Join me in a video chat with plein air artist Christina Body. Based in Chicago, Christina has competed nationally and continues to paint daily. Hear her story in becoming an artist and her plein air life. Learn how Christina, now a mom of boys is helping them become art literate with regular trips to the Art Institute of Chicago visiting different eras in art history and types of work with sketch books in hand. Trips that used to be minutes for them are now more than an hour as they've grown to appreciate and interact with the art.
Christina is a 2019 Guest Artist with the Plein Air Painters Chicago. You can see my interview with her by clicking here.
Don't forget to subscribe to the My Art Dish series. We're posting 3-4 interviews each month.
Steve Puttrich
Lee Radtke
Eric Rhodes
Stephanie Weidner
Meet a Chicago Plein Air Painter, Lee Radtke. You'll hear his process for approaching a painting, how he spends his last fifteen minutes in finishing a painting. Click here, to see my interview with Lee.
Don't forget to subscribe to the My Art Dish series. We're posting 3-4 interviews each month.
Steve Puttrich
Lee Radtke
Eric Rhodes
Stephanie Weidner
I painted plein air on mothers day… unsuccessfully.
I have no excuse.
My stomach rumbled as I stretched the legs on the tripod,
Clamped on the easel, then board and paper, and
Set out my paints and brushes.
The breeze off the Lake swished leaf shadows across the paper
And reminded me, I should’ve attached my sun umbrella.
Lined in black, it thwarts reflection, and,
eyes in shade see more clearly.
But, I didn’t have it with me.
The subject I chose included a foreground of stumps and sticks and
Lovely white anemones that flowed into the ravine,
So far below, I couldn’t distinguish a wild flower from a napkin.
The mid-ground, a rusty footbridge built by soldiers on the Fort
That offered a last clear path to the cemetery,
That from easel to there looked like stubs of worn down teeth.
My focal point?
A clump of pink bush, just below the bridge, in the ravine, with a spray of light on it,
that was actually behind me.
No one will know, I reasoned with artistic license, if someone cared to check.
Tomorrow, it would be green.
And beyond, where it was too windy to stand,
A wide open ultramarine lake and out-of-the-tube cerulean sky,
that later, with a rogue bristle in the paint tray,
I accidentally brushed, with a bit of alizarin crimson,
that would’ve been ok, if I’d used it for greying.
But I didn’t.
I turned to pour water into… well, I realized,
I forgot my usual white yogurt container, and,
Creatively used the top to my water bottle,
Thinking, maybe I shouldn’t drink from it anymore.
But I did.
As I turned to place the topless bottle carefully on the ground, for fear,
I only had one source of water, which was then uncovered for my watercolors,
The wind or crumbly earth slid my whole set up down the hill.
The paper, easel and tripod stayed intact.
The paints in their palette landed, face down, though only the brightest, cadmium yellow light
Was soiled.
Two steps further in from the ridge,
I restretched the legs of the tripod, straightened the palette, picked the sticks from the yellow, poured more water, and started again,
When it all went over a second time.
I wondered, if a woman swears in the woods, does a bear hear her yell, fuck?
I persevered.
I laid in my first wash and blotted clouds in the sky.
The cad yellow-light, blues and burnt sienna created dirt and stumps and leaves,
With real leaves imbedded.
My phone rang a ditty.
My three o’clock company was to arrive in 90 minutes instead of 180.
I don’t paint that fast, nor cook that fast, nor hike out that fast.
Oh well.
I laid on another wash.
Of raw sienna, with a touch of cad yellow-light for a warm and welcoming foreground.
Skimming the paper with a dry brush, to
Leave an impression of wild flowers.
I’d fill their glasses as they entered and put them to chopping, stirring and setting the table.
After all, it was mother’s day, and
I am ambivalent whether there should be an apostrophe in mothers.
My phone sang again.
I thought not to answer it, as I was determined to paint.
But, I didn’t.
My son’s Nana had taken a turn for the worse
And did nothing now, but breathe, with help.
I decided I’d drive to see her in the morning,
to read to her,
to thank her once again.
After all, it was mother’s day and she is the mother, and the grandmother.
But, I didn’t.
I brushed in a third wash.
Violet over cad yellow light leaves, burnt sienna and ultramarine.
The ravine got deeper, the distance beyond the bridge further.
But it was too early for the bridge. I should’ve been patient. I wasn’t.
I know better: back to front, light to dark, big to small.
I didn’t do that;
Any of that.
I packed up.
I drank from the bottle before I screwed on the top, that now contained a wash of paint, and
Began the trek to the car,
Across the tall grass prairie, that once was a golf course,
Where I saw a piece of ivory black satin,
With a sheen of pthalo blue, against the raw sienna dirt.
Only, it wasn’t.
It was the remains of a black bird, face down into the ground.
I stepped over it, not on it, and thanked it for its life on earth.
And, walked on, but it got me to thinking.
On November sixteenth, nineteen eighty-nine,
Our son, born in nineteen eighty-five,
Told me with the utmost of Authority,
That God made crayons and he colored himself in,
Then he gave them to everybody,
but the wind took God’s colors and he turned grey.
Then he died, and came in all our hearts.
The next morning
the wind took Nana’s colors.
I planned on being there.
But I wasn’t.
May 14, 2017
Painting a tree is hard. I say hard as if I am part whiner, part pirate. It’s haarrd.
Children make drawing a tree look easy. I watch them as they fill a page of the sketchbook I offer when they seem curious about the painting underway on my easel. The encounter starts when I feel a presence at my side, a head near my elbow. Sometimes I ignore it, but usually, I’m ready to take a step back. As painters, teachers encourage us to step back, to compare our painting with the scene in front of us. The masters wore carpets to threads in their studios and ruts in the grass outside. “What do you like to paint?” I ask the child beside me.
If they respond, I ask the parent if it’s okay, and offer the child my black, spiral-bound book, with the instruction to make a picture, and the provision that I get to keep it. Invited to draw what they see, they draw trees. Clouds and sun are the usual embellishments, though a cat and dinosaur have appeared. I sometimes continue painting the scene in front of me, and, sometimes I just marvel. When they are done, I request a signature, and the parent requests a photo of the child with the picture, and, sometimes with me, the artist.
In painting outside, John Carlson, a famous author on plein air painting, says, one should stand two and a half times the subject’s height, away from it. Me? I like to be up close. I like to see the curl of the bark, the overlap and shadows of leaf upon leaf, and the way branches mimic the human body. Starting at the trunk, at the shoulder, that big bone of the upper arm, the humerus, each branch grows like the split to the two bones that create the forearm, to the twenty-seven bones that make the hand.
As painters we’re taught to get the shapes in first, to paint background to foreground and dark to light. Today, I chose a location that I’d painted previously in the summer. Then, the trees were three-leaf clovers with strokes of greens made of cadmium yellow medium and cobalt blue. It was lush, and easily meshed with a titanium white and cobalt sky.
My teachers regularly remind me to blur the edges. We don’t see sharp lines through the atmosphere, they say. I made a scraper tool from an old credit card and dragged it once from tree to sky and once again from sky to tree. It blurred and blended till the trees appeared taller and further away. It became for me, my mother’s dressing gown; a chartreuse satin, with threads of yellow embroidery against a peek at a blue lace slip beneath. I heard my father’s keys jangling, muffled in his pocket, and watched as he pressed the crease in his fedora. She said, as she dried her hands on a kitchen towel and surveyed the balance of dishes in the drainer, “I’m almost ready, John, I’m dressed underneath.”
One teacher told me that when I paint trees I should paint the roots, but I can’t paint the roots. I don’t see them. In the scene today, I do see a sidewalk heaved and cracked by a Hulk from the underworld in search of water and nourishment. The broken sidewalk is dark, as if an artist had blended the color of the grass, the dirt beneath and dried leaves upon it. It’s clearly marked 1938. I can’t paint the roots, but I can paint their power. I only wish, that I could paint the hubris of homeowners who’ve recently planted saplings next to concrete slabs stamped with 2002, 2009, 2012, because, I know the Hulk will return. Painting a tree is hard, I say to myself again.
The children paint the trunks brown. Tree trunks aren’t brown. They are made of colors that sometimes makebrown and those same colors sometimes make violet and shades of grey. I stare at the line of trees and I see brown trunks too. I squint and colors separate. My mind separates. I see her there among the other trees. A breeze blows. Her dressing gown disintegrates. I see a trunk with limbs of grace and strength, curves at life’s grand junctures. Seasons take a turn, nourishment in some years overflowing and in other year’s light. Her limbs flow from branches to fingers where the last of the leaves become her bravest bit of bling.
I stand back with my brush in hand, and, I miss my mother.
Painting a tree is hard.
