Equipment and materials for plein air painting when travelling

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My Moroccan and Spanish kit

I`m aware that I can pick up what I need in Casablanca or Seville so I'm not too bothered if I forget anything. 

I usually check where any art shops are before I set out.

Easel

This is a cheap Chinese easel. It is light and fine for sizes up to about A3, unless you are painting on a very heavy board. 

The plastic fittings on these snap and eventually the rubber shoes will loosen, fall off and get lost. But none of this really matters. Costing about £15, you are less likely to worry about it gettting stolen and, being simple, it is easy to fix any issues with a bullog clip or bit of wire, or whatever you can find.

I would caution against travel painting with costly equipment, baggage or clothes. Fancy stuff will make you a little nervous and you are more likely to become a target. Nice clothes get smudged with paint and then you have to fuss around cleaning them.

 I`ve never been robbed when travel painting, which I attribute to luck, a certain caution about where to paint, and not having anything worth stealing anyway. The latter is really the key, as when you have little of marketable value you go around with a certain basic confidence.

Boards

A variety of boards allowing for a variety of approaches.

I set out on these trips with certain ideas of what sort of work I will do, but then changes my mind along the way. That's part of the fun, surely?

Carrier and clips

The clips prevent a wet picture from touching the lid of the carrier.

The clips have coloured tags so that when they fall on some patch of long grass (as they will, inevitably) you can find them.

Paintbox, paints

Paints stored in a B & Q storage box. There are lovely wooden boxes on the market. These look great but are heavy and will crack if you drop them. They are the sort of things which are bought as retirement presents, I suppose-  later to appear on Ebay in mint condition.

My basic set of colours

I'm not religious about these, and my set is more or less the same dozen odd that most plein air artists would recommend. I use Winsor and Newton Artists paints. They have a good consistency, with lovely flow and density. Moreover, I am used to them.

Cerulean blue

Cobalt blue

Prussian blue

Ultramarine blue

Cadmium yellow

Naples yellow

Yellow ochre

Windsor yellow deep

Cadmium red

Cadmium orange

Alzarin crimson

Cadmium green

Burnt umber

Burnt Sienna

Titanium white

Mars black

Liquin 

This is a dependable drying agent and speeds up the surface drying of paint to as little as 24 hours (depending on paint thickness and pigment an any other mediums mixed in, obviously).

Linseed oil

An oil used to increase the fuidity of paints.

Paper palettes, corrugated ard palette holder and linseed oil dipper

The dipper is at the bottom left of the picture and has a metal lid. This gets oily and becomes difficult to remove. Ah well!

The pieces of corrugated card are used to carry the palettes around. The card palettes are cut from old

cereal boxes.

Brushes

Many and cheap. You probably won't be able clean brushes as thoroughly as you`d like to, and frankly I have found little rewad in spending masses on brushes for oil painting. 

Cleaning off oil paint is done with basic household soap.

Cloth

Vital for brush cleaning and also wiping paint off the boards. One of those unglamorous pieces of equipment that is most essential. Can be replaced with kitchen roll.

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Winter in Spain and Morocco

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Southern Spain and Morocco

The prospect of several months of Scottish cold and darkness this winter is sufficiently unpleasant to drive me south: to Andalucia or Valencia, thence Morocco, (perhaps back to lovely Sidi Ifni, even?).

I`m thinking of adopting a new format, just for the hell of it. Perhaps something involving very simple line drawings? But the format should issue from the subject, surely? And that subject is not yet known. 

But perhaps one can make some decisions beforehand. I consider: size, weight of paper, doing monotypes, only black and white and colour (but restricted to about 6 different colours).

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Santinho - in watercolour and pencil

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Santinho,watercolour and pencil on paper 21 x 15 cm

 

 

 This is the first watercolour I have done for many years- perhaps as many as twenty. I'm looking forward to painting with watercolours in Colombia and Ecuador.

Oils are so cumbersome in comparison, and the cleaning of brushes and the drying of paint is always an issue when you are travelling.

It's delightful to return, this time with another perspective, one which is more accepting of the medium's qualities- especially it's lightness. 

I need to find a bigger sheets of paper: I want to use washes.

This paper is 250 gsm. I think this is probably the minimum weight not to have buckling. It's a pity how expensive the good papers are.

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Another trip to Chile?: Patagonia

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From the Stamford Library Series Map, 1912

Patagonia, and deciding where to go

The area is so vast, it seems almost an arrogance to attempt to visit and claim to be painting it.

 I`ve enjoyed the containment of my picture series: attempting in various series to explore places, often with re-visits. Ergo, I`ve been attempting to revisit places to augment existing sets (especially New York, Peru, and Scotland) and hesitant about beginning new sets.  

Revisiting a place is fascinating, making one extremely conscious of the extent to which ones subjective attitudes affected previous visits- what seems strange no longer is, what was grand now bores, and what strikes one as banal on first sight becomes fascinating with later visits. And there are seasonal changes too. Also, initial visits disproportionately involve a tick-boxing of tourist sights, which is time consuming, and just making sense of its layout, figuring out how to get from the hotel to the central square, and so forth. 

But it is nice to feel that I am extending myself at least a little, so when I went to Chile I decided to visit the area around Araucania and a little south, believing that this (admittedly timid) exploration would provide sufficient new inspiration. Indeed this was the case.

So perhaps the thing is to get to Puerto Montt then continue down the Carretera Austral (Southern Highway) stopping here and here on the way, and ending in O`Higgins. That`s 1200 km. It still seems overambitious, but provides at least some of the notion of a containment that I find so necessary, and avoids too much travel by boat, which I detest.

This site below seems to contain all the information one might need to plan a trip: 

https://www.worldlyadventurer.com/planning-a-trip-to-patagonia/

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A trip to Chile: Pucón, part 3, views just outside the town; travel and oil painting

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 Pucón, a hill, farms, oil on card, 24 x 30 cm- available through No 31 Gallery

This is one of the more successful of the trip. The larger scale allows for greater fluency. 

Oil painting and travel

A month trip, two sessions per day, is a good concentrated period to work through ideas about painting. It's a good time to learn about a place. I find that a longer trip tends to lead to some sense of exhaustion, a need for recuperation, for experiences to sediment and pass through filters. I work very well if the weather and location are kind. But I have never extended the trips beyond six weeks. 

There is also the lugging things around factor. You need no more clothes for two months than you do for a week. But with the paintings you will need to take more protective carriers so wet pictures can be transported safely. Oil paintings such as mine, which are thinly painted and pretty well without impasto need to be packed individually until a week has passed and then they can be packed together. Inevitably something gets damaged- it's wise to incorporate something of Wabi Sabi into your mental armory.

For me making art is better done alone. Human social needs and creativity can combine in performance arts such as theatre. But, for me, with landscape painting- at least the romantic landscape tradition that I am involved with- social needs and creative necessities sit in different zones. But it would be nice to have company at mealtimes, of course.

I had a thought that going all the way down, adding another month to reach Patagonia, might have rewarded me. The long thin shape of Chile cries out for a linear trip from hot desert at the north down to icy mountain in the south. But the costs would have become hideous: Chile is not a super-cheap option like Peru or Bolivia: a single room in in a budget place is about 25$. 

A separate Patagonia trip is on the cards, however.

 Pucón, a lane with children, oil on card, 28 x 21.7 cm -discarded

In retrospect, I find this picture a little overworked. I liked it at the time and perhaps I'll come back to liking it.

 Pucón, big blue hill, mist, oil on card, 19.8 x 23 cm discarded

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A trip to Chile: Pucón, part 1

Description

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Pucón 

Pucón. volcano, lake, oil on card, 23.9 x 28.7cm   AVAILABLE

Like Villarrica, Pucón is a resort town on the lake. But it is more extensive with more of an infrastructure.

I'd have preferred somewhere a bit wider in both cases, more rural. I had somehow imagined that these towns would be buried, hidden and that I'd arrive as if the first to reach for generations, but everything here is quite polished and you might even imagine yourself to be somewhere in the USA at times. I confess that I often had a feeling of unexcitement in Chile, as if the place were determined not to get under my skin.

Well, it became very hot, and it rained. 

But I worked very well, with a good rhythm. When painting goes like that life is pretty much as good as it can be.

Travel painting

One of the things about travel painting is how it forces ones critical judgments to become rapid. One has less time to find subject matter and acquaint oneself with it. And one has less time to make judgments about ones own work. 

This might lead to weaker or more conservative work- more conservative because one might be less willing to take risks. But I think for me the result is simply that I work with more energy and make better use of my time. I think there is something in the idea that if you give a man an hour to do a job, he'll take an hour, if you give him two hours to complete a job ...and so forth. Time limitations concentrate energies. 

Another thing to thnk about is how creativity is about working with that you have at hand. So a time limitation can make you far more aware of the diverse possibilities of a given set of tools, and in the case of a lanscapist, also the possibilities in any specific view.

The world is essentially an interesting place, and creative responses are not necessarily richer in dramatic locations. I would say, however, that variety is always good: a diversity of landscapes and a diversity of media with which to interpret them. But I add, at risk of contradicting myself, that some places just seem to be more inspiring than others.

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