A case for painting what you see

One week after I painted this ramshackle old house it was torn down. Several local people who saw the painting said,  "I never thought about that old house that way. I meant to get a picture but never did".  Plein air painters tend to find these kinds of places, perhaps responding to the textures and sagging lines rather than the historical context. Easton Plein Air really grasps this concept and encourages artist to find the old, the decayed and the soon to be torn down so that these places will be captured in paint for all time. It's smart and it adds an inherent value to the painting. If you think about paintings from each period in history, it seems that the ones that have value are the ones that tell us something about that time.

And in other news. My good friend and brilliant painter Don Sondag just got the new Sorolla book and holy crap is it depressing. More than any book I've seen. There are pull outs of his provinces paintings and pics of him painting HUGE outside and all I can do is wonder how the hell he did that. Drawing and painting figures that are life size and larger on site? Makes my little 12x16's seem.... little. Can't wait for my gloucester easel and my cahones to come in.