Private Spaces

Painting a landscape is essentially about representing space and the places that surround us. Landscapes are generally associated with sublime pastoral scenes, but as our landscape has dramatically changed over the past century, so have our ideas of what a painting about space can be.
The structure of foreground, middle ground, and background can be applied to almost any space. For instance, an interior space like your living room or studio can be a painting about space. As a painter, I use my local landscape as a subject to explore space and make paintings that are about the specific places I encounter every day. Therefore, I don’t necessarily have to travel to the countryside to make beautiful paintings. I can simply sit in the backyard or take a walk through the neighbourhood and respond to the places in my immediate environment. This next week’s worth of exercises is devoted to using your home and neighbourhood as inspiration to create paintings based on both the interior and exterior places you see every day.

Home Landscape

Day 15
I have always been interested in painting space, and I’ve always painted pictures of the places where I have lived. I grew up in a rural environment; now that I live in an urban setting, my interest in space has not changed but my paintings have.
Painting your home feels a lot like painting a self-portrait; there is a particular pride, or even vanity, that affects the decision making and editing process. There is a very emotional response to that process of returning or leaving home. The first or last thing you see is the same every day, but your memory of it constantly changing. For this painting, my intent was to paint the front of my home and suggest the beginning or end of this journey.

Exercise 15
Make a painting of the exterior of your home, whether it’s where you currently live or perhaps your childhood home. Look for unique details and qualities of the space around your home to include in the painting. For example, in my painting I was interested in capturing the compressed nature of my neighbourhood, so there isn’t much open or negative space in the painting.

Tip
When working within a traditional landscape format with a distinct foreground, middle ground, and background, it’s helpful to paint the background first and then work up to the foreground. Since painting is a medium that favours layers, this will help create a deeper space no matter how realistically you render the space.

Utopian Landscape

Day 16
The backyard is a place of refuge and a great subject for a landscape; in the warmer months, it is the first place I retreat to after a long day of work. The backyard is also a space where a lot of activity happens-and unlike the front yard, the backyard is less formal. I spend a lot of time in my backyard sitting, reading, looking and drawing; at times it feels like a second studio. For this painting, I wanted to document a moment between activities that suggest pause. The rugs drying on the line while the light rakes across the grass implies that silent reflection.

Exercise 16
Find a space in your backyard (or other exterior space that’s a little retreat for you) and make a painting from it. Focus on a particular time of day and its light quality to add to the mood of the space.

Variation
The size of your backyard doesn’t matter. It could simply be the fire escape of an apartment or another transitional space from interior to exterior. Matthew painted a very intimate space behind his apartment in New York City.

Porch

Day 20
A porch or similar hybrid space straddling both interior and exterior offers countless possibilities for a landscape. The challenge here is to represent two very different types of space seamlessly. For this painting, I was looking from the porch through a handmade birdhouse to the landscape beyond, so essentially I was trying to capture three distinct areas of space. The subject of the painting is clearly the birdhouse, but the inclusion of the subtle details of the hand railing and post in the foreground makes the viewer aware of the vantage point and conscious of the interior-like feel of his or her own position in the scene.

Exercise 20
Choose a space in your home, like a porch or maybe a garage, that has both interior and exterior space. Include a foreground detail somewhere in the composition that is dramatically cropped by the edge of the painting.

Tip
When painting this space, remember to apply the rules of atmospheric perspective and use more neutral tones and muted colours in the background and through the middle ground. Increase the contrast and use more saturated colours in the foreground. This will give the illusion of a deeper space and push the foreground elements forward. Complementary colours are a good way to create high contrast, and the neutral colours they make when mixed together will create low contrast to use in the background.

Neighbourhood Walk

Day 21
When I am moving through spaces familiar or unfamiliar, I get a lot of ideas about painting. Whether I’m in the car, on my bike, or on foot, the sensation of scenes moving past me at variable speeds always inspires new painting ideas. Walking through your neighbourhood is an intimate process that suggests both private and public space. For this painting, I was looking into my neighbour’s back yard one day while I was out for a walk, and I was fixated on the juxtaposition of their classical female statue next to a very masculine pickup truck that hadn’t been moved in quite some time. The textures of the two objects appeared connected, and yet completely different in a charming, contradictory fashion. I took a few photographs of the backyard and did a few quick thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook to use as a reference when I got back to my studio later that day. The painting is a combination of the photographs, my sketches, and my memory of the scene.

Exercise 21
Take a walk through your neighbourhood, looking for a space other than your own that inspires you for some reason. Do a quick sketch of the space, take a few reference photos to work from, and make a painting of the space.

Tip
Whenever I leave the house, whether I’m searching for an idea for a painting or not, I always travel with a little sketchbook and a small point-and-shoot camera, both of which can fit in my pocket. You never know when something will inspire you to make a painting, so being prepared to take the proper notes and reference photographs is crucial to the process.

Variation
It’s an interesting transition when we begin to travel outside the comfort of our home and studio to look for inspiration in the real world that surrounds us. It’s a bit voyeuristic and scary at first. Amy addresses this emotion quite exceptionally in her painting Greener Grass (below). She presents us with a view looking right over her fence and into a completely different space. It asks the question, ‘Is the grass really greener?’

Public Places

In the preceding chapter, we found that a landscape isn’t limited to exterior space or sublime scenes of the horizon or trees. The landscape and places we see in a typical day of commuting through our local environment are splendid subjects for a painting. The public spaces that we frequently encounter are important to our personal narrative, and the documentation of these places—no matter how seemingly mundane—elevates their unique qualities when painted with observation. The public space comes with a different set of challenges than the private space of your home.
Photography, a sketchbook, memory, and invention are necessary tools. While you can certainly make these paintings from observation with a portable easel, the obstacles in some spaces, depending on the traffic, can be difficult. You may want to try working both with an easel and without. These next seven exercises are devoted to making paintings that explore public space, from the places you frequent regularly.

Café

Day 22
The casual setting of your favourite café or place for brunch is a good subject to begin with, especially if it’s a place you go frequently. You’ll be able to rely on memory a lot more than you would with a less-familiar place. There is a long tradition of artists painting the gathering places of their neighbourhoods. Think of van Gough’s paintings of cafés or Edward Hopper’s iconic paintings of diners. There is a certain energy in these places that continue to inspire artists.
This painting began as a drawing in my sketchbook. It’s the interior of a music venue in my neighbourhood that hosts a brunch on Sunday afternoons. I’m always startled by how different it looks on a Sunday morning long after the bands have left town and the debris is swept from the floors. I sketched the scene, then returned and photographed the exact space from my sketch.
Whenever I have a photograph for a reference, I find it’s helpful to limit myself by only using it for the first thirty minutes of painting. At some point during the painting, abandoning the photography forces you to rely on memory and allows you to invent new moments. This makes the overall process more enjoyable and the painting more successful.

Exercise 22
Go to your favourite café or coffee shop and look for a space where you have sat many times before. Begin with a few sketches of that space and take a few reference photographs as well.

Tip
If you choose to work from a photographic resource, try to limit the time you use or look at the photograph back in your studio. You will be surprised at how much you can rely simply on your memory or invention to finish the painting. Regarding this issue of invention and working from memory, sometimes it is not about what you add to the painting, but what you edit from the image. For example, in this painting, the real life table in the foreground had a lot of clutter, but I chose to edit that out to focus on the pouring over the table instead.

Shop

Day 23
One of my favourite hobbies is collecting records. Buying new and used vinyl is a routine I treat myself to every other pay day. Fortunately, I live in a neighbourhood where there are many independent record stores to choose from. For this painting, I chose one of my favourite record stores, located in a cosy store front attached to a house. I wanted to capture the long row of records on the left wall and the space outside and across the street. I did a few drawings in my sketchbook and took some photographs to work from, then went back to my studio to start the painting. I wasn’t concerned with the individual details of the records or posters, and many of the marks that suggest text and pictures were both invented and done by memory.

Exercise 23
Choose a shop in your neighbourhood that you often patronise and make a painting from it. ask the shopkeeper if it’s okay to sketch and take photographs of the store to use as a reference from which to make a painting.

Variation
The storefront is a perfect example of how our landscape has changed dramatically over the past century. An interesting variation on this exercise could be to paint the exterior of your favourite store. In Libby’s painting of a Louis Vuitton storefront (below), the exterior of the building fills the entire canvas, denying us any sense of atmosphere or horizon.

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