Monday Morning Art School: pochade boxes for every budget

I hate to see people waste money on a cheap pochade box that won’t work.

My current system is an Open M box on a carbon-fiber tripod. It's lightweight and puts up with a lot of abuse.

Last week I discussed how Google drove me toward inexpensive and fatally-flawed Meeden pochade boxes. I do not generally tell people what boxes to buy, as there’s a tremendous range of excellent options. But I don’t want to see students waste money on a cheap box that won’t work.

We’re a month out from the start of plein air season here in the northeast, so it’s time to research and order a box if you need one. Some manufacturers are on their seasonal hiatus, but if they make the box you want, it’s worth waiting for.

My super-light pochade box when it was new (and clean).

Unfortunately, most pochade boxes are sold on the internet, so you can’t twiddle the dials in person. You must rely on word-of-mouth. The good news is that there are some excellent products out there.

Many people have been given some version of a French box easel by loving friends or relatives. If you’ve got one, by all means use it, but don’t voluntarily inflict one on yourself. They’re heavy, difficult to set up, and you can’t slide the paint out and store it in the freezer. Pochade boxes are lighter and nimbler.

If money is an issue, make your own. I have instructions here for making a lightweight aluminum box. This was my primary box for several years and I still use it for backpacking, as it’s the lightest box I own.

Jennifer Johnson's variation on that theme.

My student Jennifer Johnson decided to make a box like mine, but her husband ordered the wrong binder. It was a fortuitous accident, because her box is smaller and stronger. It pairs up perfectly with her Mabef M-27 field easel without any drilling or special machining. She’s used two of them—one for acrylics, one for oils—for four years now without any problems.

Or, you can use Victoria Brzustowicz’ ingenious, cheap and simple solution. She hinged two aluminum baking sheets from the Dollar Store together with a strip of duct tape. Open, it’s a paint box; closed, it goes in a plastic bag in the freezer. She also uses it with a Mabef field easel.

Victoria Brustowicz' variation on the theme cost her all of $2.

That Mabef field easel can also be used with a plastic Masterson sta-wet palette box and disposable palette paper for another lightweight and inexpensive combination.

In all cases, you’ll have to tinker with bungee cords and clamps to secure the box to the easel, but it does work.

A few of my students have the Leder easel. At $119 (not including the tripod), it’s reasonably priced, stable, and extremely compact. You must buy your own tripod and paint box, but that, again, means you can use a sta-wet palette box. It’s also a useful system for pastels, because it allows you to use your existing pastel box.

New Wave u go pochade box belonging to Ann Clowe.

I’ve also seen several New Wave u.go pochade boxes over the past year. They’re birch and use magnets instead of clasps. They seem solidly built and have a lift-out palette.

My current everyday box is an Easy L box by Artwork Essentials. (I also use their umbrella, because it stays where I put it.) The box is durable, basic, and you can set it up so it hangs with the palette at the same angle as your canvas. That’s useful for demoing but I never do it in real life.

Another lovely box in a similar style is Open M’s panel/palette holder. It’s also well made of Baltic birch. The major difference is in the style of hardware.

Terrie Perrine using the Leder system with her own pastel box.

Guerrilla Painter is a well-known brand of extremely-robust pochade boxes. I have a 12X16 Guerrilla box that is so tough I could drive over it with my truck and then use it. That comes at a price, however; the box is too darn heavy for anything other than park-and-paint plein air.

Strada makes the only aluminum pochade boxes that I know of. That’s a pity, because aluminum is stronger and less prone to moisture damage than wood. It doesn’t result in much weight savings, however; the 11X12 Strada box weighs only an ounce less than the 10X12 Open M box.

En Plein Air Pro now has a system for oil and acrylic painters with a greyscale mixing tray. They also have a portable pastel easel. I worked briefly with the oil-palette at my Sedona workshop last month, and it seemed quite solid and practical. I have had one of their tripod trays for years, however. It’s rigid and durable.

I of course receive no spiffs for mentioning these products.

Constant overdrive

My strategic plan for 2022 seems to be in tatters. That’s the price of constant overdrive.

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, available.

At the end of last year, pastor Quinton Self challenged us to stop with the busy work and focus on what matters. That includes moments of rest. He and I are the same psychological profile (with the test scores to prove it), so when he zings me in a sermon, I figure he’s also talking to himself. In February, when he’d just finished a fast-paced, five-week teaching program on top of his other work, I asked him: “so, how’s that Sabbath rest thing going for you, PQ?” He smiled. It’s a constitutional problem for both of us.

Every year recently I’ve said, “this is the latest I’ve ever done my taxes.” This year’s record will stand. I can’t get much later and not file for an extension. That’s a terrible idea; it just prolongs the agony. What’s scary is that I didn’t even think about taxes until I was flying back from Phoenix two weeks ago.

Breaking Storm, 48X30, oil on canvas, available.

I had coffee with my Canadian pal Poppy Balser last week. I don’t really envy our Canadian neighbors their economic system. However, when I’m calculating income tax, I wish we could streamline our ponderous system and replace it with something like theirs. As a sole proprietor, I keep records on all kinds of things that are irrelevant to the average taxpayer—household repairs, utility bills, and the cost of operating my car.

It’s time-consuming and tedious, and I’m good with numbers. I can’t imagine what it’s like for my math-phobic fellow artists.

Admin is the curse of all sole proprietors. We write our own ads, maintain our own websites, do our own strategic planning, keep books, and somehow churn out a product. I am, for some reason, drowning in admin right now.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, 18X24, oil on canvas, available.

“Did I ever send you the materials for next year’s ad?” I asked Anthony Anderson of the Maine Gallery Guide yesterday. No, he replied, but if I can get it to him next week, I’ll be fine. I could hire my student Lori Galan or my old friend Victoria Brzustowicz to lay it out for me. Either of them would probably forgive me my hair-raising lateness. However, I don’t even have a clue what I want to say. And that ad is the most important one I’ll run all year.

Being in constant overdrive is corrosive. It forces a person to be reactive, batting balls back out as fast as they come in. Instead, intelligent people are proactive, thinking out a strategy and sticking with it.

I did that at the beginning of the year, by the way. It’s in tatters.

Beautiful Dream, 12X16, oil on birch panel, available.

But help is on the way. When we’re in overload, things have a way of falling on us and slowing us down. Another Canadian artist friend, Cathy LaChance, put it very succinctly when she was diagnosed with COVID this week: “My turn to be forced to rest.”

Call it the Universe, if you want; I prefer to credit God with this good design. 

The problem with frenetic people is that we are sometimes so busy we can’t hear the “still small voice” of God. That’s why it is often accompanied by the wind and earthquake (or COVID)—to get our attention.

I’d rather not wait that long.

Paint like you’re rich

Being stingy with art supplies will cost you more in the long run.

Terrie's rig is handmade but very solid. There are many ways to solve the pochade box question, which is why I hesitate to recommend one. 

The discussion started with a student confessing that he didn’t mix enough different greens for his painting of a rill riffling through a forest. “I didn’t want to waste paint,” he said. “Paint is expensive.” Instead, he wasted paint and time.

“Paint like you’re rich,” his classmate told him.

Turns out that was advice from my student and friend Becky Bense.

French easels may be heavy, but at least they work.

I should have known. Becky regularly chides me for my use of cheap watercolor paper for demos. While the paint seems to flow off the brush fine, it dries as if I’d painted with a typewriter. My justification is that I’m trying to demonstrate a principle, not create art. Also, I have a lot of it lying around; it was on sale and I succumbed to the temptation. But I’ve never painted anything good on it and I never will.

If I were a student, I’d be terribly frustrated by the results. Perhaps enough so that I would believe I couldn’t paint and would stop trying. I certainly wouldn’t learn much.

Then there's always the picnic-table option.

At my Sedona workshop, two students had pochade boxes from Meeden, a low-end art supply vendor. They fill a niche for the casual hobbyist, but their products are not robust enough for serious painting.

One of these boxes was fatally flawed; its mount was not strong enough to hold the box on the tripod. Had Ed Buonvecchio not lent the student his old field easel, she’d have been unable to paint at all. She’d flown in from Hawaii, rented a car, reserved a room, bought top-end paints and brushes—and was stymied by this weakest link.

I provide detailed supply lists for my classes, but don’t specify a brand of pochade box, as there are so many excellent ones out there. It never occurred to me that anyone would buy a Meeden box. No serious art supply stores sell their products.

Minnie Brown combined the French easel with the picnic table option at Sedona.

But if you search Amazon for ‘pochade box’, Meeden is the brand that comes up first. And the world of Google throws us another curve. Because I’d just looked at Meeden boxes on Amazon, when I searched for Easy L Pochade Box (a brand I recommend without reservation) I got a series of ads that led me straight back to Meeden. There’s convenience in online shopping, but a lot of hucksterism, too.

But back to the paint itself—it’s a false economy to not squeeze out a proper amount, to paint on bad substrates, or with lousy brushes. It always ends up costing more in time, materials, and lost opportunities. In fact, none of us are rich enough to be stingy with our art supplies.

Speaking of classes, I have a new session starting next week on Zoom. The key to being a good artist is working at it consistently. For busy people, that’s often the hardest part. We meet for three hours weekly to dissect and practice a key element of painting such as design, color, perspective, foliage, value masses, or brushwork. And as the above discussion indicates, a lot of learning goes on from student to student, too.

I’ve taught on Zoom since the start of COVID. A big reason these classes work so well is the support and encouragement my students give each other. You listen, adapt, critique and think through problems as a group, and we are all better for it.

ZOOM morning Session
We meet on Tuesdays from 10 AM to 1 PM EST, on the following dates:
April 12, 19, 26
May 3, 10, 17

ZOOM evening Session
We meet on Mondays from 6 to 9 PM EST, on the following dates:
April 11, 18, 25
May 2, 9, 16

The fee for either six-week session is $235.

All media are welcome. More information can be found here, or just email me.

Monday Morning Art School: drawing realistic clouds

 Clouds have volume and are subject to the rules of perspective.

Clouds over Whiteface Mountain, oil on canvasboard, available.

Clouds are not flat. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air. We are sometimes misled about that because clouds that appear to be almost overhead are, in fact, a long distance away.

I’ve alluded before to two-point perspective. I’ve never gotten too specific because it’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. Today I’ll explain it.

A two-point perspective grid. You don't need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line. The vertical lines indicate the edges of your paper.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line, at the edges of your paper. These are your vanishing points.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It's that simple.

I've included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity.

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

(There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things, and four-point perspective, which gives a fish-eye distortion reminiscent of mid-century comic book art. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you've left painting and entered a fantastical world of technical drawing.)

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Still, two-point perspective is useful for understanding clouds. Clouds follow the rules of perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The difference is that the vanishing point is at the bottom of the object, rather than the top as it is with terrestrial objects.

Cumulus clouds have flat bases and fluffy tops, and they tend to run in patterns across the sky. I’ve rendered them as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. They may be far more fantastical in shape, but they obey this same basic rule of design.

You can see that basic perspective when looking at a photo of cumulus clouds.

A flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky will be at a consistent altitude. That means their bottoms are on the same plane. However, there can be more than one cloud formation mucking around up there. That’s particularly true where there’s a big, scenic object like the ocean or a mountain in your vista. These have a way of interfering with the orderly patterns of clouds.

I don’t expect you to go outside and draw clouds using a perspective grid. This is for understanding the concept before you tackle the subject. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky in volume, rather than as puffy white shapes pasted on the surface of your painting.

This post was originally published on March 8, 2021.

Growth and change

How does one find one’s purpose as an artist? Should we build that into how we think about our work?

Ravening Wolves, 24X30, oil on canvas, is as close as I get to didacticism these days.

“How have you grown as a painter in the last ten years?” a student asked me.

My drawing and brushwork aren’t much different, but my color choices have certainly changed, as has my ability to relax into abstraction. That doesn’t seem like much growth for a decade’s work.

In intangible ways, however, I’ve changed a lot—I’m far less anxious about the outcome, and less didactic in my subject matter. I’ll never focus on figure as I was doing a decade ago. Although I’m proud of the work I did about women’s issues, I’ll never paint that subject again. Which reminds me: this is the last weekend you’ll see Censored and Poetic at the Rye Arts Center; it ends Saturday night.

Main Street, Owl’s Head, 16X20, oil on archival gessoboard

Ten years ago, I was still wrestling with the legitimacy of my calling. Those of you who were raised thinking that art wasn’t a ‘real’ career understand that. Today, I barely remember the question. I’m an artist because it’s all I know how to do.

Which leads me to the second question I received this week: “How does one find purpose? How have artists done it over time? Should we build that into how we think about our work?

“I see people at figure sessions banging out the exact same thing over and over. I get the impression, from talking to them, that they have been doing that, or variations of that, for years on end. And they aren't that good. Why do these people show up? Something to do?”

Spring Greens, 8x10, oil on canvasboard

I’m the last person to denigrate regular practice, and figure is one area where that is particularly important. If I had the time right now, I’d go to my local life drawing class myself. It’s good exercise and I like the people who attend.

But I have known people who never progress past that. They were taking classes 25 years ago and are still doing that today. Some are stuck because they have day jobs. Some aren’t that skilled but enjoy the process. Some are excellent painters, but uninterested in making it a career. Amateur status is nothing to be sneezed at.

I’ve also had students who’ve just gone through a major trauma—an unwanted divorce or job separation. They were floundering and it gave them an anchor. Creativity is cheaper than therapy and for many it serves as well. When they worked out their next step, they moved on from art.

Midnight at the Wood Lot, 12X16, oil on canvasboard

But there are always that few who want to make art their life’s work. For them, the question of artistic purpose is critical. It’s inextricably bound up in one’s life purpose. Your work ought to be an expression of your thoughts or feelings, or it’s meaningless.

When I was younger, I thought that my purpose was didactic. Today, I’d be hard-pressed to put my mission statement into words, but it has something to do with glorifying Creation and helping people feel connected to it. That’s tied to my faith, but I don’t feel a need to preach through my paintings.

That, too, may change as I get older. One’s mission and calling in life is fluid. The important thing is to have the tools at our disposal to answer whatever comes up. And that’s where all those weeks and years in art class come in.