My recent winter camping adventure over Christmas break to Cape Hatteras National Seashore NC has inspired a few January evenings of quiet work trying to interpret the many photographs and field sketches I captured there. Winter skies and the muted tones of marsh and dune challenged my perception of space and color so I looked to William Merritt Chase and Frank Dudley, to help me see and interpret differently.
Known for his passion for teaching landscape and portrait, William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) spent summers on Eastern Long Island with his family in a home-studio in the Shinnecock Hills. A career art educator he taught at several art institutes during the school year, but come summer he devoted his time to his own painting, his family, and a small summer art school. I looked at his cloudscapes and dune compositions for clues on how to see the colors hidden inside sand and sky. I experimented with his color schemes and design that added structure to my hastily done field sketches.
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| Front dune path |
I realized that part of the problem was that I had whisked through many of my sketchbook pieces so fast in order to keep my hands and fingers from freezing that I didn't really pay attention to powerful structure of the dunes. I was so rushed that I neglected to capture - even in notes - the weight of dark color against the lighter sand forms. Studying Chase gave me the courage to go dark and reserve the white for hints and highlights. Nowhere in his dune works is sand simply white. Sand reflects the colors around it and on dark, wintery days, my dunes were much improved by using the full palette of dark colored pencils from my field kit.
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| Sunrise sketch |
I took the bold color lessons and applied them to a sunrise sketch. Using two reference photos and my original scribbled field sketch (again, I was freezing!) I dared myself to save only a slim white rim of beach wash and pressed fully into the heaviness of the color scheme depicting an overcast sunrise where only a suggestion of sun leaked from the clouds. I'm really glad I spent an evening with this early 20th century American master as he's changed the way I see and use color in these small sketch renderings.
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| Field sketch on a cold, wind-whipped day |
On another frigid January evening I decided to spend a few cozy hours looking at the work of Frank Dudley, a champion for the conservation landscape that is now the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Through his art and advocacy he was able to spearhead a local and regional effort to protect the wild lakeshore along the southern coast of Lake Michigan. This is a place I love and have visited several times, and I always look forward to going back. It's as wild and crazy and dune landscapes can get, a real treasure for coastal naturalists like me. I love hiking, botanizing, birding, and sketching through the traveling dunes as they roll inland through forests and grasslands and harbor their own unique wetlands, like I found on the Nags Head Woods Preserve on the Outer Banks.
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| Back dune shrub wedge |
As I studied Dudley's dune works I was amazed at how he applied blues, greens, and violets not only as shadow and depth but as major composition components. These clues on how to pull out the monumentality of my own dune sketches launched me into two nights of working and reworking my stack of pencil sketches (not attached to my sketchbook) until I felt brave/determined enough to turn to two sketches in my book and give them the Dudley treatment.
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| Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge |
This little multi-night expedition into Chase and Dudley's work really helped me see color as a dynamic force in the way field sketches can make big landscapes translate to the small space. A big lesson I learned from both artist's techniques and vision was to limit my use of the white paper as light within the sketch. Color is all, said Chase. The second lesson was to be bold in the use of color as design - use color like structure. Chase would make his students gasp with his boldness on the canvas.
Notes:
Frank Dudley. "Inspired by Dunes" Indiana State Museum 2023 Exhibit
Frank Dudley. "Painter of the Dunes" Indiana Historical Society IHS Blog
William Merritt Chase. Parrish Art Museum "The Shinnecock Years" 2019 Exhibit
NPR "William Merritt Chase: The Man Who Taught America's Masters." Susan Stamberg,
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