Winter Plein air painting with Donald Jurney

Anytime Donald Jurney calls you to go plein air painting, you grab your gear and make it happen...even if it means ankle deep snow and sub zero temps.  Donald Jurney is American landscape painting royalty...in my opinion, one of the best practitioners of the craft today.  Just awesome in so many ways.  

Donald is a friend and incredibly generous mentor.  In the few years I've known Donald, I've observed him share so much to so many aspiring artist.  Five things about Donald Jurney you might like to know;  

1) He makes them up!!!...Yes!...that's right, his landscape paintings come out of his head.  No reference.  2) He starts with burnt umber and ultramarine blue and completes an underpainting with these two colors only.  3) He uses a small bristle round brush for most of the painting process...even the really large canvases.  He scribbled, calligraphs, scrubs and marks.  4) The only other brush I've seen him use is a wide, inexpensive house chip brush.  5) He spent a large part of his early career filling sketchbooks with landscape sketches drawn from life while living in the French and English countryside.  I believe it was these valuable years, massing hundreds of drawings that he built his outdoor visual vocabulary that enables him to make them up with convincing results and with such virtuosity.  Amazing.