Outdoors
by Don Holzschuh
Selected Text
From an article that appeared in the magazine
"The Window" In The March Issue, 1992
- When you're painting outdoors you're in what I like to call the world's largest studio. It's just you before this whole
creation, at this one place and time. I think every artist when they're in the studio, is actually trying to re-create how
beautiful nature is, with it's light, forms colors. But when painting outside it's all before, it's all around you at all times.
You just have to look to see it there before you.
When you're outside, all your senses are combined into one. It's not like the studio, which can be like a sterile cube with
you inside controlling your environment. When you're outside you're at the mercy of the environment around you, and you
have to contend with other problems that are not artistic, such as wind,rain the sun itself, bugs, people-it's kind of like a
competition while you're painting. It makes it areal challenge.
When setting up it's very important to look at things careful. Unlike the studio,reality and life can be completely different
than in your mind. You don't have painting as a form, but reality and life and you as an individual participating in the
natural world. You tend to look at things in a more o 0objective and pure way. When you're painting outside you're
actually putting you're self on the line. Every day you're a different person,and if you go back to the same spot the next
day, it's a completely different scene: the changing season, the weather,the aging of the whole process. And so if you
want to capture the time and spirit of it, you do the painting all at once, complete in a single sitting. By painting
"complete" you have more emotion that you can tie into your subject matter, and also into the piece that you are creating.
Outdoor painting that's done on location is more charged, has more emotion than something done in the studio. In the
studio you take your time, you can make a mistake, you can go over it, change it, graphically design it.
I just think open air painting is more honest. It has a purity, no matter if done by an amateur or by a so called
professional, because it's really about a person perceives a situation and who they are at that moment. It's not contrived,
it's not per-planned in execution. It's there. It's total emotion. And that's what's so exciting about it. You have hits and
misses, like anything, but when you're really going at it outdoors you can feel everything around you: the birds, the traffic,
the rhythms, the people, the air. You can see how the rhythm of the earth goes, you get that tune. You can get up in the
morning and paint, or in the evening,or at midday. There are different times of day when you go paint and have different
types of emotions about it. It all just contributes to the frenzy of creativity, something you don't get in the studio.
