Valerie Isaacs is a fixture in Provincetown. She’s often painting on the wharf or in the dunes with her portable easel and tote bag full of paint and brushes. For a portion of the winter, she heads south, where she can continue to paint outdoors without having to wear gloves. Charleston, S.C. is always on her itinerary — it’s where she grew up and where her parents and many friends remain. This year, for the third time, she’s also visiting a farm in Virginia owned by friends. —Abraham Storer
Q: Does travel feed your work?
I try to keep continuity with the work I’m doing on the Cape. I’m almost entirely a plein-air painter. Being in the South keeps me from having to paint indoors. It extends my plein-air season.
Q: What’s your daily routine in Virginia?
I’m farm-sitting. In the morning, I go to a farm next door and feed the pigs, the goats, and the cows, and then I have lunch and paint all afternoon. There are nine horses right in the yard where I’m staying, so I can just sit out and paint and draw horses all day.
Q: Are there any color ideas that you’re discovering?
I’m using more raw sienna than I usually use, because that’s the color of the dirt here. With the horse paintings, I’m using a lot of different colors, especially earth colors, and I’m not mixing as much as I usually do. I have to paint the horses so fast that I’m painting straight out of the tube.
Q: Tell me about the painting Charleston Cormorants.
That’s at the reservoir in my parents’ neighborhood. I wanted to keep painting water, because that’s something I do regularly in Provincetown, and it’s something I need to continually practice. That’s a particularly good spot because there were hundreds of birds roosting in the cypress trees on these little islands. It’s really fun to be there at sunset, because all the birds come flying in and land right nearby. This is from last year. I also painted there this year, but it didn’t come out well.
My brother and his friend used to sneak a little boat out and play on these islands. There were alligators out there, and none of the adults knew about them going there. When I was doing this painting there was an alligator in the scene, but I didn’t put it in the painting.
Q: Is your setup different when you’re on the road? What limitations do you have?
It’s much the same, because I usually paint outside. The trick is bringing enough canvas with me and getting all the wet paintings home in the car.
Q: What do you like about painting in the winter?
I love winter landscape painting because the trees are purple and peach and gray instead of green. Green is really hard to paint. That’s also something I like about the dunes. It’s landscape painting without tons of green.
