Trey McCarley | enchante

PHOTOGRAPHY & EDIT: Rebecca Goodpasture

PLEIN AIR

with Trey McCarley at String Lake

Teton National Park, Wyoming, USA

plein air: the act of painting outdoors

EDITOR'S NOTE

It was late afternoon when Trey and I finally arrived and set up at String Lake. We spoke for hours, listening to the scene and to one another, and we reflected on the enduring legacy of life-mentors and the paths that had brought us together.

For the depth of this moment, with this person, in this scene, I am eternally thankful.

I have a whiteboard in my studio and black walls. I have a dry erase marker and a white pencil, they’re laying around the studio, and if I have an idea I just grab one. I just grab it, I just go, and write down the idea, so I don’t have to find my journal, it’s just on the walls.

And one of the things that I wrote down the other day is that different aspects of a painting correspond to different aspects of our humanity and of the scene, however we want to translate it. The way that you mix color will translate, the application of the paint translates your energy. How you’re applying it – water is glassy, so the way I apply that is going to be way different to say how I feel about the jagged peaks.

I’m using the value of the paint – how light and how dark something is – it’s the most important part. It’s the truth of the painting, or the truth in our life.

JIM WILCOX EXPLAINS:

plein air

If you don’t paint outdoors there are a lot of things you miss. Even if you work from really good photographs, they don’t tell you everything; you don’t see the atmosphere, you don’t see the details, you don’t see the little colors that are back in there. The darks tend to get very dark and black and featureless.

And that’s why you need to go out there. If you’re out there in nature, you know. You have to learn to see what’s there instead of what you think is there.

for the full interview, click here.

PLEIN AIR:

When it’s plein air, outside, I try to render it exactly how I see it.

I think I’m learning out here. I might change one or two things, for the sake of the painting, but the more I can realistically record what’s going on, the more tools I have back in the studio. It’s like a journal. I’m not worried about selling it in a gallery, so it’s freeing. It’s not “try to do something that someone else will like.”

This is the purest way of painting.

TREY: "There’s three properties to the color: the value, the intensity, and the hue, and they each translate to a different part of what you have to say."

ON HIS START:

I started out on my own, just doing everything I could to figure it out, looking at other people’s work, going to people’s websites and looking at their paintings and getting some books and trying to replicate what I saw.

I felt like I had a purpose for the first time in my life. I hadn’t felt that before.

I was always doing what everyone else wanted me to do. I had a really hard time in school. I was always getting in trouble and I couldn’t pay attention, and I was always being hyperactive and I didn’t have an outlet. All that hyperactivity and low concentration, it flipped when I found painting. I was hyper focused on it and I had a purpose and I felt like I had an outlet I hadn’t had before. It was awesome. It was freeing! That’s how it felt.

THE MENTOR:

I got a workshop with this guy named Barry Thomas in Arkansas and he...it was pretty much my first painting lesson and I asked him if I could study under him.

He said, “ No. I don’t have time.” He came back to me though, and was like, "Do you really want to do this?" He’s a great guy, he’s a straight up cowboy. He said, "Son, if you really want to do this you should go take a workshop from a guy called Robert Moore, a guy in Idaho."

And I emailed Robert and told him my story and that I’d like to study under him. I asked if I could come out and work for him. I told him I was willing to sleep on the floor of his barn if he had one. I will do anything, I won’t be a burden. And he said yea come on out, and it turned into a four year apprenticeship.

Sure I worked super hard at this, but you can’t do it without other people.

Confidence is different than pride. We all struggle with both.

"THE EMBERS LEFT OVER FROM THE LAST PAINTING START THE FIRES FOR THE NEXT"

It’s a lot about the energy, too. Whether an artist wants it to happen this way or not, how they feel in that moment, comes through in the piece. I'm learning how to allow that translation to happen without force.

I have unfinished paintings or ones where I was impatient. I can see that I didn’t have control or I was in a bad place mentally, yea all those are bad paintings. It used to carry over.

I think now, the embers are still there. Because you want to come back and do it better. Or you found something that was exciting in it and you come back and you want to do it again. There’s never a drag. The more I paint, the more I have enough to make me do another one.

How quickly do colors change when you’re painting?

TREY: "They’ve already changed twice. They usually change every thirty minutes, but a cloud can come over."

IN PLEIN & OPEN AIR:

It’s worship. It’s something that’s bigger than us and we just get to be a part of it.

It’s almost like a mediation. This, it really puts me at peace. Just looking at, just being out here. Even if I’m not painting. Just being out here puts me at peace.

It reminds me of God’s faith in us. Because the world is not easy sometimes. And this never changes. There are different seasons, but his voice is always there and it’s the same.

I sit here and talk about painting like I know what I’m talking. Every time I have to explain something I learn something and every time I paint I learn something.