About the Artist
Nanette Biers
Nanette Biers is a Corte Madera painter who works in oil, most of all outdoors. Her landscapes, seascapes, gardens, animals and still lifes carry the loose brushwork and the light of the plein-air tradition. As early as 2001, Rebecca Bedrossian wrote in Communication Arts that looking at her oil paintings, the Impressionists Monet, Degas and Cassatt come to mind, not only because of her painterly style but because of her use of light. She painted her very first plein-air picture in 2012, on the first outing of the first Plein Air Convention & Expo outside Las Vegas, in clouds, drizzle, sleet and freezing air, with rain pooling in her pochade box. It did not put her off. Painting outdoors, she says, lets her see much more colour than working from a photograph, and the pressure to capture what is fleeting makes her simplify and paint looser. Her advice to other painters says much about her own work: stay loose, simplify, and remember that you can often say more by suggesting than by rendering. Her subjects are close to home: Sonoma in spring, Olompali Park, the Marin hills and vineyards, Drakes Beach under a harvest moon, the marine layer on the coast, ducks and chickens and cattle, a friend's garden, a bowl of almonds and grapes. Her heroes are Sargent, Sorolla, Zorn, Edgar Payne and William Wendt, and many living plein-air painters. Nanette is an artist member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, which named her Artist Member of the Month in September 2019, and she exhibits with the California Art Club, including its 113th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition and A Feast for the Eyes at the CAC Gallery at The Old Mill. Her work has been shown in LPAPA exhibitions, in the American Impressionist Society's online member show, and at Mockingbird Gallery in Bend, Oregon.
“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.”
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.
