Because it’s a form I’d like to make use of, I follow many plein-air landscape painters on Insta. They’re all competent landscape painters, one way or another. Some have very distinct styles. Others not so much, a point I’d make to their credit.

What very few plein-air painters deliver is paintings that regularly give a strong reason to look at them beyond a passing glance.

Most plein-air painters on Insta seem to be painting just to be painting, or to build inventory, or to stay in practice, or for some other reason people use to justify simply cranking out art.

If they ever possessed the sense that painting should be event, or should contain event (working out exactly how to state this), or to mean something beyond the attractive covering of small bits of wall, they’ve lost it.

I’m not talking spectacle, which I consider easy and cheap. “God DAMN look at that cloud!”

I’m talking about one of the items in this highly incomplete list – just working off the top of my head (as with all art thoughts here):

— unusual viewpoint

— surprising composition

— compelling coloration

— interesting mix of abstraction and realism

— compelling sense of touch

— strong evocation of an emotion

— powerful sense of place

— any sense of deep thought, or theory, or idea other than “Gonna paint me a landscape”

It’s no help that the fashion now is to paint little postage stamps on panel, with 12 x 16″ being an absolute maximum size, and most coming in around 6 x 8″.

We all come at art-making from different angles, and it doesn’t surprise me that so many plein-air painters are only plein-air painters, and their ideas and interests don’t extend beyond their tiny panels. The sales they boast prove they’re way ahead of me in terms of making art anyone gives a damn about.

I guess I’m just surprised they’re so easily satisfied.