Laura Cunningham Art and Nature

Check out my new Meet Up group for painting and sketching in the Great Basin. I'll be in South Lake Tahoe the first week of August. https://www.meetup.com/Great-Basin-Plein-Air-Painters/  Also a new Facebook page to go with it, where I share my explorations of the Great Basin:  https://www.facebook.com/Great-Basin-Plein-Air-Painters-105666293452755/ It's a long process, but this is all part of how I do research for a potential Volume 2 book on the Ecological History of the Great Basin, which would be a companion volume to A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010). Field sketching in the Wee Pah Springs Wilderness Area on Timber Mountain, Nevada. Plein air painting on Sonora Pass CA in the Sierra Nevada. A lot of snow in June 2017!

The past month I've been trying to bring the paint box along with me more on trips and pause for an hour or two at certain spots to paint a landscape or a study of a part of a natural feature. Since I live in the Nevada Desert, any sort of travel means I have to drive through some beautiful countryside, so I have been determined to paint more of it (and sketch it too). In this 3 part series I show some of my methods and the resulting open-air oil paintings. Twenty or so years ago when I took my paint box outdoors to do oil studies it was this large and somewhat clunky old paint box: This served me well over the years, and it held everything I needed, but it was large and heavy--too heavy really to take on a hike. I usually sat on a chair or on the ground and set this paint box on the ground near me or on a table--no tripod in those days. Today there is a large array of small, light-weight, and well-designed paint boxes of all kinds to choose from. Many come wit...