En Plein Air or The Studio Linwood Gardens NY
Aug 12: The day was perfect ~ 35 min from Rochester NY
location Linwood Gardens NY
You would have loved being at Linwood Gardens east of Rochester NY past farms and rolling meadows. You would have spent hours in the Arts and Craft Style great room overlooking the most stunning field that reaches out for miles. When you're there, you want to draw, hum, relax, write or paint paintings. It's the perfect place to get together in the name of ART.
10 of us engaged in a discussion regarding the differences between En Plein Air painting and painting in the studio. Would you have agreed that Plein Air is not for everyone? We did!
These are some of the comparisons we talked about,
• For inspiration, Plein Air has an immediate connection to being inspired to paint because there's so much nature all around. It's a heightened emotional and sensory experience while painting a painting. "Wow this is inspiring! "
• Everything is right in front of us for Plein Air and sometimes it can be overwhelming.
• In the Studio, inspiration needs to be sought out, for example, researching imagery, using photos or poetry, or glancing at copies of famous paintings. We usually think, What do I paint?
• The light and color in the landscape changes during En Plein Air. In the studio we have more control of the environment .
• Insects, sounds, wind, the sunshine, and all the outside elements are with us during Plein Air work. In the studio, we might have music on while we paint or a fan on to help control the environment's temperature.
• There are distractions in both En Plein Air and Studio work, but usually En Plain Air demands that we stay focused and finish before the sun sets.
In the studio we often drift to other things that need to be done and feel we have plenty of time.
We all agreed that we felt engaged in both painting environments.
If you were there you could have strolled the property at Linwood to find the perfect view, set up your temporary outdoor studio and pass the day with colors and the landscape. It was perfect!
Many thanks to Linwood Gardens and all the Linwood Painters. Next time maybe you would like to join us.
~ Angela
Learn More about Museums : The Uffizzi Florence Italy
En plein air
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
En plein air (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ plɛn ɛːʁ], French for outdoors, or plein air painting) is the act of painting outdoors. This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look.
Wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_plein_air
plein-air
[pleyn-air; French ple-ner]ExamplesWord Origin
1890–95; < French: literally, full air
[pleyn-air; French ple-neradjective
- pertaining to a manner or style of painting developed chiefly in France in the mid-19th century,characterized by the representation of the luminous effects of natural light and atmosphere as contrasted with the artificial light and absence of the sense of air or atmosphere associated withpaintings produced in the studio.
~ dictionary.com
Figure drawing over time
FIGURE DRAWINGS for Centuries & WOMEN in the ARTS,
Another term for figure drawing is drawing from life. It has been taught in many academies and is a part of fine art school's academic studies, such as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Artists & students draw from a live model in front of them, often nude, to be able to study more closely human form. It is one of the best ways for artists to deepen a study regarding line shape and form. It requires a keen sensibility toward fluid line, total variations, and measurements. It is considered a classical method and has been a tradition that is hundreds, even thousands of years old.
Of course my most favorite period is that of the Italian Renaissance: also known as the The Golden Age of Drawing. The Renaissance era (c.1400-1600)
During this historical period paper became more available for drawing, and drawing became it's own art form. Collections of drawings on paper became very special to Leopold de Medici. I read that Leopold de Medici had accumulated 12,000 drawings by 1689. I can't be sure how many drawings in his collection were of the figure, but it would be easy to assume most were from artists; Leonardi Da Vinci, Michealangelo and Raphael, three of the most famous artists of the Renaissance.
Who was Leopold de Medici ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_de%27_Medici
I have always been interested in what role woman in the Arts played over the many years.
I love this photo above that I found on the web . unfortunately I can't credit it. I'm going to unprofessionally date it around 1920- 1930's.
Woman Artists have played a role in the Arts as Painters & Sculptors over many many years. One female sculptor in particular is Camille Claudel. She was assistant to Auguste Rodin starting in 1884. She was his model for his work and then later became a sculptor, she went unrecognized for many years. Claudel actually was responsible for sculpting some of Rodin's most famous sculptures. There is a movie that depicts her life during the late 1800's, called Camille Claudel (film1988) Here you can see the trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KdpaQVkGjQ She is known for such sculptures as The Waltz, The Mature Age . You can read about her life in the book by Anne Delbee, translated by Carol Cosman entitled "Camille Claudel Un Femme"
such a cool read about nature ❤ dc
Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas Voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
