I recently went to the Salvation Army to search for a warm and long coat that I could use for painting outside in the cold. It had to be cheap and especially warm, preferably wool, and cheap because otherwise I would feel bad about ruining it. I was also secretly hoping to find something Vincent Van Gogh might have worn. Impossible? Not at the Salvation Army. I found one—replete with pleated sleeves, 80% wool (do they even make that stuff anymore?), and a length below my knees, which is not an easy task being that I am 6-2. This thing is a real beaut as you can imagine. I have a friend that I paint with sometimes and we were going to go out painting this past Saturday the 18th, called painting “en plein air”, which is just a fancy-sounding French term for bringing the studio outdoors and painting there instead of inside. If it sounds romantic, it is, and it’s also annoying. Bringing all your painting gear like thinner and extra oil, tons of rags, rubber gloves, a trash bag, plenty of brushes, canvas(es), a heavy wood easel, and paints—of course—borders not just as an annoyance, but straight up as a bit of an absurdity. But that was okay because I had the afternoon planned to paint with a friend outdoors in the cold and most assuredly was I going to do this.  Well, he had to cancel. I suddenly had the afternoon off and for those who have multiple children, you understand how rare that is. So I replanned my day with lots of reading etc. But, then again, I had the time, I had the gear. I looked at my weather app—9 degrees out. Yeesh, why couldn’t it be just a bit warmer? You probably guessed what I did next. Yes, I layered up, got that snazzy new (old) coat on along with a red Russian fur trapper hat my wife had  hidden away in a winter bin. It was also again a cheeky nod to my old pal Vincent. I packed up my painting things and drove to a nearby lake, Lake Johanna. I would have painted on the much closer Lake Valentine which I love, but alas, no one was ice fishing there today. I knew that Johanna would have some shacks aboard, and I was right, noticing a good handful to choose from when I pulled into the lot.  I hoisted myself out of my low car and waddled around getting myself and painting stuff ready, layered up looking absolutely on the crazy side. I began walking onto the frozen tundra others seem to enjoy so much, and about 20 feet out from shore I noticed something I didn’t take into account. There was wind. It was icy. It was much colder than 9 degrees now. Oh well, I was there and gonna do this. Did I mention it was cold? I looked around and immediately spotted this beautiful red boxy ice shack. It stood out from the rest by far, as it was red and red is my favorite color. Unfortunately it was quite far from the parking lot. Okay, I was so tempted to just take a few photos and call it good, or just walk a little and make some stuff up, or just not walk that far and set myself up. But after getting this far, I started to understand value a bit better. I needed to get the best spot, not just a good enough one. What was the point of only getting a decent-enough painting? No way, I was in this and in it hard. I trudged nearly half a mile to the  red ice shack and set my stuff on the ground. Okay, this is it, here I go.  I began setting my easel up. In the warmth it’s not super easy, and in the howling icy winds it was, well, difficult. Up came the legs and I got the easel sitting straight up and ready for painting. Nice! Oh shoot, my trash bag was immediately ejected and skittered all the way across the lake in seconds. Whoops. Shoot, there went my trash collector. Then out flew my paper towels. Thankfully I reacted fast enough to catch up to them and stomp on them. Whew! That was close. Without paper towels I would have had to totally quit. This oil painter needs his paper towels. And at this point quitting really would have hurt. Okay time is wasting away and I need to paint as fast as I can. Most Plein Air Painters need to paint quickly because of the changing light. My quickness was due to not wanting to become one with the lake. The tubes of paint fought back as I tried squeezing dollops onto the palette. They were already getting very stiff. I mean I guess that makes a lot of sense being on a frozen tundra, a really pretty one at that. Okay focus.  I began painting and kind of forgot about the wind. My easel didn’t forget and a few times decided it might want to leave. Thankfully I caught it before it fell over. I got the basic sketch done, and was beginning to get color notes. At this point my fingers were so cold—guys I even had those warming packets in my gloves, and boots, but the packets were only on my palms and my fingers had none of that fabulous warmth. I decided I needed to just really get some good color notes on the canvas, and take some good looks and photos, because this session was ending sooner than I initially planned.  As I was finishing my color notes I noticed the owner of the shack arriving. Huh, I thought it might be kind of a strange situation if he was upset about me painting his cool shack. Thankfully he was super gracious and was even excited about me painting his beautiful red box. The colors were

Oil on Panel, 12″ x 16″. I was looking at pictures in this book my son gave me for Father’s Day–it’s an oeuvre of Vincent Van Gogh. I love Vincent’s work (I and the rest of the world) and am trying to learn from him through studying his work. I even painted his third version of Sunflowers in order to better understand his way of painting, strokes and all. You can read more about that here. I especially love that this book shows pieces of his that are not well-known at all. I get a better understanding looking through his timeline of pieces how he started testing different ideas he was seeing. You can watch him transition out of dark paintings, but then he kind of falters and goes back to it, and then back to bright paintings again. And you can see his brushwork go from initially decent learning from his uncle, to the ugly renaissance smooth, to the still ugly pointillism, to finally his super thick “I just don’t care anymore” brushwork. What I noticed was that in his brushwork, he suddenly starts outlining his main figures and structures in a dark color, usually black. As I have been working in watercolor for some time doing Urban Sketching, I immediately realized what he was doing–he was creating an armature or skeleton on which to hang his thick strokes. Instead of creating planes with color and using those to define the edges of things, he sometimes (not always) relied on his sketch in black lines to guide where he put each color. You can see it very clearly in certain paintings like this one: