Plein air painters...

have deep roots. Van Gogh. Monet. Sargent. My uncle was, among many things, a plein air painter. The last time I talked at length with him was for WSC. I interviewed him about his work. He died last night, the culmination of a quick fall from health. It's shocking how fast the show lights can dim. In his "retirement" from commercial painting, he travelled around Arizona, where he lived, and the other expanses of the West, setting up his easel and painting what he saw. To see more of his art, go here.

On his passing, his words carry weight.
“To me, the real magic of a painter is to look at something, break it down into its simplest form, stroke it in and it looks just great. And that’s how I want to paint. I want to be an impressionist who doesn’t linger over his work and somehow leaves all that magic and paint hanging there on the canvas.”

“Everything out in the real is so much more brilliant, so much more colorful.”

“I want really thick, expressive paint. I don’t want to put all this detail in. I want it to look like a painting first and a scene second.”

Artists tend to see the world in concretes. They're often hardcore materialists in process, if more metaphysical in concept. Jane Mead, who passed in 2019, put the work of life well: 

Whenever the experiment on and of
my life begins to draw to a close
I’ll go back to the place that held me
and be held. It’s O.K. I think
I did what I could. I think
I sang some, I think I held my hand out.

—Jane Mead, "I wonder if I will miss the moss"

Mick sang some. He put his hand out, brush in his fingertips. I'll end this note as I ended my article. He said to me, in his slow and gentle voice, “You just never get tired of painting these distant buttes.”