Searching for green...the sequel

I’ve been spending the last few days out at the multi acre farm at the university with a little coterie of painting students, learning to paint en plein aire.  I’m using materials and colours I’m not familiar with.  Painting outdoors looks easy for the lovely young women in the class with their portable easels and pretty summer frocks.  I have a little fold up three-legged stool to sit on that sinks into the dirt and tilts backward, and I balance a board with my paper clipped to it, and my palate covered in desperate attempts at green, on my knees.   I’m covered in paint from swatting at mosquitos with my brush-laden hand and leaning on my palate to squint at the scene I’m painting to determine values. 

The instructor advised us to tuck away our day’s work so as not to be too self critical, because, she said, the charm of the pictures would only be evident after a good night’s sleep.  The three ‘studies’ I did on the first day were of a green house on a beautiful field nestled next to vibrant rows of squash complete with cadmium flowers stretching into the distance. 

These revealed themselves, after sleep, to be paintings of the hideout of desperate revolutionaries in a jungle, hurriedly rendered at night by a journalist concealed in the nearby shrubbery, using the only tools at his disposal; the remains of his dinner.  The instructor was plucky in her attempt to be positive.  “I love this area right here…it’s beautifully understated..” she was pointing to a corner of the canvas left blank when I ran out of time.

As we complete our little daubs we bring them for a group critique.  It’s not as encouraging as you might think to have a group of ten smother little cries of dismay as your painting is brought out, and then stand thoughtfully staring at it trying to find something useful to say, while the instructor says brightly, “anyone?”  Finally,

“It’s quite exciting the way it looks like that browny-green part there is on fire.”  Not for me the little private thrill of relief at seeing there’s someone worse than me.

While I admit that by the afternoon of the first day I was tempted to pack it in and go back to my usual vacation activity of scouring the house looking for my glasses, I was cognizant of the hefty sum I paid for the course, so I have stuck it out.  Day two was slightly less awful, because I nipped out after my course on the first day to pick up a couple of tubes of ready made green, and was able to render, as one kindly course mate said, “a very nice pole.”  It still looked like a pretty nice pole the next morning.  I could get into this.  

The search for green....

I’m about to start a brief but intense course through Emily Carr on painting outdoors.  I have to use materials I have never used; acrylics, after struggling for the last 15 years with watercolour.  I’ve engaged in an epic battle to find the right greens with watercolour, and have come to an ‘almost’ compromise on many of them, and now suddenly this new viscous, thick and unsubtle medium.  “Oh,” says my husband blithely, “you’ll love it.  You can just paint right over anything you don’t like.”  But the greens! They are like squirrels on acid.  I sit before my little box of paints and am overwhelmed.

   The thing about painting outdoors in BC is you need some greens.  I am constantly distracted by the layerings of greens in almost any scene I pass.  I have a little box at the back of my brain that constantly runs a commentary on them; ‘yellow with burnt umber? Pthalo? No…that colour was invented by masochists…how to get that dark forest colour?” all while I’m trying to drive and remember what I’m supposed to be out to pick up.  And then one day I’ll finally sit down and try to use the acrylics to re create the greens in a photo I’ve taken and come out in the end with something lurid and intense that bears no resemblance to a landscape anywhere .   I have failed again, I tell myself, to capture life.  Its intensity, its subtlety, its complexity. 

 

  I am trying hard to catch some real essence, as if in doing it I could hold onto it forever, stave off ever having to leave.  I look at the water colours (still my favorite medium to look at) that I love, I feel as if their painters had stopped time, they, and that scene, are forever.  They are like revisiting a favorite novel.  When you open the pages the characters fly out, noisy, chattering, doing, ready to get back at their lives (and thanks for opening the pages, we were rigid with boredom here!)

 I have a painting I bought in Dorset last year…an early morning scene on a village green, with the sun just spreading warmth across the grass, the house on the left still in shadow, its inhabitants about to have their floors bathed in gold as the sun hits their windows.  I am there, in that morning, every time I look at it; smelling the mid summer green of the shrubbery, washed in my favorite time of day; that moment when anything is possible, a feeling I was suffused with at any time of day or night when I was younger, before my parents started dying in that irresponsible way old people have, but now still feel every morning.

 

  The man who painted that was the now deceased father of the woman I bought it from.  She charged very little to part with it.  Her father is still alive here, just out of the picture. A classic English watercolour.  I want to be him.  Well, more alive, if you know what I mean, but able to paint like that, capturing the shifting shadows and tone changes on an early morning swath of grass.  In a week my course will start and I’ll be out there with my acrylics.  In a desperate attempt to look like I know what I’m doing I’ve made a full page colour chart of all the different greens I can get with the hyperactive squirrels in my paint tubes.  There are only two so far that don’t make me lose the will to live.  Wish me luck.  It’s my whole retirement I’m playing for here…