Travel Light and Sketch Often was a gouache painting demo by Michael Held. The Albin Polasek Museum holds an annual Winter Park Paint Out, and Michael was one of the rock star artists who helped raise money for the museum. Each year over twenty professionally acclaimed plein air artists paint at the Polasek Museum and at other locations throughout Winter Park and Orlando. Art lovers are invited to watch the artists at work and attend free painting demonstrations like the workshop I attended. The Paint Out happens in April before the worst of the Florida heat kicks in.
Artwork created during the Winter Park Paint Out is on display as soon as they are completed and dropped off at the museum’s wet room. These paintings are available for purchase with a portion of the proceeds going to support the Museum.
The description for Michael Held’s workshop lured me in, since it sounded very much like the light kit I carry when I travel. Michael uses gouache which is a medium I want to start working into my kit. I put down very light washes of watercolor on my sketches but at times, it would be nice to go back in and paint opaque paint on top to bring out highlights.
Michael is different than other painters at the Paint Out. Rather than depicting local landscapes, in all their detail, she prefers to paint close ups of birds in a loose and very vibrant style. She doesn’t try to catch wide vistas; she prefers close ups on avian subjects.The camera is not her enemy. She described some of the other artists at the paint out as illustrators and she considers herself more of a visual poet.
She showed her travel kit and I really liked the compact container she had to hold her gouache colors. She said that they never dry out when sealed. She also used a spritz bottle often to moisten the colors. I had a tiny spritz bottle but it didn’t seem to make it to the studio in the last move.
Michael painted one of Albin Polasek’s statues with all of the foliage behind it. It was a challenging subject made more challenging since she needed to keep talking about what she was thinking at each step of the process. I know that talking while at work cuts me off from the more spontaneous and creative side of my brain. Michael described that stages of a painting to great comic effect. Every painting had its ugly phase and every time the artist had to push past that phase.
I learned a whole lot from watching Michael paint, I also loved her story of going through a very difficult time in her life and then pushing ahead to quickly become a renowned painter. She travels often with her small gouache painting set up and she has inspired me to start painting in the medium myself.