Marc Dalessio

After a week of polishing things up, here are some of the sketches from Myanmar. There are no titles on the images yet as I have to get a map out and find the names of all the places and pagodas. These are the smaller paintings, the larger ones are still on the easel, so to speak.

I’m trying a new plug-in to display them. You can use the fancy PicLens screen or just click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images.

Let me know if you have any problems.

[View with PicLens]

My suitcase-of-paintings safely back in the studio.

Opening the box slowly for the rat/gecko/spider check.

I spend an inordinate amount of time discussing this with my fellow painters. With the new security restrictions on airplanes and the airlines trying to squeeze more money out of passengers with weight limits, traveling with a large amount of painting equipment is getting harder and harder.

I’ve never traveled with turpentine, or anything I felt was dangerous, yet I have still had equipment taken from me at airports. Often in big American airports, when I would have difficulty getting through the screening, just changing to another x-ray station would get me through. It seems to often be just the decision of one individual whether or not tubed oil paint is dangerous.  Once I had an agent take all my hand ground paint because the tubes were unlabeled. When I protested that I had made them myself he said that I should make my own labels too. So I did. I named my brand ‘Safety Series’ and had labels professionally printed to fit my tubes. That worked until the 100ml rule, and now its just easier to send them in my baggage. My (non-flammable) medium goes in a shampoo bottle, the Canada balsam smells like conditioner anyways.

Turpentine can be bought almost everywhere. The problem many people have is that they go looking for ‘art supply stores’ rather than the ‘chemical shops’ where most people buy turpentine in countries without large numbers of oil painters.

On this trip I was hit with massive overweight fees both going out and coming back. Luckily I was able to talk them down both times. The smart thing to do these days is what all of my fellow painters did, which is put everything heavy (including the box-easel) into the biggest carry-on that you get away with. One even filled his jacket pockets with books and cameras and other heavy objects.

Overall I’ve had good luck with Airport security. If you try to make things easy for them, they are usually accommodating to the fact that we are not the average traveler.

Maung Thiha painting near the Sulamani temple.

While in Bagan I was fortunate enough to meet a group of Burmese landscape painters centered around a teacher, Maung Thiha. They work mostly in watercolor en plein air, and paint in acrylics from photos in their studios. Apparently, a century ago, a Burmese painter (whose name I forget) studied in London and then returned to Myanmar to teach at the art school in Mandalay. Today there are a number of working painters and teachers artistically descended from this one individual.

Lin perched on a pagoda, near the Sulamani temple.

Having local painters to show me the best spots (and drive me around on their scooters) helped immensely. In exchange, I left them painting equipment and took some of Maung Thiha’s watercolors to try to sell for him in the off-season. Here are a couple of his watercolors, contact me if you are interested in purchasing one of these gems.

Burma Road by Maung Thiha. 30 x 40 cm, watercolor. (SOLD)

Dhammayangyi at Dawn by Maung Thiha. 35 x 25 cm, watercolor, 2009.

On the last day, the maestro asked me if I would paint his portrait. I only had time for a short sketch, but one of his students filmed the whole thing and I tried my best to explain sight-size portraiture while working.

Sight-size portraiture in New Bagan.

The portrait sketch after an hour or so.

We also had a small exhibition towards the end of the trip and invited the local artists. It was quite interesting to get their feedback on what subjects they liked from our oeuvre. One problem I had when they were trying to show me their favorite spots was that they wanted to paint the ruins which looked like European ruins, whereas I was interested in the more exotic (to me) subjects. I got the feeling they were a bit bored of painting temples and pagodas (there are almost 3000 in the 20 mile radius around them).

Our end-of-the-trip exhibition.

The interaction with this group of painters was probably a high point of the trip. If anyone else is planning a plein air excursion to Myanmar and will be passing through Bagan, I would highly recommend you stop by the Heritage gallery in New Bagan and ask them to show you the good spots.

Plein air painting at the Shwezigon Pagoda.

I just got back this morning from a month of plein air painting in Bagan, Myanmar. The trip was very productive and I managed to paint almost 40 sketches in 28 days. Everything is still packed up in the studio but I’ll put some of the work up when after I’ve polished it up. In the meantime here are some images of the trip.

You can see all the posts on the Myanmar trip here.

The gang scouting outside of the Shwezigon Pagoda

Anna scouting near the Soe-min-gyi Pagoda.

Pushing the limits of what you can carry with a Julian box-easel.

Justin, Anna and I heading off in the morning.

A much better way to move around in 35°C heat, thanks to the local plein air painting group.

My studio on the banks of the Irrawaddy River.

The Joys of plein air painting.

Having grown up in the tropics and then in Southern California, I have always been fascinated by snow. Here in Tuscany winters are also rather gray, so every year I try to get some plein air painting done in the snow. Luckily I’m just a short drive away from some of the most picturesque Alpine scenes in the world.

This week I was offered the use of a Chalet in the small village of Saanen, just outside of Gstaad in Switzerland in exchange for one of the sketches and I jumped at the chance. Gstaad itself isn’t very paintable, but the neighboring villages, Saanen, Gsteig, Lauenen, and Rougemont are all very beautiful.

The village of Saanen.

An old friend, Calyxte Campe, happened to be painting there at the same time (and had already done extensive scouting, conveniently for me), so the two of us painted together for the week.

Calyxte and I above Rougemont.

Painting plein air in the snow can actually be quite comfortable. On the days when it was really cold I tried the ‘Hibbard Mitten’ (thanks Darren!), which is basically a large knit sock on your painting hand which you poke your brush into. This way you can hold the brush with your bare hand inside the sock. It takes some getting used to holding the brush so far back on the handle, but you have much better control than trying to paint with a glove. I also used those little hand-warmer packets under my toes in my shoes.

Here are a couple of the sketches, I’ll put the whole series on my Artipolis site when I’ve finished them (I liked the old Swiss barns and farmhouses a lot).

Barn at Lauenen. 25 x 35 cm, oil on board.

Farm above Rougemont. 25 x 35 cm, oil on board.

The Church at Saanen. 30 x 20 cm.

Above Turbach. 20 x 30 cm

I’ve been trying to work larger outdoors. With today’s modern conveniences, we should have less trouble moving our equipment around. I was always impressed with the photos of Sorolla painting on his massive canvases with large wooden structures to protect them from the wind.

My idea now is to have an easel made that I can attach to the side of my car. I already use the car all the time as a windbreak as it is so tall, now I just need a way to attach a canvas to the side…

Here is an image of the final painting:

In the Face of all Aridity. Oil on linen, 120 x 150 cm (47 x 59 in). 2008

I spend a lot of time driving around the Tuscan countryside every summer looking for great spots to paint.

An ongoing project of mine is to take a picture from every spot I find which I think is especially picturesque. The camera on my cellphone is set to automatically check the built-in gps system to see where I am in the world, and the phone is set to automatically upload my landscape photos to a Flickr set. Flickr can then parse the location data in the photo and place it on a map.

Another painter can then check my ‘landscape archive’ map on Flickr to see if any of the views interest them.

At the moment there are just a few practice shots up, but over the next couple months the map should fill up.

(The phone is a Nokia N82, if anyone was curious).