A Maine redditor posted this shot of a small seascape his parents bought in the 1950’s to the /r/whatisthispainting subreddit.

I don’t recognize the artist. The signature is nearly illegible and crude, unlike the painting itself.

But I do recognize the work of an artist who had a reason to paint.

And I recognize the hand of an artist who’s continually working things out. An artist not so firmly entrenched in method that their work is essentially done upon arrival at the site, with the matter of transferring image from wide visual field to panel being simply clean-up.

Everything holds like a tightrope walker between the territories of paint and wet splashy rocky world.

The furthest distance is greasy with strokes swirled not by an attempt to convey swirliness or to add movement, but by the application of paint. The next layers trace a hand animated by wind gusts, salty sprays, a single brighter-green hit between the putty greens and grays. The rocks are simply laid, severe, with a contrast of smooth, confident strokes and later, thicker, smaller, shivery strokes, as though the hands were cold, perhaps numbing, or simply uncertain.

As a field with its own magazines, plein-air is rife with method-first painters. Their entire idea of the activity revolves around perfecting a method for quickly producing a sales-inducing kind of visual perfection. Most are simply working to fill the racks they present beneath their portable tent at craft sales. Time being money, who can blame them for relying on simplistic methods to crank out product?

A handful have the time for self-doubt, reflection, discovery, really the mistakes, that become distinctive, compelling, inspiring art.