Not Quite Pisa

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

An hour color study near using the last rays of the day. Quick and loose - so do not visit Böhl-Iggelheim just because you love leaning towers!

Hang out in L4

30 cm x 22.5 cm, Oil, Pleinair in Mannheim

Ruppertsberger Evening Lights

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair near ...

Noon on Koller Island

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair... well, on Koller Island.

Digging in the Dirt

20 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair near Schifferstadt.

Often I paint next to my car with the radio on. Thought this song title fits quite well.

Study of another master piece by Colley Whisson

30 cm x 50 cm, Oil

Learning objective: Handling a large brush (flat, 5 cm wide). 

Copyright: Colley Whisson

Study of a master painting by Colley Whisson

30 cm x 22.5 cm, Oil

Done to learn sunlit greens. Copyright: Colley Whisson

Excursion into Green

I did some oil paint mixing charts this morning to learn about the greens. In the upper chart all colors have the same value and fading towards gray in each column. The yellow on the upper left is a mix of cadmium yellow medium and burnt umber, the blue on the left is coelin blue tinted with white and the greens in between were mixed from these two. The decrease of saturation downwards was obtained by adding a neutral gray.
What surprised me was the left column, which appears fairly green, not brownish. It doesn't come out quite as clear in this photo than in the original chart. So at lower saturations my color judgement "that's green" stretches much further towards the warm colors than I thought.

Even the indian yellow in the left column still appears slightly greenish, although I used a warmer gray to decrease saturation compared to the first color chart. 
To find a color observed in a landscape it is usually not necessary to know which exact mix of paints is used. In fact, most of the observed colors, especially the grays, can be mixed from a large number of  tube paint combinations. Matching a color is much of a try and error game using the paints one has on the palette... Lighter or darker, more saturated or less, warmer or colder. 
However, this game can go wrong when some of the observed colors are not within the mixable range of the paints on the palette. And I think this is exactly what happened to me in some of my paintings with fairly light greens. I often did not have a warm yellow on my palette and I tried to mix those warm greens from cad red and cad yellow, which did not give suffiently high saturation and looks chalky in relation to other colors matched more accurately. 
> So is all you are trying to say that one needs a warm yellow on the palette?
Yes :-)

Hallo Berlin

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

"Good color observation today but questionable whether you really needed to drive 20 kilometers for this"

    Mind your own business and come up with a title for it!

"Hallo Berlin"

    Haha, don't be silly. That has nothing to do with Berlin. So?

"Hallo Berlin"

    Forget that. Serious now.

"Hallo Berlin"

    SHUT UP!!!

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Brain? 

Pfälzer Gemüsegarten

25 cm x 25 cm, Oil, Pleinair

In Max Slevogts Territory 2

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair near Frankweiler, Deutsche Weinstrasse

Speedworks 25 min

15 cm x 15 cm, Oil

Fruit Study

24 cm x 30 cm, Oil

Brief Update

40 cm x 30 cm, Oil

You do not know Richard Robinson!?

Okay, a brief update:

Claude Monet died 1926, Pablo Picasso in 1973.

Richard Robinson (*1975) is a New Zealand painter.

http://newzealandartist.com

A scene of the slabstick movie Naked Gun comes into my mind: famous singer Enrico Palazzo is shacked and has to watch police officer Frank singing the national anthym on tv, subtitled "Enrico Palazzo". Maybe Richard feels like Enrico seeing this :-D

An X of Heidelberg

Almost a third of my pleinair approaches result in failure - complete failure to be specific ;-)

I am not too unhappy with this ratio. Today I didn't manage to follow my original concept with the two towers being the focus of the painting. Also i started working on details too soon. I got confused and found myself working on different things simultaneously. Finally, in a moment of brilliant clarity I made two passionate strokes.

Evening Color Study

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Preps

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair Otterstädter Altrhein

Energy Bar

25 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Luidpoldhafen 2

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

My second of the day brings me to about seven hours of painting at over 35 C. I'm born in July, i love it! A problem is the sunblocker though. The sweat carries it into the eyes where it burns quite good. 

Into the Heat

25 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Festplatz Bad Dürkheim

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

I did this one on streched canvas for a change. Confirmed: It does feel better for me to work on prepared wood...

Sibylle

33 cm x 33 cm, Oil, Pleinair

The wood board I painted on is 40 cm x 40 cm and I covered the edges with tape to obtain a passe-partout-like white canvas around the painting area. 

416

40 cm x 20 cm, Oil, Pleinair

In Max Slevogt's Territory

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair


Compared to other countries, Germany does not just have a great history in impressionistic pleinair painting. The men considered the big three were Max Liebermann (1847-1935), Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) and Max Slevogt (1868-1932). Today I painted in Slevogt's territory near Landau at the Deutsche Weinstrasse.

Max Slevogt's painting "View from Godramstein to Frankweiler", Oil (1913)


My painting location was about one a kilometer behind that poplar in the Slegvogt painting and I was looking to the left, towards Birkweiler.

On Calm Water

50 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Water keeps attracting me. To improve, I should better paint something else to be able to observe color more carefully. Due to the wind calm water changes its colors much faster than anything else. It just keeps attracting me.

Rosenhugel

30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

At watercolor painting the paper is taped onto a solid support and I read quite often that the greatest moment is the when the tape is removed because the resulting clean edges give it an neat finished look. I thought why not trying the same with oils and covered the edges. 
I do like the effect. The thick textures of the oil paint come out nicely surrounded by the empty canvas. Don't like the white though and will apply an imprimatura before taping next time.

Stands with a Fist, 2nd Attempt

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil

Face of Pity

50 cm x 40 cm, Oil

After plenty of pleinair work recently I went for a face today, mainly to improve drawing accuracy. Faces are excellent for that purpose because minor misplacements cause funny results... Oh boy, can't find it funny at all right now. What a pityful effort today!

Day at a Creek

"Stump", 40 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

"Branch", 25 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Of What's Left

30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Not much left in our region. Almost everything looks the same. Oceans of corn and vinyards. Where there is grass it is cut, where there is water it is straightened. And on the weekends people work in their gardens to make it look the same in small.