Behind every pizza parlor

The pizza joint down the road

I do not have a comfortable relationship with plein air painting – mainly because it’s not comfortable.

 I have listened to more than one plein air artist talk about painting outside every day of the year and this is not in Southern California but New England.

They say rain requires good quality umbrellas to clip onto your easel and to battle snow storms you need a copious supply of hand and foot warmers, triple layers of clothes, gloves with the finger tips cut off.

  If gusting winds threaten to carry you to Oz, just convert your car to a studio and carry on.

  Bushwhacking into the woods or over the dunes with easels, chairs, tables, food, canvases, paints, brushes, waters, solvents, palettes, camera and everything else I forgot to list is a walk in the park.

 It's not. I did this for four days in a workshop on Monhegan Island in Maine.  We were so scattered over that island the instructor couldn’t have found us if he wanted to which he didn’t.  He did, however, stumble upon me on the last day at a picnic table near the inn where we were staying.

Albeit there was no vista of crashing waves, craggy rocks, sailboats heeling out in the ocean, but I didn’t have to trek far, a bathroom was relatively near by and I had a table and the canopy of a huge maple tree.  Did I mention the sleet and that I paint with acrylics?

 “What are you doing HERE?” the instructor was aghast.

  Good question when Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper and all the rest of the artists who achieved Monhegan masterpieces did not settle for a picnic table when just over those two or three steep hills in the far distance was a precarious perch above the roiling sea.

  Yet, a picnic table without a view does not have to be the lot of the lazy painter. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon behind the pizza parlor a half mile from my house. I’m not assuming that the edge of the parking lot at most pizza joints ends as this one does in a tangle of pickerel weed in bloom and a stream that bends obligingly off into the fuzzy distance. 

Behind the pizza joint

There was not a too-cool-for-school instructor, but there was a six-year-old who wandered over with her grandfather. I told her she too could sit in a beach chair on the bank of a river and paint a picture in her lap if she wanted to.

That possibility seemed to please her because she picked a cardinal flower and put it in my cup of dirty water as a gift.