by establishing the time of day and the temperature and intensity of light and can also frame the rest of the painting in silhouette.
A Good Foreground
The foreground in a painting is an integral element in creating a powerful composition. Making sure that there is proper room for one leaves the viewer safe and grounded and also dictates the lighting and feeling that will be displayed throughout the rest of the painting. A good foreground should never be overlooked or omitted but should be addressed first before the rest of the painting is composed. In my workshops we work hard on all elements of composition. I invite you to attend. The information is below or on my website www.StefanBaumann.com
-Stefan Baumann-
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