There is an oil painting technique known as “wet on wet”. The instructor at the Laguna Gloria Art School taught my class about it when I started painting ten years ago, but I am still not sure exactly what it involves. Painting plein air on a Saturday morning in the spring rain is not it. However, that I can tell you about.
Oil painting in the rain can be done. Oil and water do not mix, so the paints on your pallet are not ruined when the raindrops fall and the canvas, when primed, repels the water. Watercolor painting is another story. Still, oil painting in the rain is messy and to get a decent plein air painting during a downpour takes focus, determination and a dry spot. Vincent Van Gogh, as prolific a plein air painter as there ever was, tried a rainy scene while he was a psychiatric patient at the asylum in Southern France the last year of his life. He nailed it, as he most often did, with greyed out colors of the fields and sky and hundreds of stabbing, vertical brushstrokes simulating the streaky rain drops falling. Studying Van Gogh’s rainy scene in Provence, it’s clear he was sitting in a dry room looking out at the bad weather as he painted. Who knows what he was thinking about? Van Gogh had no blog, only occasional letters home.
Before the traffic got heavy, I set up my painting gear on the sidewalk under a small oak tree across the street from Austin Fire Department’s old Station 2 on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., in the south end of the crowded community where most of the University’s private student housing is located. Fire Station 2 is an attractive little building, with phony German-style fachwerk on the high front gable over the garage, an architectural touch no doubt intended to help the station blend in with the nicer homes in the neighborhood when it opened in the early 1930s. The neighborhood Station 2 has protected for nearly a century has grown up, with bland towers and squat parking garages erected on all sides in the last few years. The station and it’s big pecan tree are wedged between unattractive new construction.
Even with a recent facelift, the station was a challenge for me to paint, especially on a rainy day with no bright colors (the red engine was behind the garage doors) and no suncast shadows to light the scene. I tried to work fast doing a light pencil sketch on the canvas, picking and choosing which of the tedious urban details (fire hydrant, utility lines, traffic signs) to eliminate and which to include in order to get the idea across. Just as I laid out the oil paints to get to work, the rain picked up. I was so focused that I didn’t notice there under the tree until water began to bead up on my pallet which made it tough to mix colors. Like trying to spread cold butter on untoasted bread. It was time to use Van Gogh’s old trick.
P-Terry’s hamburgers was nearby and out front there were covered tables, an area not too tidy but more or less dry. I relocated my tripod and continued working. The new location blew up the carefully laid perspective of the scene that I drew in my sketch, but the colors were the same and allowed improvisation. This being a few blocks from the UT Drag on 
Guadalupe Street, there were more than a few people moseying around. Two young men joined me in front of the hamburger place to watch and stay dry. Both men were having a hard morning. Gabriel offered me a cigarette and told me he was blind, but complimented my colors. Robert had a soggy sleeping bag and didn’t look well, but he could not have been nicer. “Damn!” he kept
saying over and over as he watched me paint and asked questions now and then. “You’re just like Bob Ross” he said. Van Gogh may have had similar company that rainy day at the asylum in 1889.
My little painting of the fire station will never hang on the wall of a museum like Van Gogh’s Rain. But, like his, I think the painting catches something of the moment for the station, a throwback structure, still serviceable but shoehorned into the exploding city surrounding it.
