Big Views, Big Emotions, Big Sur

Big Views, Big Emotions, Big Sur

Big Sur, California. This place has mystique and legends surrounding it for a good reason. Half the time it is shrouded in fog coming off the Pacific Ocean, only slightly revealing its craggy rugged coastline with a hint of the sun’s rays shining through the fog.

The sun sets over the ocean and I attempted, more than once, to see “the green flash” on the horizon the moment the sun sets over the water.

I never saw that, but what I did see left me in awe and wonder, more than any green flash.

 

Bixby Bridge, View from Hurricane Point
Oil on Linen
8 x 16″
SOLD

Winding my way down Route 1, anxious to meet Erin Gafill whom I would paint and teach with over the next week, the views unfolded, one after the other.

Unfamiliar with this territory, I just couldn’t think about missing this day of painting. What to paint? The views are all so momentous and moving. This one had just the right composition and was easy to frame and take off painting.

Painting right on Highway 1 is an exhilarating experience. The cars whiz by and many people stopped, thinking that this must be a good view to snap a photo of, so they did.
Then they shivered a little under the fog and jumped back in their cars, zooming away and continuing down the coast.

This prolonged stay, getting out of the car to paint no matter where you are and no matter how much work and things to do that are always waiting, is what gives meaning to life as a plein air painter.

Painting comes first.
Capturing a moment comes first.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel enough. Can just this painting tell the story of a place?

That is a feeling and question I am continually left with, but better to do something rather than nothing. Better to have captured this moment, and in paint, rather than just a snapshot in one of so many, or nothing at all.

The thing about plein air painting is that technical skill seems to predominate in this field.
How well can you draw? How good are your values? Does it have space, light and atmosphere?

But what about feeling? How did you feel about this place? Or how did this place make you feel?
Was it chaotic or silent? Powerful and vast or a close-up intimate moment?

Skill is essential in painting, but it is not everything. This is what Big Sur and painting with Erin Gafill taught me.

Skill is just something mechanical that can be learned through conscious work and repetition over time, something that you can improve ongoingly. Emotion and getting that into your painting, that’s another animal. Another category and one that seems to be almost completely absent from the now very popular movement of contemporary plein air painting.

Some great plein air painters working today teach this, but I’m sure they find it challenging without the fundamentals of drawing, perspective, color theory, etc in place. But maybe it is a skill that should be consciously developed simultaneously with the others so that our paintings deeply effect us and those who look at them and want to take them home and live with them for years to come. Consciously working to develop our ability to communicate the emotion in a painting should be as important as the other technical skills.

Isn’t the whole reason to stop and paint because I was moved in some way by this scene and I want to share that moment with others?

Visual language is a powerful one. It is our first language before we have words. Painting is our opportunity to communicate a shared human emotion.

Big Sur is a profoundly moving place with big sky, big water and big mountains all converging together. It is a unique and wild place with some of the most varied landscape that I have encountered. I by no means scratched the surface in my brief week of painting here, but that’s the good news. There’s room for more.