Campus: UC Santa Cruz

Instructors:
Hank Pitcher
Bruce Tiffney

Reserves Used:
Coal Oil Point Reserve
Sedgwick Reserve

Students usually complete four paintings each day - sunrise, morning light, afternoon light, and a sunset. A lot of them are just learning where the sun comes up and where it goes down. And that it doesn't come up and go down in the same place, and that the shadows change.

Hank Pitcher, UCSB

This innovative course resulted from a friendly conversation between a scientist and a landscape painter on the unity of science and art. As Bruce Tiffney, botantist and Dean of the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, recalls, “[Artist] Hank Pitcher and I ended up agreeing that art and science are really about the same thing:
they are about observation. The distinction was in how you record those observations.”

Inspired by this realization, Tiffney and Pitcher collaborated on a number of courses on the UCSB campus that eventually culminated in CS Art 101, Field Painting with an Artist and a Botanist on the UC
Reserves. “We both appreciated the fact that we have these incredible reserves here,” Pitcher explains, “and that it would be interesting to introduce the students to these areas. Most students have never had this opportunity.”

The class usually involves about 15 students, the two professors, and a number of professional painters who work alongside the students, demonstrating their techniques and sharing their solutions to the problems involved in capturing a locale on canvas. Painting en plein air involves a number of logistical challenges, from easel maintenance, to selecting paints that won’t “seize up” too quickly, to capturing the constantly changing light, to dressing properly for a day exposed to the elements. These issues are the primary focus of the class’s first Saturday at the Coal Oil Point
Reserve, where students get their equipment into shape and begin their first day of painting. The class spends the next two weekends at the Sedgwick Reserve, where the students are totally immersed in painting, from the moment they wake up to catch the sunrise to the moment they collapse into bed late that night.

While Pitcher and the other painters work with students on their techniques, Tiffney focuses on making the students aware of the natural landscape that lies before them: that the trees vary
dramatically in branching, leaves, and color; that the vegetation changes with the soils; and that different geologic deposits produce differently shaped mountains. “I explain to them,” he notes, “that they don’t have to faithfully record everything that’s out there, but if they truly want to capture the sense of a place, they must capture what constitutes that place. As artists, they can alter a setting to fit their particular visions. But if this is going to be a painting somehow derived from a southern California oak woodland,
they can’t paint everything like palm trees, with straight trunks and round crowns.”

At the end of the class, the students hang all of their paintings in the order in which they were created. Almost without fail, each student has dramatically improved both in painting techniques and in powers of observation. “The Sedgwick Reserve’s availability to campus is a huge asset,” notes Tiffney. “We know the people up there, they know us, and it’s a magnificent
natural setting.”