Paint your important place.
When landscape meets memory.
What makes a place special? Is it the the quality of the sunlight hitting a tree? The rim of bright peach of a sunset or the blue violet light of a sunrise? The briny smell of the seaweed on the shore or kettle corn on the boardwalk? Is it the multiplicity of the greens in a field of grass or the earth tones embedded in the sediment? Or maybe it is merely the people we are with in a place that make a place special.
Important places from our past arrive with so many sensory moments. I can’t smell that distinct spoiled yet sweet smell of catsup that has been left out in the sun without thinking of my family’s yearly summer trip to the Vacation Village resort in Lake Okobji, Iowa.
I think of Vacation Village, too, when I smell that stink of toxins and plastic that is emitted from a newly-opened beach inflatable, not the cool Instagram-friendly giant swans of today, I’m talking about the cheap and terrible-for-the-environment kind that you buy in a flattened plastic bag at a truck stop.
I’ve painted one of my other favorite places a million times. The Missouri River cuts my home state of South Dakota in half. I’ve painted it on a sunny day.
And I’ve painted it as one of those ominous prairie storms blasted across it.
My grandmother’s house was on the eastern bank of the river. It was a place cluttered with both trashy gossip magazines and sheet music for her piano. Talk about multiplicity, that woman was a million people in one. A thoughtful and generous friend, she could carry a grudge for decades. She was an epic and hysterical storyteller prone to giving people the silent treatment.
And the house she created fit me perfectly. Beyond the National Enquirers laying around telling me what was really happening behind closed doors in Buckingham Palace and Hollywood, there was so much weird stuff in the closets like old accordions and high heels still in the box from the 1950s. My cousins and I spent our summers going back and forth over the river in her giant boat of a car talking to truckers on the CB radio she had super glued to her dashboard. We headed west to get pie, east towards the pool.
I love my childhood home, too. I once painted a painting for my friend Hetty Lui McKinnon’s amazing magazine, Peddler Journal, depicting the summer neighborhood potlucks we hosted at our house because we were the only family with a two-car garage and a double wide driveway to match. That painting is a time capsule and a record of a place. My nostalgia for that driveway seems to grow exponentially as my parents prepare to move out of that home after 55 years.
When I teach landscape painting I encourage people to bring in an image of a place that matters to them, their Arcadia. You will not get the same meaning and impact by painting an image pulled from the internet, although a few people always show up with a glamour shot of a snow-caped mountain or pristine, red algae-free beach.
I had a landscape painting workshop last weekend with so many first-time painters. And the variety of subject matters and styles was thrilling. I love when people go deeply and risk looking bad to find their own voice. Here are just a few of their artworks about place. Some zoomed in to offer a microscopic view of the soil in the desert or allowed the viewer to get swallowed into the foliage of a sunlit tree.
Others zoomed out to give us tiny creatures living their best mountain or ocean life.
One painter gave us a Croatian street in the spirit of Egon Schiele or Gabriele Munter.
There was an aerial view of an Italian island Cezanne would love.
This expressive sunset viewed from a beachfront home would earn Munch’s respect.
This roadside cloud formation made me want to hit the Pacific Coast Highway.
Where is your special place? Maybe it is from your childhood or maybe you went there last summer. Get out your paints and paint it. Zoom in, zoom out. Give us details or give us a drone’s view. Think of the colors and the smells and the tastes and the textures. Remember how lucky you were to be there. And maybe offer up a bit of gratitude that you were there with the people you were there with.
Happy Painting!
Sara
Painting Can Save Your Life: How and Why We Paint
Love this! Take me to the river ♥️👋🏽