‘En Plein Air’ : My Process

This blog post is about producing abstract art outside, ‘En Plein Air’. My method of choice!

When I get outside in the natural world and create art, I paint intuitively and my art is influenced by my emotions.

‘En plein air’ means “in the open air“. The term was used to describe impressionist Claude Monet’s art process in developing his landscape painting. His passion was to change his perceptions of his surroundings into paint, which my art also aims to do.

I don’t simply copy the landscape in front of me but capture ; Spirit_of_place a unique, individual interpretation of colour, atmospherics, sound, wind and temperature. The greater my freedom of expression, the better the mark-making.

Here’s a short video of the essentials to paint ‘en plein air’. My advice is to ‘get comfy’ and pick a day when the weather is kind, unlike the day I ventured out this time.

The video below shows mark-making onto sketching paper using a variety of mediums; watercolour pencils, oil pastel, acrylic paint, pencil and compressed charcoal.

One of my most recent small abstracts:

See mini-abstracts for more!

The ‘En plein air’ sketches are then cropped or collaged to experiment with composition.