What do you do when the world spreads out before you like this? It can be overwhelming in your attempt to do what is advised…edit the landscape!

I think here is where working outside is so helpful. Time and circumstances and comfort level do not allow you to include everything before you in the picture, as you might be tempted to do when working at home in the studio. So you edit. You make decisions about what to include that may say what you feel about the place and may share the experience you are having there. Do you say it perfectly? As an amateur, no… but does it matter? You have been there and you recorded your presence.

Regarding painting outside the studio, to paraphrase Tolstoy, how much kit does a man (or woman) need? Not all that much really, a lightweight stool, your sketchbook or block which you hold on your lap, a small palette of colors, a couple of brushes, water and a cup, a few folded paper towels and maybe a sponge. A camera to take some shots back home with you is nice but not entirely necessary. Your small rocket stove for a cuppa is especially welcome on a day like this. As you can see by all the layers of shirts I had on, it was chilly.

The experience was awesome, in the old sense of the word…”filled with a sense of reverential respect and wonder.”

As a side note, did you know that Thoreau is called the Patron Saint of swamps?

Writing in Walden, he said, “My temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”

My swamp is the wetlands near my home. 😊