Artists who love to paint in plein air, or outdoors, find that summer is an odd time to paint outside.  I know that is surprising because the weather is good and it is much easier to travel to interesting locations, but there is a reason some do not care for that season.  It is that a lot of the landscape is green and it is very uninteresting to paint everything the same.

That is why autumn is so popular for outdoor painting for artists.  However, the more experienced artists do not paint everything the same green when painting summer scenes.  What they do is add other colours in various shades to the greens or mix their own greens by adding red and yellow and blue or earth colours and greens, and even black and white and they might use yellow, yellow green, blue green, and a myriad of other colour combinations for more realistic summer nature mixes.

The Group of Seven artists used a wide range of colours in their art works to make a statement and none of their paintings are monotonous because they did not hesitate to use more colour in their art work.  They took lots of liberties and probably added many colours that were not there.

Contemporary painters enjoy the challenge of summer colour.  They do not hesitate to paint soft yellow skies, purple roads, and other elements in landscape with emotive colours and in creative ways.  Abstracting the landscape yet keeping some of the elements of representational recognition is widely practised.  These artists do not remain slaves to what they see.  They often paint landscapes, picking and chosing the elements they wish to include.

They are of the mind that the painting, once started, is a world onto itself. It does not have to adhere completely to what is being viewed.  They can move landscape elements around, to whisk a tree which is on the right foreground in real life to the far left distance of the painting, to include in or remove that which does not contribute to the compositional flow, the colour moods and the emotions that the artists are trying to convey and elicit.

Adding that to the directionality of the artwork, vertical for the active landscape and horizontal for calmer could be other ways in which the artist changes up the ways to view the summer world. 

For myself I love to paint outdoors in the summer time.  I can place myself under a tree, listen to the brook gurgling over the rocks, hear the summer sounds.  My vocation and avocation are the same.  I paint to live and I live to paint.  www.valeriekent.com