Landscape Painting with Charles Philip Brooks (Oct 4 and 5, 2014)

The art teacher I have been studying with (Melinda Borysevicz) took some time off for the summer.  This coincided with Paul and I spending almost all of our free time working on the house we bought.  Finally, the house is pretty much done, and we were able to move in.  Melinda invited artist Charles Philip Brooks in to teach a landscape class. 

In the morning, we headed out to Fort Pulaski, which is has large open areas of marsh.  I chose to do a "big sky" painting. 

I'm really pleased with how this turned out.
In the afternoon, we headed to the beach on Tybee Island to paint the ocean...

Painting a constantly-moving body of water is a real challenge, and the net result is a painting that depicts the essence of the thing, not the actual thing itself.  An awesome experience of really LOOKING at something and seeing that there is so much more to it than just a blue patch. 

I learned so much in this class, and really enjoyed it.  I have discovered that plein aire painting with oil paint is so much easier than the acrylics I was using before.  For these outings, I used my 9x12 Guerilla Painter box.  It's a nice rig, but heavy.  Fortunately, I was able to use my roller bag on most of the ground we had to cover.  The others in the class worked with French easels, and some of them had some issues with their equipment.  It seems like there is no such thing as perfect plein aire painting equipment.  I plan to continue to evaluate ways to lighten the load to make transport of the equipment less of a hassle.