Plein air is French for "open air." It means painting outdoors, on site, finishing in one or two sittings while the light is still doing what it was doing when you started.
Every painting on this site was made this way. Not from photos, not in the studio (with rare exceptions noted on individual pieces). On a hillside, a beach, a vineyard road, a foothill homestead. Out in the wind.
The kit
Pochade box, French easel, six to eight tubes of oil — ultramarine, alizarin, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, yellow ochre, burnt umber, white. A palette knife, a handful of brushes. A canvas panel under the lid of the box. That's it.
Three hours, give or take
The hardest constraint of plein air is also its gift: the light moves. By the time you've been painting two hours, the sun has shifted, the shadows have changed direction, the marine layer has burned off. You commit to what you saw in the first ten minutes. You don't get to argue.
That's why these paintings look the way they do. The brushwork is fast because the light is fast. Palette knife on rocks and foreground sand because the texture wants to match the place. Alla prima — wet into wet — because there's no time to layer.
Why this matters when you buy one
- It can't be repeated. Even if I painted the same view tomorrow, the painting would be different — different light, different brushwork, different mood. Every piece is one of one.
- It carries the day. Collectors tell me they can almost feel the wind, the time of day, the temperature. That's not metaphor — it's literally what was happening when paint hit canvas.
- It's a record of someone being there. Not a print, not a reproduction, not a digital file. A physical object made by a human in a specific place at a specific time.
The lineage behind the practice
I learned this from Pam Glover, who learned it from Lundy Siegriest, son of Louis Siegriest of the original Society of Six — the Oakland-based group that, in the 1920s, painted outdoors on weekends and quietly invented California modernism. The practice is more than a century old; I'm one node in a long chain.
Where I paint these days
San Clemente most weeks — the pier, Crescent Bay, the eucalyptus groves between here and Dana Point. Up to the Sierra foothills a few times a year for the Glover Group paint-outs around Sonora. Napa Valley in October for the vineyards. Wherever the light is doing something.