Plein Air

The Mechanical Liberation of the Sun-Drenched Canvas

In the early years following my time after the army and before art school, my creative universe was largely contained within the four walls of a garage studio at 2 de Vos Street in Worcester. It was a space of controlled shadows and the familiar, stagnant scent of turpentine, a sanctuary where the outside world was filtered through a single window. However, there is a limit to how long one can stare at the same patch of concrete and the same arrangements of still life objects. Eventually, the itch to capture something more visceral took hold, and I decided it was time to abandon the sanctuary of the garage and venture into the blinding light of the Worcester area to try my hand at painting outdoors.

There is a romanticized image of the outdoor painter that has persisted since the nineteenth century—a solitary figure in a straw hat, peacefully dabbing at a canvas while a gentle breeze whispers through the trees. This European ideal, born of rolling green hills and soft, temperate light, is a lovely fiction. The reality of the South African sun quickly dispels such notions. Painting outdoors in the Worcester heat is less of a spiritual retreat and more of a tactical struggle against the elements. The light doesn't just illuminate the landscape; it punishes the retina, washing out colours and creating high-contrast glares that make every aesthetic decision feel like a gamble.

Then there are the insects—an enterprising local workforce of flies and midges that seem to view a wet oil painting as a newly opened landing strip or, worse, a communal grave. I remember being perched in the scrub of the Nuy area, trying to capture the blue haze of the mountains and the parched ochre of the grass, while simultaneously fending off a swarm of gnats with my palette knife. Every brushstroke was a race against the sun, which threatened to bake the paint directly onto the bristles of my brushes before they even touched the canvas. It was during these sweltering sessions, drenched in sweat and squinting against the glare, that I truly began to appreciate the mechanical liberation that allowed me to be there in the first place.

The term we use for this, "en plein air," sounds remarkably sophisticated when spoken in a studio, derived from the French for "in the open air." It carries an air of high-minded artistic philosophy, suggesting a pure, unmediated communion with nature. In the French tradition, it was about capturing the ephemeral quality of light as it danced across the Seine or filtered through the leaves of Fontainebleau. But in the dusty reality of the Breede River Valley, the phrase takes on a more practical, almost ironic meaning. To paint "in the open air" here is to accept the dust in your palette, the wind rattling your easel, and the harsh, unforgiving clarity of a sky that offers no clouds for relief. The elegance of the French terminology often masks the sheer physical endurance required to actually execute it under a sun that feels several miles closer to the earth than it does in Paris.

For centuries, the grandeur of Western art was born within the somber, controlled confines of the studio. Before the mid-nineteenth century, an artist wishing to capture the landscape had to be a chemist as much as a draftsman. The physical act of painting outdoors was a logistical nightmare that discouraged all but the most dedicated or masochistic. An artist had to grind dry pigments by hand and mix them with linseed oil on a stone slab just to get started. These volatile mixtures were then stored in pig bladders tied shut with string. To get the paint out, you had to prick the bladder with a pin, but there was no way to reseal it afterward. The paint would inevitably oxidize and dry within a day, forcing a methodical, one-colour-at-a-time pace that killed any chance of spontaneity.

Furthermore, these organic containers were prone to bursting during transport, a messy catastrophe for anyone traveling on foot or horseback. Imagine trekking into the rugged Worcester landscape with a bag full of fragile, leaking pig bladders; the local baboons would have had a field day with the scent and the mess. The "little metal marvel" that changed everything arrived in 1841 when John Goffe Rand patented the first collapsible tin paint tube. This simple invention featured a screw cap that provided an airtight seal, allowing paint to be preserved for long periods and squeezed out in precise amounts. This effectively liberated the artist from the studio, turning a stationary craft into a mobile one. When combined with portable "box easels"—compact units that folded into carrying cases—the artist’s studio became entirely mobile. As Renoir later reflected, "Without colours in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism".

Of course, the liberation of the tin tube also invited a unique set of disasters that the Old Masters never had to contemplate. On one particular afternoon, I had finished an outdoor painting session at Brandvlei lake, about five kilometers outside the town. My primary mode of transport was  my bicycle, and the logistics of moving a wet oil painting on two wheels requires the kind of balance usually reserved for circus performers. I was pedaling back toward de Vos Street, the finished canvas balanced precariously on my handlebars, my mind already drifting toward a cooldrink and the shade of the garage.

The afternoon was typical for the region: hot, dry, and increasingly gusty. I was making good time when a sudden gust of wind caught the canvas like a sail. In a moment of slow-motion horror, the painting was ripped from my hands and dived face-up onto the tarmac directly in front of my moving bike. There was no time to brake. I felt the distinct thump-thump as both wheels rolled directly over the center of my landscape. I skidded to a halt, heart sinking, convinced that hours of work had been reduced to a smeared mess of asphalt and oil.

I peeled the canvas off the road, half-expecting a total loss. Instead, I found that the bicycle tires had left a magnificent, textured track mark through the wet paint, cutting a geometric, repeating pattern across the organic curves of the Brandvlei shoreline. It was a collaboration between man, machine, and the South African elements. The tire tread had added a layer of grit and industrial reality that my brushes never could have achieved. At that moment, I felt a strange kinship with the Impressionists who had come before me. Monet famously braved the rough northern coast of France to paint Waves at the Manneport, on one occasion being dragged into the sea by a rogue wave that destroyed his materials and left his beard covered in blue and yellow paint. My bicycle tracks were simply the Worcester version of a rogue wave. The tin tube had allowed me to get out there into the wild, and the bicycle had finished the job, leaving its own indelible mark on the history of my personal artistic journey. See less