Making Art on the Go

Lorraine Glessner

I have been organizing self-made residencies annually since 2019. After many dollars and hours spent applying for and being rejected from numerous traditional artist residency programs, I decided to save application fees and spend them on a residency that I made myself. I’ve also had “mini” residencies at home during COVID, during workshop travels, and during the past two summers, while teaching my encaustic retreats in Vermont. The best thing to realize about organizing a self-made residency is that there is an alternative to traditional residency programs, you don’t have to rely on them exclusively. Further, you don’t have to rely on having a studio, an awesome place or even inspiration (whatever that means to you) in order to make art. You can make art anywhere and gather your inspiration from just taking a walk in your immediate surroundings. In this article, I share with you how I use travel, hiking, and responding to my surroundings as inspiration for my work in the hopes that you will also be inspired to create art anytime, anywhere.

During my first self-made residency, I discovered hiking/walking as an art practice. It’s been said that Beethoven always walked with a notebook, as the act of walking helped him to work out his themes.

In the book Mapping: The Intelligence of Artistic Work by Anne West, she writes, “Somewhere I read ‘where the feet walk centers poetry.’ This is another way of saying that by placing the mind and body in movement it is possible to approach the heart of things from another direction. Walking helps to ignite the senses and to open self to external stimuli. To walk is to cultivate a wandering intelligence where we are placed in fresh relationship with the world and happenstance. When walking, thoughts are allowed to be free. We entrust ourselves to chance. Anywhere, anytime the unpredictable may appear. All we need to do is stay open to it.” 1

My work is rooted in landscape and the body, so inserting my body and intentionally experiencing the landscape with it is a goal. During my residencies, I literally walk five to seven miles a day, always in a diferent place with various terrain. Beach, forest, swamp, stormy, sunny, hot, cool, hills, flat… Northern Florida in January has it all. Navigating weather, wild animals, and sometimes rough terrain helps me to become more connected to the place, my thoughts, and myself. Hiking and photography have always been a part of my work. The act of focusing on a subject and taking a photo somehow records it in my head, and it becomes a part of me. Taking many photos of the same subject really burns it into my head. It’s like the beginnings of a plein air sketch.

Additional inspiration images taken on hikes during my 2019-2021 Florida self-made residencies.

1 West, Anne. Mapping: The Intelligence of Artistic Work. (Maine: Moth Press, 2011), p#89

One thing that photographs help me do is focus on the small things, to notice little things in the landscape that otherwise would go unnoticed. (top left and right)

I also notice and collect little treasures… (middle left and bottom left and right)

Sometimes I keep them and other times I arrange them on the trail. I’m no Andy Goldsworthy,2 but I have fun finding little things and arranging them. Like the photos, I see these simple installations as drawings or plein air sketches that better help me to know the place and for the place to know me.

2 Andy Goldsworthy is a contemporary English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist, who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Everywhere I hike I sit, sometimes in several places. Once I find a place I always meditate, then I write, and then I paint. During my first Florida residency, I first began making plein air watercolors, but this became a bit overwhelming. Just by doodling in my sketchbook, I came up with two simple exercises that helped to map these places — horizon contour drawings and palette paintings.

The contour drawings started a few years earlier while I was in Utah teaching a workshop. We made plant brushes, dipped them in ink, and traced the contour of the landscape.

The idea was to create images of landscape using actual parts of the landscape. Using the structure of the initial contour lines, I connected them — like walking through the drawings but with lines. I then added patterns from the landscape and strangely enough, the drawings actually took on the overall rhythm and carved look of the terrain.

So believe it or not, these drawings were actually done a year before this photograph was taken, but the similarities are uncanny. I don’t look at the hiking photos while I paint. In fact, I rarely look at them again after I take them. It always amazes me how my photographs and paintings intertwine in my head.

Contour drawings of Florida and photograph of the Florida landscape taken two years after the drawings were made.

The palette paintings came about as a way for me to record the landscape without actually painting landscape. I had been really inspired by Ellen Heck’s Color Wheels series.3 Heck is actually a printmaker and narrative figurative painter. She created the wheels as “both a visual journal and a systems based color study,” and for her, they grew into an ongoing series of abstract works.

I hadn’t really planned to do anything like this, but I did remember the series out on the trail. I made circles with my bottle cap and ovals from some packaging I had, and there was my structure. To paint my palette, I simply choose a small section (sometimes as small as a square inch) of the landscape and paint all the colors I see in it, rather than painting the whole of what’s in front of me.

Please enjoy these palette painting examples and read on for instructions on how to glean inspiration out on the trail.

3 “The Color Wheels project is both a visual journal and systems-based color study. I have used the wheels as a foundation for creating large, sometimes serial, seemingly-abstract works, many of which are multiple-panel compositions. The wheels for each grouping are intaglio printed from the same plate, and serve as both a sub-structure and not-so-blank slate. I begin by considering one wheel at a time, often finding a particular theme for a panel and behaving as if it were a stand-alone piece. The wheel lends itself to organizing information, and I have used panels to chart the color of the surface of the San Francisco Bay over time, break apart master works to examine their components, and document a series of self-assigned systems that are often a chimerical mix of process and play.” ellenheck.com/portfolio/color-wheels

By Permission of the Artist

Ellen Heck, Carolina Color Wheel: Drift, Various Media

By Permission of the Artist

Palette Painting done in plein air while hiking, watercolor, gouache on paper

Finding Inspiration; Recording Your Environment

1. Take a walk, experience it with all of your senses. Take photos as you go - anything that catches your eye. You may never use these images or even refer to them again, but looking, framing, and focusing with the camera, pressing the shutter - all of these actions actually work together to create a recording that informs your creative mind.

2. When you feel the time is right, settle in a spot and experience it through all of your senses. Listening, breathing, looking, touching, tasting, smelling for 10 minutes as a form of meditation. Try to time your breathing to the wind, water, and sounds in the environment.

3. After 10 minutes of quiet meditation, spend 10 minutes freely writing and creating a narrative of this environment. Pay particular attention to the rhythms, patterns, repetitious sounds, sights, smells and what kinds of emotions they evoke in you.

4. Horizon Contour Drawing: a. Stare at the horizon line and from as far left as you can see, follow it with your eyes to as far right as you can see, repeat a few times. b. Now, with your finger in the air, trace that same horizon line from left to right. Do this three times. c. Now with any sketching material, trace this horizon contour in your sketchbook. Draw it multiple times on the same page, allowing the rhythms of the place to direct the rhythm of your drawing. d. Begin adding in other rhythmic details such as sounds, objects, tactile qualities — use symbols, marks, text, and color. e. Draw for 20-30 continuous minutes, creating as many drawings as you like. f. Make a note on the drawing: where you are, date and time of day.

5. Palette Paintings of the Environment: a. Trace around a bottle cap or a quarter, something small that you can carry in your backpack. Make 10 circles or squares of the same size in your sketchbook. Choose an area in your environment (as small as an inch square or as large as several square feet). b. Map all of the colors you see in your chosen area using watercolor, gouache, or watercolor pencils.

6. Combine a Contour Drawing with a Palette Painting to further inspire your mapping and recording of a place.

7. Take these recordings back to the studio and work back into them with further painting, collage, drawing or use them as a basis for a painting series.

Want to make art on the go with me and three other encaustic instructors? Join me this summer in June, July, or August for my Vermont Encaustic Retreats. Visit this link for descriptions and registration. www.lorraineglessner.net/workshop-intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TYC6_joPY&t=96s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUnXDdXHG10

Digital Catalog for exhibition, With Wax: Materiality & Mixed Media in Encaustic, curated by Lorraine Glessner and held at the Chester County Art Association, September, 2022.

A tour of one of my self-made artist residencies in Florida, January, 2021.

Next page left, Winter Light Series 8, Encaustic monotype, 13 x 9.5 in R&F Brown Pink Residency, 2022

Next page right, Winter Light Series 5, Encaustic monotype, 13 x 9.5 in R&F Brown Pink Residency, 2022

About the Author

Lorraine is a former Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art, a workshop instructor, and an award-winning artist. Lorraine’s love of surface, pattern, mark making, and image has led her to combine disparate materials and processes in her work such as silk, wood, wax, pyrography, and rust. Recent professional achievements include curating With Wax: Materiality & Mixed Media in Encaustic at Chester County Art Association in West Chester, PA; a Grand Prize Award from the show (re)Building, Atlantic Gallery, New York, NY; and a recently appointed position as a Tier Artist at R&F Paints. Her work is exhibited locally and nationally in galleries, museums, craft centers, universities, fine art shows, and more. Lorraine brings to her teaching a strong interdisciplinary approach, mixed with a balance of concept, process, experimentation, and discovery.

You can view Lorraine’s work at www.lorraineglessner.net www.facebook.com/lorraine.glessner.3 www.instagram.com/lorraineglessner1