A long time ago I promised myself that I’d one day return to landscape painting. Have you ever made a promise to yourself? You gotta keep it!

A couple weeks ago I bought a French easel, stocked it up with good brushes and paints and took it for a spin in the local landscape. I started in my backyard to give myself time to remember what it’s like to paint en plein air.

There actually wasn’t a lot to remember: just prime the canvas, tote your easel out into the motif, stand it up and start painting. Easy!

I first painted a landscape in the summer of 1981 in Norfolk, Connecticut. The teacher was Wilbur Niewald from the Kansas City Art Institute. Wilbur would hike all over the rolling hills of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel estate spending time with each student at what is now called the Yale Norfolk School of Art.

I can still see him coming towards me up the hill, his cotton white fluff of hair visible from a great distance. I’d be wearing the requisite garb — straw hat, long sleeved cotton shirt, loose cotton trousers. This outfit was the perfect sun screen.

Painting outdoors for the past couple weeks, I’ve heard Wilbur’s voice in my head. His basic advice, as I recall, is this:

• paint what you see
• paint at the same time every day so that the light is consistent
• come back every day until you’re finished
• squint to help hide unnecessary details. The important thing is getting things in the right place using the right colors
• constantly move your brush all around the canvas in order to capture the relationships between the colors, adjusting and repainting in order to accurately capture the colors you see
• look at Nature more than you look at your painting
• Nature is the best teacher

The only other thing to add was that you need to get used to making adjustments to the composition whenever they are needed.

For example, at some point you may decide that the horizon line is too high. Here’s how to fix that: use the end of your brush to scrape a new horizon line into the paint, then repaint the whole painting on top of the old one. Bonus points if you can find the old horizon line in Norfolk Landscape, 1981 above.

I can’t tell you how dreadful and scary it is to do that for the very first time. But it works, and it gets easier each time because you know it makes the painting better.

Here’s to new beginnings!