Exemple of exercises we do: one day painting with Sara and Tristan, taking turn in the same pose (let’s say it’s mainly Sara’s face and lines, colour and light referenced by Tristan’s sittings)
Painting buddies & Plein air
When I first imagined myself as a painter in 2017, one of the dearest things I could think of was to find peers with whom to share this new chapter. Through my studies I met wonderful friends, among the other students and tutors and those relationships are still very precious to this day. However, as my diploma came to an end, the availability and frequency of those exchanges were traded for a more solitary practice (the pandemic obviously increased this isolation).
We first met a couple of years ago through a bigger group of painters. Every few months, we would rent a space and hire a model for a day of painting from life. This dynamic already felt wonderful: mutualising costs and committing to a date in the calendar for a day-long painting.
Once the first lockdown eased, the three of us decided to meet and resume painting together. Truth be told, on this one day we practically didn’t paint, apart from quick mutual portraits, and spent a good 10h straight talking and properly getting to know each other. The friendship started to grow beyond painting, touching on the challenges and joy of being self-employed or an expat. Working with models was impossible for some time so we got into the habits of sitting for each other.
Through my studies, I had been focusing on painting Portraits and the Figure, I would also paint some Still Life every now and then, but never I had dared tackling landscapes. That’s exactly why it felt like a good idea to push out of this limited ‘comfort zone’: we decided to tackle a subject that is always available no matter the pandemic: nature and the genre of ‘plein air painting’ (oh so french!).
That sounded a little scary: how on earth could one tackle something as big, open and wonderful as what nature is offering. Where to start and where to end, what to focus on and what to edit out? I’m still nervous when facing such big questions, but as usual, the key is in trying, making, failing, learning, practicing!
Oh and as you can see, my first outdoor paintings are clinging furiously to the figure.
Something clicked when I painted my first tree: I absolutely loved finding all the colours in this greenery, which reminded me of working with the figure and all the nuances found in the poorly named ‘flesh tones’. A second painting fully convinced me I could get a lot of joy from plein air: this one of Glen Faba’s lake, where I made wonderful memories last summer. I did a first pass from direct observation one morning, and then continued at home to resolve it away from the source material. I found this process really pleasing: a balance between observation and improvisation when it comes to the design of the shapes and tweaking of colours.
However nothing was magically resolved and I kept struggling every time I’d go out. I could identify two reasons: my diploma and Grad Show in December got most of my energy, so I started allowing myself to treat those Plein Air paintings more like a chill play than work I’d get stressed over. But it somehow made me lose my process and with that the joy of painting altogether. Usually my pleasure is in exploring the image as I paint it, covering a lot quickly and then playing with the shapes and colours by a continuous push and pull. With some Plein Air I started to lose myself into a more linear process with a drawing that I’d then fill, almost like a paint by number: I was getting bored. Nothing too bad in itself and some results came out pretty well but the process was not as thrilling as for my other work.
To shake things up, I changed from my oil set up back to some gouache in this lovely Concertina sketchbook I was offered. It reminded me of the pleasure of sketching, going more loose, simplifying and finding gestures, a way to be evocative without getting literal. And as you can see.. Reintroducing the figure was also key! Weirdly enough it seems to make me more playful overall, more free. And I guess I care emotionally more about those little scenes when there’s my friends in them. Another take away from practicing under different parameters is that I really enjoy painting over something. This too seems to be freeing. I guess I like the confusion it creates in the process, and encourages me to be more playful when it comes to solving those visual puzzles. There’s also some kind of magic in preserving a few colours from underneath, happy accidents.
And then one day Sara came to us with an opportunity to exhibit at her community church in Camberwell. We had always seen the paintings as practice, experiments, with no pressure to be shown; so we designed an exhibition that would be reflective of that. Without discriminating the best ones over the rest we kept everything and showed it as it is. No frames, no fuss, the work as it happened. It was fascinating to see the amount of painting created in a year; and the validating thought that progress definitely comes from practice. Also heartwarming to hear the show felt inspiring to some. It definitely reassured us that we were doing the right thing, simply by showing up consistently, painting again and always.
We motivate each other to paint, we design challenges and exercise to always push ourselves further (i.e. in the third lockdown we challenged ourselves with self-portraits in weird colour palette), we learned how to give and receive feedback (never an easy one!), we encourage each other on the challenges of being self-employed, the stress and doubts that come with it; we inspire each other to keep practicing and to dare being vulnerable. I’m incredibly grateful of how Sara, Tristan and I bounded over the months. Not just painting buddies, a wonderful friendship developed and with it some very precious support...
…and I can’t wait to see where this friendship takes each of us!
Sara created this little sign for our exhibition, it says it all ♥