Room interiors, though a relatively common subject, have never really been treated as a separate genre like still life, landscapes or even “cityscapes”.

Though they have a long history, and some wonderful painters are noted for them, such as Vermeer, De Hooch or Tarbell, room interiors seem to be most often treated as backdrops for figurative work, a way to place the figure or portrait in an environment.

Room interiors, when well done, have their own kind of magic, conveying emotion, atmosphere and a sense of place and time quite unlike landscape and still life.

Nick Patten is an artist who focuses on the emotive and suggestive qualities of room interiors, in particular utilizing the play of light and shadow, strongly geometric compositions and carefully considered color palettes to transport us into his glimpses of another, sometimes seemingly familiar place.

Room interiors without figures by their nature often convey a feeling of stillness, a quality of contemplation that, like some still life painting, invites contemplation of the work itself. I particularly like the way Patten uses soft contrasts of muted yellows and greens along with subdued reds, to give his compositions a richness of color while maintaining their essentially still quality.

In his obviously lived in rooms, furniture and other objects seem to await the arrival of the houses’ occupants, as though they might be just in the next room, or behind a half open door.

I also enjoy the way Patten plays with light sources as compositional elements, with open windows, lamps or splays of light on walls and objects acting as the players in his quiet dramas.

Unfortunately, Patten’s website is awkwardly arranged, with a pointless scrolling division that can be too easily scrolled past its content, allowing the thumbnails to disappear, and a maddening pop-up window JavaScript that resets the position of the thumbnails so that once you start scrolling, every time you view an image and close the pop-up you must scroll down and re-find your place to select the next image (see my post on How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web).

However, if you enjoy room interiors as I do, Patten’s beautifully refined and subtle work is certainly worth the effort. Note that there is an archive of sold paintings in addition to the main portfolio.

[Suggestion courtesy of Randall Imai]

[Addendum, July, 2012: I’m glad to report that Patten’s site has been redesigned; it is now much more straightforward, and easier to view his online gallery.]

Though I had encountered his work on the web previously and filed it away for a future post, I had the pleasure of speaking briefly with New York based artist Paul Bachem yesterday at the 2012 Wayne Plein Air Festival.

Bachem has a crisp style, with lots of attention to edges and a physically textural paint surface. His work also demonstrates a strong sense of composition, perhaps stemming in part from his long career as a successful illustrator.

On his website you will find a variety of his paintings, both current and archived. Unfortunately, the link to “An Illustration Portfolio” has not been extended into a gallery.

Bachem also maintains a blog, on which he discusses his painting experiences and posts current work.

Bachem’s plein air paintings will be on view as part of the Wayne Plein Air exhibit at the Wayne Art Center (in the Philadelphia area) until June 23, 2012.

I was at the Wayne Plein Air Festival yesterday, the most well known event of its kind in the Philadelphia area, and I had the pleasure of talking with several of the participating painters as they worked.

One of them was Renee Lammers, a painter originally from Florida, now living in Maine. She paints her bright, immediate landscapes in a high key palette, with an almost post-Impressionist approach.

Lammers mentioned that she was fortunate to have had the opportunity to study with well known painter Stapleton Kearns, who was himself the student of R.H. Ives Gammell. Lammers said Kearns reined in her excessively bright “Florida colors” and steered her toward more traditional and proven methods.

One of the unusual traditional methods Lammers discovered on her own was the use of copper sheets as a painting surface. As I was talking with her, she was working on a quickly rendered painting of the tiny barbershop in Wayne (images above, top two) and her “canvas” was a thin sheet of copper that she had mounted in her small pochade box (see my recent update on pochade boxes). “Thin” in this case meaning thick enough to hold its shape, but thinner than a copper etching plate.

Painting on copper achieved popularity in the mid 16th century when northern European artists in particular found it to be a durable, archival and practical surface on which to work, not prone to the cracking and stretching dangers inherent in wood panels and stretched canvas.

I asked Lammers about difficulties in painting on the smooth metal surface and she indicated that it just took some adjustment (thinned paint doesn’t adhere as well as thicker applications), and that working on the copper directly without the need for priming gave her work a luminosity not present when working on other surfaces.

In addition to a portfolio of her work, Lammers’ website includes a page on the technique, Why Paint on Copper?, that includes a bit of history and links to resources. (In digging a bit, I also found this book on Amazon: Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Paintings on Copper, a catalog from a 1999 exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum).

Lammers also maintains a blog in which she discusses her painting practices, experiences and travels. Her work will be on view as part of the Wayne Plein Air exhibit at the Wayne Art Center until June 23, 2012.