Plein air painting changes with times

By Sara Hanlon
For Zone

“Recent Works” by Charles Warren Mundy (American Impressionist) is showing at Columbus Museum of Art and Design upstairs in The Commons. Working their canvases plein (rhymes with hen) air, was one of the many differences that set the Impressionists off from their contemporaries.

The term literally means “open air” in French. Today this technique is widely practiced. However, at its inception in the middle of the 19th century painting outdoors was a radical departure from the formal studio painting which was the norm.

A professor of mine at Herron once gave us some very good and insightful painting advice. He maintained that often small technical or practical problems were the sole impediments to our progress in the medium. Therefore, he would go around the room making small suggestions such as: stand rather than sit at the easel, clean your brushes, clean your palette, or lay out your colors in the same order each time. He was right. His small observations, when followed, did exert quite an influence on the eventual outcome of the painting.


By the same token, who could conceive that an American inventor in 1841 could, in a sense, provide the birthing bed for a radical painting movement that would still be revered over 150 years later? Before John G. Rand (1801-1873) came up with the collapsible paint tube, artists had to mix their own paints. This involved grinding the pigment out of minerals using a mortar and pestle or purchasing pure dry pigment from the pharmacist. The dry pigment had to be then mixed with some viscous material (vehicle) to make the substance flow with the right consistency.

An alternative to this method was available but was no less troublesome. Cumbersome refillable bladders or metal cylinders could be bought from the colorman’s shop. These containers were emptied by means of a piston and were returned to the shop to be refilled.

The invention of the paint tube then gave rise to a variety of ready-made paints. These twin innovations freed the artist from his job as chemist and liberated him from the studio as well. Plein air painting in the field was now feasible as the materials were highly portable. The bright/light Impressionist paintings that we enjoy today were made possible by these two events. Artists no longer felt constrained to use the few colors that they had laboriously mixed themselves so a wider variety of colors began to pop up in their compositions.

Look closely at the Mundy paintings at CMAD and you too will be a beneficiary of John Rand’s invention. Mundy’s lights are a vapor of confetti- like color and his shadows and darks are wells of muddy complementaries and moody cools.

There are 35 beautifully- framed and loosely painted images in this show. These recent works are for sale with 10% of the total being donated back to the CMAD. The show runs until May 28.