A few years ago, my wife Deborah (an award-winning watercolorist) and I started combining our love for travel with our painting. Since then, trips to Italy, Greece, Croatia, France, Spain, England, Norway, and, especially, Scotland have provided inspiration (to use an overused but difficult to replace word). 

Deborah began a practice of keeping a watercolor journal of all the places we go, along with her usual daily discipline of painting. I’ll leave it to her to describe what she does on her own FASO pages. Today I’ll simply describe my traveling practice. 

Because my primary medium is oil, and my canvases tend to be quite large, and my approach to painting is expressionistic and abstract, I restrict my traveling work mostly to sketching, either with pen and ink or with watercolor. From time to time, if we are staying in one place for a long time, I may paint somewhat larger watercolors, but generally my goal is to utilize my sketching to see more clearly and to absorb more deeply the world around us as we travel. Usually the sights and smells and sounds of the world sink deeply into me through sketching, are held there, and release themselves when I am back in my studio. 

Sketching in the field bears some similarities to plein air painting, of course. Almost all the sketches are done quickly, sometimes very quickly. A good example is the quick sketch I did on a bright midsummer midnight a few weeks ago as our boat approached the Arctic Circle. Heading north, along the coast of Norway, I stood in the bow and sketched the line of mountains and cliffs that guarded the pass through which we were headed, and the tiny Sami fishing village on the mainland. While the primary scene is of the soaring mountains and the dramatic cliffs, I wanted to engrave on my heart the feeling of the way these mountains overshadow and dwarf the row of tiny houses. I had to work very fast before we rounded the headland. 

On another occasion, however, in the North Yorkshire Dales at the stunning Aysgarth Falls, Deborah and I brought camp chairs and sat on the banks of the river, studying its flow, watching the ways the water moved over and through the rocks. When I felt ready to begin sketching, I moved less quickly, looking again and again at the falls to feel its orientation, its movements, the way the waters swirled and foamed. Even moving less quickly, however, the sketch was finished in no more than fifteen minutes. The speed of the sketch translates into a sense of energy and movement making the sketch a living thing. 

Most of my watercolor sketches are fairly objective and representational, but sometimes they may be abstract, as I try to reflect the moods, the energy of places in colors and gestures. I usually take more time with the watercolor sketches, proceeding more slowly because of the nature of the medium, but, still, each watercolor represents only about 30 minutes in actual painting time. 

What has this process accomplished? 

First, and most important, I find that my experience of “being there” is enhanced to a degree I had not previously imagined. I spent several years as an avid photographer and student of photography, but the discipline of sketching what I see has opened doors of perception I never experienced taking photographs. There’s a sort of magic that occurs in the artist’s visual connection with the place that seems only possible when sketching it or painting it. The artist experiences an immediacy of presence, an inhabiting of “what is there,” that soaks into her pores through the full range of senses. This translates into the life of the sketch, and the subsequent paintings, keeping me from merely engaging in landscape taxidermy. 

Second, there is a vital living quality that travels home with you from far-flung places because of the intensity you bring to the practice of sketching what is before you. Even the word “feeling” falls short in describing this living quality. It is as though you have bathed in the place and keep tracking little pools all around your studio. The experience just stays with you, and compels you to paint. Sometimes, by the time I arrive home, and stand before the blank canvas, it feels as though the painting is just waiting for me to release it. 

Accompanying this brief blog is a photo of one of two recently completed paintings of a vantage point looking out toward a series of islands in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. I have been there often, sitting on the rocks, letting the changing light and tides play before me, allowing nature herself to flaunt her unfathomable mysteries, teasing me into thinking I can capture something essential in a mere sketch.

What I “captured” in this painting is my feeling of being fully present in that place, not separate from it, but as much a part of it as the black and gray boulders on which the ferocious waves break or the flog and mist that forms and shrouds the islands and lies softly on the surface of the water. For a few moments while painting I feel again the dynamics of this wild place, suspended between sea and sky and earth. 

Before I close, let me simply say this as clearly as I can: Don’t go anywhere without a good sketch pad and pens.