Spring time painting

You have to be truly hard-hearted to be indifferent to spring. Even the crustiest, most offensive grouch has to be moved at least a little by the “unlocking” season. Water runs where ice was frozen in dirty lumps; crooked trees take shame, so to speak, and cloth themselves in foliage; growing things sprout where snow was cast aside to languish.

It is not necessarily my favorite season for painting. Among paintings of my own that I call favorites, there isn’t much to represent spring. That is partly because in some years it is a very brief season. If cold weather persists through March and into April our spring in the upper Midwest can be condensed into two or three weeks in May. Early spring, when you have grass turning green and a colorful haze of buds on the trees, is more interesting in color but is also usually brief. The latter parts of spring, which are so joyful to experience in their warmth and fertility, are difficult for the painter because they are awash in chartreuse and gray violet hues.


Early in April we made two excursions to Rattlesnake Bluff, on the south shore of Lake Pepin near its west end, between Red Wing and Frontenac, Minnesota. This was before much green began to show. Buds were beginning to come on the trees. Some were greenish but many were warm colored, with tints leaning toward orange, or reddish. Some of the maples have buds that are scarlet. It is reminiscent of autumn, but more subtle. I did two paintings there. Both featured the west facing cliffs with some of the bluff side below, all in shadow, and some trees in the foregrounds of each painting lit by the morning sun. The most difficult passages in both paintings were the colors in the rocks of the cliff face. These were very subtle hues of grayed-down blue and yellow, better described as warm (yellow) and cool (blue) tints of gray, which I didn’t get at all in the first painting and only got closer to in the second painting. The latter painting is composed horizontally on the diagonal of the bluff side with the cliffs rising from that in complement, and sunlit hardwoods on the lower slopes. Those were colored pale red, (white, an oxide pigment and tints of cadmium red) with subtle tints veering alternately toward yellow and violet. That one might be good enough to show. The first painting is composed vertically with the cliff face dominant and the lower slope complementary, with a mass of sunlit hardwoods and a narrow strip of mowed field in the foreground. The buds on those hardwoods were an ochre hue tinted slightly in a narrow range from orange to green. I might be able to salvage this painting if I go back next spring at the same time of season and do further work on the cliffs. Or, I could turn it into an autumn painting this fall.

In mid-April, I stopped at a site near LaCrosse, a city on the Mississippi River in west central Wisconsin. The valley is wide there and the bluffs on the east side of the valley have tall limestone cliffs and rise up to 600 feet above the river. There was a view looking across Ebner Coulee and a saddle between two wooded bluffs to the far side of the valley, receding southwards miles and miles away. I first noted this view on a trip to the area a year ago. At that time, the leafing out had not yet begun. That day was partly sunny and not as bright as this day, so the contrast between near and far was greater and made a more dramatic composition. Still, even given less value contrast, the juxtaposition of near and far was intriguing.

I set up at the end of a point by the edge of a cliff. There were gusty winds, and I was obliged to keep one hand on the easel throughout the time I was there. The wind affects me while I am painting by making me anxious. I was downwind of the cliff, so I wasn’t anxious about blowing off of it. I was anxious about placing, or spotting, shapes with my brush. You can’t try to spot any specific shapes while gusts are shaking the panel because if the wind moves the panel as your brush hovers near the surface, the two will collide and the mark of the brush will be made for you, where you do not want it. You have to try to remain patient.

The trees were advanced in their budding and many were leafing out. On the wooded bluffs there were very bright sprays of new green making the shapes of some trees distinct, with duller greens, colors influenced by the orange-ish and brownish color of buds, making up the larger percentage of color, and making less distinct tree shapes. There were the colors of light and shadow on the leaf fall of the forest floor – reddish browns and blue browns and blacks – the occasional dark spot of cedar or evergreen, and the pale blue grays of the far side of the valley. Along the spine of the saddle the sun lit some of the new greens to the same value as the pale blues in the distance. Those same blues became darker and more tinted with yellow as they approached the middle ground of the picture beyond the saddle shape.

I spent two hours there on a panel of 8 x 16 inches. I got the overall values down well, and the colors to a passing grade. However, the minor values within the larger masses of value had exaggerated relationships to each other. In painter’s parlance, it was spotty. This was caused by the difficulty I experienced in handling and rendering the character of the scene. Each brushstroke made to represent the variegated hillsides had to render a shape and value and also create the illusion of space and form on the hillside. Budding trees in sunlight have a unique quality of revealing space within the tree crown when raked with light edging over a steep hillside –an “airy’ look - so instead of seeing relatively simple masses of light and shadow on masses of full foliage, I could also see more of the underlying tree structure as well as some of the structure of the hillside beneath, colored by the sunlight on the cover of rusty brown leaf fall and the dark or mottled cast shadows of the trees themselves. You try to suggest all of that by getting the spots of color and value correct. As you work, you must try to get just the right amount of paint of the correct value and hue applied with each stroke as you go over the initial thinly washed lay-in of the painting to achieve the affect. Too much or too little paint, and values that are a little too dark or light, make it spotty. I’ll define spotty as visually hard to read; both leading the eye and confusing it at the same time, like prose with too many adverbs.

One of these paintings is suitable for showing, and the other two could be fairly easily amended, because the compositions are sound. In my next post, I will talk about paintings with design problems that aren’t so easily fixed.

Photo of Rattlesnake Bluff by Nora Koch