People often ask why I still paint outdoors when modern cameras can record far more detail than I could ever capture on a small panel in a few hours.
The answer is simple: a photograph and direct observation are not the same thing.
Even the best camera does not see the way the human eye sees. It simplifies some relationships and exaggerates others. It freezes a moment that, in reality, was constantly changing. Light shifts, colors vibrate, and attention moves across the landscape in ways that a photograph cannot fully preserve.
This is why plein air painting remains important to me.
When I work outdoors, I am forced to make decisions quickly. The light changes. The weather changes. Sometimes the entire mood of a scene disappears within minutes. Instead of copying, I have to respond.
What interests me is not accuracy but presence.
Occasionally, something unusual happens during a painting session. For a short period of time, self-consciousness disappears. There is no longer a painter standing in front of a landscape. There is only the act of painting itself. These moments are rare, but they are one of the reasons I continue to work from direct observation.
Plein air painting also brings an unpredictability that I value. Brushstrokes become more direct. Decisions become simpler. Accidents occur. Many of these accidents contain more energy than the carefully planned passages that often emerge in the studio.
Back in the studio, I may use photographs, sketches, or memory. But the plein air study remains the foundation. It contains information that cannot be collected by mechanical means alone: atmosphere, rhythm, and the experience of being present in a particular place.
For me, painting is not about reproducing reality. It is about transforming observation into something that possesses its own life.
When I stand in front of a great painting in a museum, I am rarely interested in its message. What I search for is something more difficult to define: a sense of magnetism, an atmosphere, a world created from brushstrokes, color relationships, and structure.
That is what I continue to pursue in my own work.
And that is why I still paint en plein air.
