Realism Takes Flight: Painting Airplanes on Location

Two aviation artists explain how painting airplanes on location informs their highly collectible art.

By Bob Bahr

Painters who depict airplanes face a conundrum: to realistically render the elegant machines in action means portraying them in flight. Short of painting them from another plane flying alongside them in the sky, however, this is essentially impossible. Painting them as they sit inside a museum or hangar is one alternative, but their shiny fuselages can’t possibly show the bounce light from sky and land indoors. Thus, plein air work becomes crucial for the exacting needs of aviation artists.

Adding to the complexity, this genre can be very exacting. “In aviation art, there’s a term called rivet counting,” says Marc Poole, a Mississippi aviation artist. “If you get something wrong in a painting, you’re going to hear about it.” Some artists may like that kind of obsession with detail; likely most will not. But perhaps the painted details matter less than the artist knowing that they are there so they can be merely suggested.

“First, I think it’s important to know your subject, to study and learn all you can,” says North Carolina painter Russell Smith, another veteran of aviation art who knows a thing or two about historical veracity. In addition to his success in aviation art, he’s made a name for himself in Western art. Collectors of that genre know when a saddle model was introduced and when a particular revolver hit the market. No errors are tolerated.

Corral Mistakes

An artist working in a detail-prone genre has two choices: embrace the minutiae, or change the expectations of the viewer. Either way, it’s important to remember that no one knows it all. “Yes, there are armchair historians who don’t realize that artists study aviation, but you have to be open-minded enough to know that you don’t know everything either,” says Smith. “You have to be willing to step back and take another look at it if someone approaches and says, ‘Hey, you got this wrong.’ Honestly, my first reaction is defensiveness, but I have to stop and consider if they are right.”

Poole adds, “Most of us in aviation art are obsessively tight, but we don’t necessarily want to be like that. We want to loosen up. But it’s hard to paint economically. That’s why I started plein air painting — to limit the amount of time I have to paint something. I do clean up the work in the studio, but I retain the looseness that I captured on the spot. That’s the spirit of it, anyway.”

Viewers and collectors can meet aviation artists halfway. “If a detail is missing, I make it clear that even though I may be depicting an actual event, I need to do so in a way that best communicates the overall narrative. I don’t want small details to get in the way of the overall story,” says Smith.

Plus, tight realism doesn’t actually present the authentic experience of seeing an airplane in flight. “I always ask myself, ‘What would I see?’” Smith says. “If I were actually flying beside the plane, would I see small details, or just a passing blur? I’m certain I would see some detail, but it’s more important to indicate it rather than make a tight rendering.”

Poole says he tackles that problem in a way that would be familiar to many plein air painters: go from the general to the specific, breaking shapes down further until the degree of desired finish is achieved. “I tell my students to forget the thing they are painting, to abstract it,” he says. “You are not recreating the thing, you are painting how the light plays on that thing. It’s tricky because you can be intimidated by the subject matter. Just forget what you are looking at and focus on the spatial relationships.”

He explains further, “For me, it’s a continual process of de-uglification. Starting is always the scariest part. After the first few marks it may look horrible, but it’ll get there eventually. I grew up on a farm, and it’s like corralling cattle. You just get things where you want them to be. Gradually corral the mistakes — or, as I prefer to call them, suggestions — until things are where and how they should be. I look for negative spaces. It’s kind of like shaping a lump of clay, working out any inaccuracies as you go.” Poole says he moves from background to foreground; from big to small shapes, using big to small brushes; and from the most obvious aspects of the subject to the least obvious ones.

Work with What You’re Given

If you want to paint a mountain, you can depend on it being there whenever you’re ready. Set up on a day with the weather you wish to paint, and have at it. Airplanes move. And because the planes aviation artists depict are often antiques, painters like Poole and Smith usually have a small window in which to capture them — for example, during airshows.

“You work with what you’re given,” says Poole. “You never know what you are going to get, weather-wise. I plot out a plan of attack when time is limited. A backlit scene is a lot of fun; I like working into the light so I can test my color mixing. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. Sometimes the plane takes off, or it starts raining. You have to let the experience, or the painting, be what it is. It doesn’t bother me too much because it’s the experience for me. I always learn something, no matter what happens.”

Says Smith, “Usually when I paint on site, it’s not historical. There’s enough information on World War I aviation that I can create a pretty accurate portrayal … but with enough unknown that I can be creative with it. My plein air work is for my own personal study to understand how light flows across the surface of planes. En plein air, I paint in the moment. For historical accuracy, I go back into the studio and research the facts.”

Collectors of aviation art gravitate toward depictions of airplanes in flight, posing yet another problem for aviation artists. “Plein air is putting the subject in its environment, so if you’re painting an airplane, you have to put it in the air,” says Smith. “I like to give the viewer a sense of time and place, a sense of being in the painting. The best way to do that is to handle light so it makes them feel like they are there.” We’ve established that painting a plane in flight is essentially unfeasible, and gaining access to a vintage airplane from life requires travel and timing. The solution? Return to a childhood hobby: model building. “I build scale models and do plein air work with them,” says Smith.

“I set model airplanes to the side for more than 20 years, and then one day one of my clients offered to send me free kits from his company. As I was putting them together, I realized they were so accurate I could take them outside and paint them to see how they look in the light.”

The artist favors World War I airplanes, and while the British planes were painted in drab camouflage colors, German planes were colorful. Many examples of that era had canvas for their skin, with “dope” — a plasticized lacquer — coating the cloth, giving it both a reflective sheen and some translucency. A discerning artist can have a field day with such light effects. “Because the canvas was covered with dope to tighten it up, you get some really neat reflections,” Smith points out. “You get the blue of the sky and even perhaps the logo on the fuselage reflecting on a wing. And when you get it right, you really know it.”

Planes made of metal were often shiny and very reflective — think of Charles Lindbergh’s plane, The Spirit of St. Louis. Smith was keen to paint Lindbergh’s plane because of the unique texture of the metal cowling, which was brushed or otherwise finished to give it a mottled and varied surface. He was working on a similar plane from the same manufacturer, Ryan Airlines, and painting “The Spirit of St. Louis” allowed him to nail down that distinctive feature. Whether coated with dope or consisting of reflective aluminum, much is reflected in the plane’s exterior.

Such are the challenges and considerations aviation artists face. Even when placing a scale model in the sunlight of a backyard, adjustments must be made by the artist. “Scale changes things,” Smith notes. “With the scale model, there’s two and a half inches between the wings of a biplane instead of five feet on a real plane. Two inches allows a lot less light to come through that space. So when I scale that up to a full painting, I open up the shadows to compensate for that.”

Find Your Niche

Smith chose to focus on World War I airplanes in large part because there was less competition in that market than for World War II planes. His other main genre, Western art, is dominated by a different form of transportation: the horse. “I find that there’s a lot of crossover between horse people and airplane people,” he says. “In college, my girlfriend at the time was from a family of riders, but her father also had a couple of airplanes. And many of the pilots in World War I came from the cavalry and brought a lot of their traditions with them. For example, one always enters a plane on the left side, and that’s because you always mount a horse from the left side.”

Poole fell in love with airplanes when he was a child. His father was in the Air Force and met his mother in Germany. He grew up watching the TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep and obsessing over the 1976 film Midway. Painting planes qualifies as a passion more than a profession for him. He remembers building model airplanes and studying the art on the kits’ box tops. He earned his MFA from Mississippi State University in 2001 and chose to pursue art instruction. “I didn’t want to paint for money,” he says. “I wanted to paint for myself, and learn. I wanted to paint for the pure love of painting.” He has taught at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College for 17 years and plans to retire in two years. “I’m ready to be a student again, full-time,” he says.

In part, the artist will be occupied by an ongoing gig he has painting for the National Museum of the Marine Corps as a civilian artist in the Combat Art Program. “The primary mission is to embed with units to document and capture what you see and experience on site. But I’ve also had the unique opportunity to create larger historical pieces for the foundation that fill in gaps in the museum’s collection,” says Poole. “I research the story behind the scene, talk with the veterans who were there, and learn about the history they lived through.” Poole has completed more than 10 large paintings for the program. Painting pilots, as in Rhinebeck SPAD, helps with these historical works as the parallels between depicting people and planes is evident. After all, what are aviation paintings if not portraits of airplanes?

Bonus Article! Click here to see “An Aviation Art Mini Demo”