Sargent Paints Monet

That "plein air" thing was not always a part of the painting game. The re-invention of paper and stuffing of paints into little tubes was required before painters could leave their studios for field-work. That happened before the Impressionist painters arrived on the scene in France but they certainly gave it a bigger roll than any other group. In Canada, our own Group of Seven had a similar influence on the many small artists dotting our visual landscape.

I learned to paint in the field as the cameras and photographic film of the 1950s brought back truly terrible images. No one would even want to use one of those black & white snapshots as the impetus for a painting. The photograph as fine art was then in the hands of a few with huge budgets; men like Joseph Karsh and Ansel Adams.