Skip Whitcomb
on plein air painting
By Rose Glaser
This September the Colorado Mountain Club will christen the new conference center at the American Mountaineering Center with a fine art exhibition of twenty-five of the country’s most noted landscape painters. The show will feature paintings of national park and forest lands—places many CMC members know and love.
Artists and hikers have much in common when it comes to conservation of the mountains. Many artists paint plein air or on location. Trail & Timberline caught up with nationally known plein air painter M.W. Skip Whitcomb to talk about his connection with the land.
T&T: What’s the big attraction with painting on location? Isn’t it easier to take a photograph and paint in your studio where you’re warm and dry?
Skip: Of course it’s easier to do that, but part of the commitment to landscape painting is actually being in the landscape you’re observing. You can’t experience it though a car window. You couldn’t write a book on mountaineering if you’ve never set foot on a mountain. Who’s going to believe you? But it goes beyond that. Some of us are hardwired for the outdoors. We have to be outside; we’re driven to it. And, it’s crucial to who we are. It’s the same reason people are drawn to the Mountain Club.
"Summer in the High Country"
T&T: Do you feel your painting helps protect the landscape?
Skip: I certainly hope so. I think the people who truly have a deep love of the outdoors—whether the mountains or plains or streams—to a varying degree are all conservationists. Conservation isn’t a bumper sticker; it’s who we are. Whenever we draw attention to a place and say, See how special it is, when we celebrate the beauty and show the poetry of a place, we’re helping to protect it.
T&T: What are your favorite places to paint?
Skip: Being a Colorado guy, the Rockies, of course, are my favorite—from southern Colorado to Canada. I love the alpine landscape. I love the smell of the mountains and the more rugged country. I enjoy other places, but I always come back to the mountains. Some of my favorite places are along the Collegiate Peaks and in the Flattops Wilderness area. That’s where the painting “Trapper’s Lake” came from.
T&T: What do you have to pack to paint outdoors?
Skip: I take about twenty pounds of painting gear: a paint box that is self contained, all my paints and brushes and a tri-pod, plus everything a hiker takes. With that set-up, I can go for a full day and come back with three or four small paintings. On extended trips, logistically, it’s a whole different deal. That involves pack horses and a base camp that I could spend days working out of.
T&T: What’s the best part about being on location?
Skip: It’s all great. The best part is just being in that environment. It’s a total immersion in what I love. There’s no phone. It’s like meditation the entire time you’re out. It’s physically exhausting but mentally refreshing.
T&T: How do you capture that experience in a painting?
Skip: I just try to capture one little aspect of the place to show the viewer how wonderful that spot is. A life spent pursuing this love of painting—my life’s work—will, hopefully, ultimately make the statement: See how wonderful this is. But I take it one little bit at a time. It’s like spending your life composing a book filled with essays about all the different aspects of the Rocky Mountains, about all its different moods and light. One essay alone could never do it justice. But a book would give you a portrait of how it is. I think what is so fulfilling about being out there is this collection of all these little experiences.
T&T: Is there an experience in particular that changed the way you approach the outdoors?
Skip: Oh, yeah, there was the time I ran into the bear.
T&T: You’re kidding!
Skip: No. (He paused and laughed.) Well, I was by myself in one of the more remote canyons near Jenny Lake in Teton National Park painting all day. It was late afternoon as I was coming out, and there just wasn’t any traffic on the trails. As I came around a curve an adult black bear was standing on his hind legs working on a stump. That was the first time I ever really ran into a bear. I thought, I hope I can remember what I’m suppose to do.
T&T: Couldn’t you go another way?
Skip: It was getting late and the only other way out was three miles around Jenny Lake. I’ve been lost in the wilderness after dark, and it’s not fun.
T&T: What did you do?
Skip: I started making a lot of noise, telling him to get out of there. He decided to move on down the trail the same way I was going. As I headed on I saw him again working on another stump, and I did the same thing. He was a little more reluctant but moved on. This time I gave him more time before I started walking.
About five minutes down the trail, I came up on him digging at another stump, this time sitting there with his rear end right on the trail. No matter how much noise I made he wouldn’t move. I guess I thought he couldn’t hear me so I started walking up to him. When I got within about fifteen feet I began inching my way around him. Finally, I was right behind him. I could have touched him. Just at that moment he stopped digging at the stump and made a huge explosion of sound. I closed my eyes and in that moment he jumped up into a tree, eye level with me.
I was looking right at him. Oh boy, I just started talking to him saying, “Sport, I don’t like this any more than you do. I’m just going to keep walking on out of here and leave you be.” As I backed down the trail towards my car I kept talking. When I got about twenty feet from him, I stood there for about fifteen seconds thinking, Wow, he has perfect markings. I want to burn his memory into my mind forever.
The adrenaline finally hit me when I got to my truck, I had that taste of copper in my mouth and my legs began to shake. It was amazing but definitely not something I care to do again.