Ultimate Winter Plein Air Painting Spot - the Mount Washington Hotel

The truly incredible Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire

Spent the weekend in the snow with painting buddy Todd Bonita.

Volpe posing for a feature in "Plein Air Pin-Ups"

After it started snowing late on our first day, we resolved to chase the kind of atmosphere that American Impressionist Willard Metcalf (1858-1925) captured in Cornish, NH paintings such as "The White Veil" and "The Enveloping Mantle."

Willard Metcalf, The White Veil (1909)

They aren't Metty's strongest paintings (I think the ones in full sunlight have more life and better design), but the grays convince with subtle shifts in value and warm and cool tonalities.

Willard Metcalf, The Enveloping Mantle (1920)

We spent two days in the snow, sometimes sinking hip deep in drifts along riverbanks and rocky, wooded hills ......

Todd B. in action.

River painting underway.

I look cold for a reason.

The Intervale, 6x8 oil sketch.

.... before we realized how easy this could have been, perched on the sheltering veranda of the Mount Washington Hotel.

Todd B. painting "the veil" in relative comfort.

The Mount Washington, built in 1902, has been updated to the point of surpassing its original turn-of-the-century-grand-hotel glory. It's now a splendid, world-class resort and spa with six or so floors, several swimming pools including indoor and outdoor (heated and lit up at night, with a little perpetually burning bonfire to stop at and warm up en route), movie theater, numerous ball rooms, restaurants, etc. etc., even its own post office.

They love winter here. Besides downhill and cross-country skiing, they do sled dog rides - one ripped across the road as we drove up to the hotel. Click here for the proof (link's not working great, sorry).

Lobby of the Mount Washington

The building has an enormous wrap-around veranda where nothing's stopping one from setting up an easel and painting any number of gorgeous views while stepping inside for refreshments between paintings.

Snowy peak, 5" x 7" from the hotel porch.

Study of hills from the hotel porch.

It's the perfect base camp for a workshop, too. However, at about $350 a night, folks living on an artist's "salary" might want to do what we did and paint here for the day while sleeping nearby in more modest accommodations. Bonus: there's a 24-hour shuttle that will take you just about anywhere you need to go, too.

Abstract snowy mountainside, also from the porch.

Todd and I are looking into setting up a team-taught workshop here in 2016. It's just too perfect and fun not to at least try to get a group of crazy painters up here with us.

A stranger in paradise.

For those who prefer the sun-kissed beach to the sleet-bitten rock, there are still one or two slots left in our Ogunquit, Maine "Art of Seeing" workshop in September, but don't delay as it's almost filled and it's only March.

In the meantime, there's still plenty of room in my spring White Mountain workshop as Crawford Notch Artist-in-Residence at the AMC Highland Center lodge. That plein air workshop will run May 3-6, 2015. Check here for more info on that.

Willard Leroy Metcalf keeping it real.

Painting in the White Mountains - Field Report

View of Crawford Notch from our base at the AMC Highland Center

The White Mountains, arguably the east coast's most "sublime and picturesque" terrain, have never ceased to fascinate lovers of the outdoors. So it makes sense that some of nature's most rapt admirers - landscape painters - are coming back as they once did to explore the Whites in their art.

The AMC Highland Center at Crawford Notch.

A couple of weeks ago, six men and women joined me for a three-day beginners-welcome workshop at the AMC Highland Center, a wonderful, hotel-like lodge at the base of Crawford Notch in the White Mountain National Forest. . From Sunday till Tuesday all we did was get up in the morning, have an all-you-can-eat breakfast, and walk out the door, set up, and start painting. There were easy hikes to elevated viewpoints and a van at our disposal to take us anywhere in the Whites, but who needs them when everywhere you look there's a painting to be made? We'd break for lunch, paint until 4, and then we'd all meet at 6 for the gourmet dinners served family style complete with beer, wine, and freshly baked bread. 

Painting at the edge of Saco Lake, across the street from the Highland Center.

After dinner the first night I gave a slide talk on the history of White Mountain painting. The next day we painted from a different side of the lodge and that evening we watched Brush and Pen, Artists and Writers of the White Mountains, a documentary on White Mountain history, art, and literature.

The inaugural AMC Highland Center Crawford Notch Artist in Residency was an unqualified success. In a wonderful circularity, two of the participants in the first revival of the Crawford Notch residency - Lisa Shapliegh-Koepke and her mother Elizabeth - were actually descendants of the same Shapleigh family as was the site's original artist-in-residence Frank Henry Shapleigh. 

Frank Henry Shapleigh

Frank Henry Shapleigh's restored 19th century studio building, part of the Highland Center.

Frank Shapleigh was artist-in-residence for 16 years from 1877-1893 at the Crawford House, one of the grandest of the grand hotels, the abandoned hulk of which burned to the ground in 1977. 

Early engraving of the original Crawford House

The Crawford House in its heyday.

Crawford House in 1977, the summer before the fire.

At the age of 86, Elizabeth was an inspiration to us - despite using a walker to get around, she wasn't held back at all and painted with us in all of the locations (it's that easy to find spectacular scenery to paint within easy walking distance of the lodge).

The unstoppable Elizabeth Shapleigh (age 86).

My rendering of the gate of the Notch from Saco Lake.

On Tuesday afternoon, after the official close of the workshop, I hiked up 2,864' Mount Willard (the trailhead is right there). I invited folks from the workshop to join me and three took me up on it. I brought my paint kit so I could sketch the same view that Shapleigh famously painted.

Shapleigh's view from Mount Willard

My photo from roughly the same spot as Shapleigh's painting.

 The view was unbelievable and more than worth the effort of the hike, which wasn't all that bad actually, even with a 30-pound paint kit on my back. The sketch doesn't look like much, but it's got the information I need to build a study and then I can work from there on something larger.

My sketch of the valley of the Notch.

I was fascinated by this peak, and I still want to paint it.

This was nearby but we didn't end up painting it. Next time!

Burning Off, an 8" x 10" I painted from outside the Highland Center

I'm hoping the AMC Crawford Notch residency will become an institution of American plein air painting. The idea is to invite artists from all over the country - plein air painters, mostly - to spend a week in residence at the Highland Center. Each artist will conduct a painting workshop for a set portion of the week and is also encouraged to present an evening program, a talk or presentation, of some kind.

A White Mountain landscape, c. 2013, by contemporary painter Eric Koeppel. 

I think it's great that plein air painting is surging in popularity. The secret is out: oil painting is no longer the difficult, smelly, esoteric, highly specialized art it once seemed. With terabytes of free how-to videos and web texts online, getting started and learning the basics is the easiest it's ever been in the history of the world. It is only a matter of time before the rich history of American landscape painting again becomes common knowledge.

Who knows but a new era of White Mountain painting may even now be on its way?

THE CREW: (L-R) Volpe,  Carrie Masci, Ann Marie Corbett, Lisa Koepke, Elizabeth Shapleigh, Catherine Bickford, David Kimball

The White Mountains, Beautiful & Sublime

Early impressions of the majesty and drama of New Hampshire's White Mountains and the Catskills fired up artists' and the public's imagination and set American painting on its feet.

Thomas Doughty and Alvan Fisher were early artists to find beauty and majestic power the Whites.

Alvan Fisher, Crawford Notch, c. 1820s

Alvan Fisher, The Gate of the Notch from the House of Thomas Crawford

Alvan Fisher, Elephant's Head, Crawford Notch

Thomas Doughty, A Lake in the White Mountains

New York's Hudson River Valley was more accessible in the early 1800s, but a young Thomas Cole, a transplanted British-born landscape painter steeped in European Romanticism, was on the lookout for something more "sublime" than could be found in the picturesque Catskills. He got it in the form of a massive mudslide that wiped out the only settler family in Crawford Notch in 1826. 

Most of the nineteenth century art world thought of beauty in terms of three categories, the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. The first two were about "pleasing the eye" and representing humanity in harmony with nature as a source of spiritual sustenance.

Thomas Cole, Catskill Creek, 1845

Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Merchants, c. 1650

Cole in the 1800s, as you can see from comparing the two paintings above, often repeated a European formula for landscape painting laid down by Claude Lorraine in the mid 1600s. Many of Claude's paintings are "pastoral" because they depict idealized scenes of classical rural life - shepherds, nymphs, pagan temples and benign characters from Romand and Greek literature. Cole painted "picturesquely" throughout his career. The Cole above is "picturesque" because of the bucolic, pleasing aspects of nature he presents in a harmonious way.)

The last of the three categories of natural beauty, the sublime, as articulated by English philosopher Edmund Burke, refers to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed Nature and its overwhelming forces such as thunderstorms, deep chasms, glacial rivers and voids - anything that reminds us that humanity is not in control.

The European Sublime: Salvator Rosa's 17th century depiction of a hermit in the wilderness.

The infamous landslide disaster that befell the Willey family was national news (at the time "national" meant pretty much the east coast to the Mississippi). It had spooky overtones too - although the family evacuated the homestead to shelter in a smaller structure, the thundering avalanche of rocks, trees, and tons of heavy earth hit a boulder in back of the house and split into two streams, leaving the Willey house untouched, only to flow together again and obliterate the shelter and the nine people within it. A Bible was found open at the table in the empty house, where the patriarch must have been reading aloud from Psalm 18: 

"The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice, hail stones and coals of fire... the foundation of the earth was [laid bare] in thy rebuke, Oh God."s

As a motif of the New World Sublime it was tailor made, and Cole came up to sketch the site as soon as he could. Europe had classical ruins, abandoned medieval abbeys and other emblems of humanity's smallness in the face of time and natural law, but America was too new for that kind of mythology. What it did have though was wilderness. Cole's depictions of the White Mountains wilderness, complete with symbolic summits and dead trees dwarfing tiny emblems of humanity, were a sensation. 

Thos. Cole, Autumn Landscape, Mount Chocorua, NH, 1828

On arriving at the location, Cole wrote the following: We now entered the Notch, and felt awestruck as we passed between the bare and rifted mountains. . . . The site of the Willie [sic] House standing with a little patch of green in the midst [of] the dread wilderness of desolation called to mind the horrors of that night. . . when these mountains were deluged and rocks and trees were hurled from their high places down the steep channelled sides of the mountains. . . .

Ten years later, his famous A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (1839) depicts the hotel that was built on the site two years after the slide.

Thomas Cole, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, 1839 

Here Cole has harmoniously married the beautiful and the terrible, the peaceful and the threatening, as evidenced most clearly in the two skies, one calm, the other stormy, and the inclusion of both hand-hewn tree stumps and naturally broken trees. 

Here's another example of White Mountain paintings that touches upon the sublime.

Jasper Cropsey, An Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains, 1857

Blending to varying degrees the sublime and the picturesque in single paintings, Cole would become the father of the style of painting that would later be called the Hudson River School; the nation's top landscapists and many others followed to discover and sketch on many other painting sites in the Whites.

William Trost Richards, View in the White Mountains, 1866

John Frederick Kensett, A Reminiscence of the White Mountains

John Frederick Kensett, An October Day in the White Mountains, 1854

Close to 200 years later, the White Mountains still offer artists a sense of the primeval and the vast. Here in Eric Aho's 2008 "Blasted Tree" we get a contemporary painter's interpretation of the wilderness of the north, even down to the broken tree that here takes a central role.

Eric Aho, Blasted Tree, 50" x 70," oil on linen, 2008

White Mountain Workshop

I'll be teaching a three-day plein air workshop in the White Mountains, not far from the site of the Willey disaster in Crawford's Notch next week (Sunday - Wednesday, Sept 28-30). Want to come? You can register here.