You can often say more by suggesting than by rendering. ·
Nanette
Biers
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Nanette Biers paints California in oil, mostly outdoors: Sonoma springs, Marin hills, Drakes Beach under a harvest moon, a friend's garden, ducks and cattle in the light. Loose, luminous brushwork in the plein-air tradition of Sargent and Sorolla.”
— Nanette Biers
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Nanette paints outdoors whenever she can. She sets up her pochade box in front of the subject, in a Sonoma field, at Olompali Park, on Drakes Beach, and works fast, because the light she wants to catch is fleeting. Painting from life lets her see far more colour than a photograph shows, and the time pressure makes her simplify and paint looser, which she likes. A good painting done outdoors in a couple of hours, she says, can feel more rewarding than taking your time in the studio, and the energy of the effort shows. She begins with small sketches to work out the composition, then blocks in the big shapes without getting caught up in detail. She doesn't necessarily paint exactly what she sees: she moves things around, leaves things out, makes things up, and lets the brushwork suggest rather than render. Her palette is built on a few strong colours: titanium white, ultramarine blue, cadmium red medium and cadmium yellow medium, mixed into the warm and cool notes of California light. In the studio she can work bigger, at a more relaxed pace and with more detail, on pieces like A Sense of Scale. But it is the outdoors that keeps her painting: the more you do it, the better you become, and the more fun you have.
