The Portable Studio: History,Technique and Do-It-Yourself
by Jonathon Brown
A Little History
The image is indelible: Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) struggling out into the heat on dusty rough roads to place himself by a cornfield or orchard to set up easel and stool, arrange his paints and, with indefatigable optimism as he fixes his canvas against the gusts of warm wind, to capture the life before him, the land and the sky, the movements and the colours. To wander for instance in the fields round St Rémy gives an understanding of his waving lines that no historian or photograph can teach. (http://www.saintremy-de-provence.com/.../culture.htm) This is also the countryside whose movement of light inspired Cézanne - we celebrate the centenary of his death in 2006 - to take to the open for virtually every landscape he painted, most especially of the Montagne Ste Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. (http://www.atelier-cezanne.com/aix-en-provence.html)
Yet the idea of painting directly from nature is relatively new; even a hundred and fifty years ago it was unusual, though small sketches, done perhaps in oils but more usually in watercolour, would be done in situ, to be worked up later in the studio. Some of the earliest painters to use such a technique systematically as part of the composition of later studio paintings were Corot (1796-1895) and Constable (1776-1837), followed by J.M.W.Turner (1775-1851). (The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a very good educational project devoted to Constable: http://www.vam.ac.uk/.../index.html) And what was a novelty in Europe was more of a necessity in the pioneer countries such as the west of the United States and the outback of Australia, where travelling was the norm and a fixed studio an unlikely encumbrance; it is interesting to note that one of the most thorough museum explorations of European outdoor painting was held in 2004 - in Sydney, Australia. The archive of that exhibition is still of interest: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/.../pleinair_painting
The so-called Barbizon school represents, in the crucially French history of the era, an interim stage between Corot and Delacroix (1798-1863) and the fully committed outdoor Impressionists. The key figure in this is Gustave Courbet (1819-77), whose birthplace at Ornans in the Doubs region of France is a charming museum. (http://www.musee-courbet.com/) He it was who first carved paint into the canvas with a palette knife and thus laid the beginnings of all sorts of unkempt techniques we see as 'modern', from Monet (1840-1926) through van Gogh to Jackson Pollock (1912-56).
Part of the revolutionary impact of the Impressionists was the sheer luminous surprise of their outdoors inspiration, that sense of breeze in the light that could never be felt indoors or from a photograph. The great centre for Impressionist art is the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (http://www.musee-orsay.fr/) but on a more homey scale there is also the Musée Marmottan, a bourgeois art-collector's mansion with a specifically superb collection of Monet. (http://www.marmottan.com/) Perhaps painters were inspired by the fact the photographers had to lug their great dark boxes out into the country and so they followed their example, just in case they were missing something. They discovered they were. In our age of hiking and biking, ambling in the car or renting a hide-away in the middle of nowhere, we can sense exactly that creative response ourselves - and if we take a little care in organising the equipment this can be a lot easier than you might expect.
Some Technique...
There's no need to overdo it. The simplest equipment would have been fine for Rembrandt or Leonardo: a pencil and pocket sketchbook. Remember a sharpener, all the same, especially one that keeps the shavings to itself. Try different pencils and papers; more expensive, heavier paper can yield many more shades of the colour, under different pressures and speeds, than cheaper paper. It is good if the binding or especially the backboard of a sketchbook be solid, as a hard surface on which to lean. If not, carry a piece of plywood. Remember a small cloth or towel too, since even ordinary lead pencil can be grubby, let alone the shards of spattered charcoal that can accompany your enthusiasm. There is even a technique for cleanliness: Picasso was known to clean his fingers from pencil or charcoal by running them carefully down the seam of his corduroy trousers. Friends marvelled, he never seemed messy.
At the other end of the scale come complex-seeming but convenient easels that include a suitcase-like wooden box for arranging oil paints and rags and mediums and all the bits and bobs of the studio. This usually requires you to have a folding stool or seat as well - and, let's be honest, a thermos and picnic basket. You need also to plan for storing the painting(s) when travelling while they are wet. A helpful aspect of stretched canvas is that when canvases of the same size are stacked one on top of each other, the wood of one above touches the surface of one below in only a small margin round the edge and so, if they are all firmly tied in unison, they are fairly safe. I have made myself a set of hardboard shelves of narrow height but which take ten canvases flat in the back seat of the car.
Liquids pose special problems, all the same: be it painting medium or even varnish, inks or just water for watercolours. No matter how well you try, there always seems to be something that leaks, prompted either by the jolting of travel or the expansion of liquids in heat. (This can also have a sticky effect on oil paints in tubes. Just don't ever forget the 'wipes'.) Recently there have appeared on the market brush pens with substantial reservoirs whose leakproof quality is enhanced by an unusually long screw thread; you still need to try to keep these upright as much as you can but in my case the accident is still waiting to happen, I'm glad to say. They suit inks or water but as always, with the thickest (and most satisfying) Chinese inks the tendency for them to dry into a sort of lacquer can also cause problems.
Every art supply shop is an Aladdin's cave, a mad clutter of strange products jostling for your attention; sometimes an item will give you inspiration in a flash of ideas, at other times a simple errand becomes a torture of indecision and incomprehension. The shopkeepers are more experienced than college lecturers, they know exactly what these arcane liquids and gadgets are for and, more usefully still, whether they actually work: customer feedback from artists is likely to be full and frank, after all. Don't be afraid to look elsewhere too - I find that the range of folding seats, pocket-strewn waistcoats and little boxes for putting things in is better in a shop selling fishing tackle and, for instance, a picnic basket can be lighter and a better shape for what you need than one of the ubiquitous wooden cases so prominent at artists' suppliers. Or, elsewhere again, Chef's trousers are now made with teflon coating and in patterns other than the blue checked sort we expect of the man in the toque; usually a shade baggy, they are ideal for travel if you are seated for a long time but they are also easy to look after when the ink has misbehaved. And it's at a garden centre that you will find the great white linen parasol that often accompanied an outdoor artist on the windiest or brightest of days, to give even light as well as shelter.
Once bitten, you will never stop and open-air sketching will become a way of life. At one extreme, there is never any excuse not to sketch, while you have a pencil stub and the back of the envelope that carried that final demand notice; at the other extreme, David Hockney has his jackets made with an inner pocket specially designed to take sketchbook, brush and ink bottle - and it takes you aback to see this most cosmopolitan artist reverting to Constable's techniques, in watercolour landscapes done in wind, rain or shine in the Yorkshire hills and fields. (http://www.lalouver.com/html/hockney_05.html) A sketch by the road or in a bistro can take an hour but will yield more satisfaction then - and memory thereafter - than a photograph that took five hundredths of a second. If you must flirt with new-fangled things, though, remember that you can sketch on the small screen of your hand-held computer, and e-mail the results to your friends, possibly even while you stand there in a field. Then there's no paper to blow away and no ink to stain your fingers; which rather spoils the adventure, don't you agree?
and Off You Go!
Monet has been an inspiration to many and there is a useful archive of his work to be found at http://www.artofmonet.com/Home_Page.htm as well as the possibility of taking outdoor painting courses at his house by the Seine: http://www.artstudy.com/. Most search engines will give a host of sites devoted to art courses - Cézanne might never have painted his mountain had Provence been so cluttered with amateur and professional painters as it is today! - but here are one or two addresses to start with:
http://www.fresia.com/varea.htm
http://www.infohub.com/schools/8.html
http://dmoz.org/Recreation/Travel/Specialty_Travel/Arts/
http://www.sculpture-painting.co.uk/summercourse.html
Provence: http://www.artinprovence.com/
Florence: http://www.britishinstitute.it/
Abruzzi mountains, Italy: http://www.artworkshopitaly.com/
Greece: http://www.yourgreece.gr
Scotland: http://www.castleofpark.net/.../painting_program.htm
Jonathon Brown's sketches on the move can be found at
www.villaparasol.com/moleskineTop.htm
© Jonathan Brown. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.