Plein Air Painting

Today marks the 3rd year of the creation of this blog. It has been a long ride since, it's gone by fast but as I look back through the pages of this blog I see how much I've grown.
New things are starting to happen, such as plein air painting in Central Park. I have been thinking a lot this year about painting outdoors in spring and summer, and I dove right into it yesterday morning.
I am taking a summer monthly class with Robert Zeller, a talented New York artist and teacher. He's very knowledgeable and his guidance will help me understand landscape painting better.
For my first day of class I had to paint a landscape using only Raw Umber and Titanium/Zinc White. I don't do well with grey scales, my paintings seem to lack, as Robert says, "tonal structure." And he's right, when I take pictures of my work in black and white they read grey. Rich darks are always missing.
This is my first try at a grisaille landscape. It was hard I must say, things flying into the wet canvas, the sun reflecting off my white t-shirt onto the painting, and the light of the day was washing out the colors, no matter how dark I applied the color, the sun made it seem it was not dark enough. But in all it was a great experience to be out in the open painting.

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