In two days, I’ll be participating in an annual plein-air painting day with my local Artists’ Circle. Plein-air painting basically just means painting outdoors, usually landscapes; rendering the scene that an artist sees when they look up from their easel.
Whether impressionist, abstract, realist, or another artistic style, plein-air painting is about closely observing what you’re painting. The local colours, reflections, shadows, and even the ways the light moves across a scene when a cloud passes overhead.
Although artists were already painting en plein-air, this was made popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Impressionists like Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley. Canadian Helen McNicoll, who died in 1915 as “one of the most profoundly original and technically accomplished of Canadian artists” (1), was also a plein-air painter.
Helen McNicoll became an internationally successful artist and traveller, despite being deaf in a time when there were very few services available for people with disabilities – particularly for invisible health challenges. As someone who also lives with invisible disability, a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) which resulted from my rare disease, she is my inspiration as I learn to paint. The CRPS may have stolen my career in my bioethics, but it hasn’t killed off my desire to learn and to be creative.
Much of my own painting, with watercolours, is done en plein-air, using the saddlebags of my bicycle as an easel. Living in Montreal, with our snowy and icy winters, almost all of my cold-weather artworks are created in my studio – from my own nature photos. I used to do a lot of amateur nature photography, so I doubt I’ll ever run out of things to paint!
Whether I’m painting in my studio, or sketching and creating studies – small paintings as ideas for larger artworks – outdoors, I’m almost always alone. Occasionally someone will stop by, as I’m painting near a trail or in a park, to ask about what I’m doing. Sometimes a person will even stay for a while, to watch me paint. But I’m almost always alone.
So these annual plein-air painting events, and the occasional plein-air art workshop, are a lot of fun for me. This year the members of the Artists Circle of the West Island (of Montreal) will be meeting at another gorgeous lakeside park, on the southern edge of Montreal Island, from 1000 to about 1400. The organizers will be providing a cold lunch of sandwiches and slab pizza, and a few of us have volunteered to bring some additional dishes.
One artist is bringing a broccoli salad, and I’ve volunteered to bring a ‘relatively healthy’ dessert. I try to eat a mostly anti-inflammatory diet, to help manage the symptoms of my Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), which often means trying to avoid added sugars. There’s a recipe that I really like for chocolate-banana muffins, but I wanted to try to make bite-sized mini-muffins and try out my 3 different sizes of donut pans… These pans allow you to make donuts ‘healthier’, by baking them rather than frying them. (2)
That meant that I’d have to play with my recipe a bit, to figure out the best baking time for each type of pan that I wanted to use; for mini-muffins, mini-donuts, small donuts, and smallish ‘regular’ sized donuts. Changing the size of a baked good changes the time required for it to cook properly. This morning I’d blocked some time in my calendar to do just that; to test cooking times for each size of these little finger-food desserts.
Of course, my little CRPS and chronic pain awareness buddy/bunny Max wanted in on this action; he’s a bit of a chocoholic, between you and me! Not that I blame him, of course, as I’m kind of partial to dark chocolate myself. It’s a running joke with my husband, when Max comes out while I’m baking, that this tiny plush bunny is responsible for double-checking the recipes to be sure that I don’t forget any of the ingredients… that’s always a danger due to the mild cognitive impairment with which I’ve been sharing my life since the end of 2018.
Max took his task seriously, and he made sure that I didn’t forget any of the ingredients. What I did forget to do, though, was to oil all but one of my baking pans. If you do any baking at all, you’ll understand how absolutely basic this is; it’s something you do literally without thinking of it. Which is probably precisely why my ‘impaired’ brain forgot about it – ugghhh!
We ended up having to pry out almost of the donuts, leaving quite a bit stuck onto the pans – now soaking in almost-boiling water in the sink. My husband is kind of happy, as this means that he’ll “have to” eat all these himself because they look too horrible to give to anyone as I’d planned to. But for me, it feels almost as though I was baking without a brain.
It’s a good thing that this batch wasn’t the one that I’d planned to serve at Thursday’s outdoor art event! I’ve now added a note to my recipe instructions – to oil ALL of the pans at the very start of the baking process – to hopefully have better results when I bake the final versions tomorrow. Wish me luck!
As always, thanks so much for stopping by. Feel free to comment or just reach out to say hi over on Instagram or Twitter. There’s no longer any Comments section here on the blog, because it became too much for me to handle with my cognitive issues. I had to disable this feature, but I do still love to hear from you! Stay well, and keep safe…
References
(1) Samantha Burton. Helen McNicoll: Life & Work. Art Canada Institute. 27 Apr 2020. ISBN 9781487102111. Book, now available online:
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/helen-mcnicoll/
(2) Katilin Menza. 7 Amazing Baked Doughnuts That Are Better for You Than the Fried Version. Women’s Health (A Part of Hearst Digital Media). 26 Sep 2014. Online. Accessed 05 Jul 2022:
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a19946317/baked-doughnut-recipes/