Foreign Landscapes

Last week I spent five days in a workshop at the Scottsdale Artist's School in Arizona. This was a plein-air to studio workshop in pastels with Marc Hanson. Marc is a wonderful artist and a great teacher too, but I sure did struggle with that landscape!

I tried to figure out why I had so much trouble and I honed it down to a few causes:

• I am a big shape kind of painter, and other than the obvious big red rocks the size of small mountains sticking up out of the ground, there weren't any big shapes.
• The vegetation is all very similar in value. How many shades of green-grey, brown-grey, blue-grey, yellow-grey can you put in one painting?
• I was unfamiliar it.

This Arizona landscape challenged me.

Since the last cause is the only one I can control, I decided that to get the best result from a workshop in an environment with which you are unfamiliar, it would be wise to consider going a day or two early and immersing yourself in the feel of the place and doing some plein air studies.

When I was directing photo shoots in my former life, we would sometimes spend some time doing just that - we called it scouting out the location. I think this would be a good practice for artists planning to spend money and time on a workshop in a place that is new to them.

The sunsets were incredible, but I was way too slow to catch that on a canvas! Marc did it beautifully.
Maybe someday I can do that.