Preview the newest issue of PleinAir Magazine with the Editor’s Letter:
Showing Up
There’s a moment — every plein air painter knows it — when you stand at the front door with your kit carefully packed … and your resolve already starting to waver. The light looked better an hour ago. The wind has picked up. The canvas you pulled out has a ghost of a failed painting on it. And some part of your brain suggests, with the best of intentions, that maybe today isn’t the day.
Showing up, it turns out, is the hardest part of painting outside. Not the perspective, not the color mixing, not the compositional decisions you have to make fast before the clouds rearrange themselves entirely. Just the act of going. Of actually walking out the door and setting up in front of the world.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About how the discipline of plein air isn’t primarily a technical discipline — it’s a discipline of commitment. You have to decide, over and over again, that the experience is worth the friction. That the cold hands and the curious strangers and the painting that doesn’t come together the way you hoped are all part of something larger than any one experience. You have to believe, even on the difficult days, that showing up matters.
And here is what I know to be true: it always does. Not because every painting is a success. Goodness knows, it isn’t. But because something shifts in you when you choose presence over comfort. When you stand in front of a landscape and say, “I’m here. I’m paying attention. This moment is worth recording.” That act of witness — humble, patient, sometimes cold, sometimes muddy — is the whole point.
The painters I admire most are not necessarily the ones with the most technical mastery, though many have that too. They’re the ones who keep at it — the ones with battered pochade boxes and paint-stained jackets, one eye on the horizon monitoring the changing light. They have learned, somewhere along the way, to trust the process more than the outcome. To value the lessons learned outside over the product that comes home.
There is also, I think, something especially shrewd about the people who make this journey in the company of others — who pack their bags and travel to paint alongside fellow artists, to share a location and a few hard-won observations before the session ends. Something about gathering with other painters, in a specific place at a specific time, reminds us that we are part of a tradition much bigger than our own individual practice. That others have chosen to show up too. That we are not alone in this wonderful compulsion.
To every reader of this issue — whether you’re quietly enjoying it on your porch, in your studio, or somewhere out in the field — I want to say this: the fact that you keep going outside to paint the landscape is not a small thing. The willingness to face a blank panel and an uncooperative sky, again and again, is a form of courage that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. It’s an act of faith in the visible world.
So here is my simple encouragement for the season ahead: go out. Even when the conditions aren’t perfect. Even when you’re tired or uninspired or convinced that nothing good will come of it. Pack your paintbox, find a view, and show up. The painting may not cooperate. But you will have been there — present, attentive, alive to the world — and that, in the end, is everything.
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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Plein Air Today