Paint Like Sydney Laurence – A Gathering
As a Sydney Laurence super fan scrounging the web for content, I was thrilled to come across a UAF community course called Paint Like Sydney Laurence. As luck would have it, the class would take place the week after I’d found it! I registered, prepped my canvases, and selected a handful of Sydney Laurence paintings as references.
The class, open to all, ran 12-4pm Monday through Friday for one week and the cost was $200. Hosted by Mary Albanese, it is held virtually in winter and in-person in Fairbanks in the summer. It turned out to be less a class and more a gathering of friends who get together twice a year to paint in this distinct Alaskan style. I was the only student who hadn’t previously participated! Mary discussed the story and style of Sydney Laurence and another well recognized Alaska painter, Fred Machetanz, in the beginning of the first and second classes. Otherwise, we spent the entire time painting.
If you are looking for instruction on how to paint, I would point you elsewhere. If you’re looking for fellow Laurence fans to paint with, this is the jam! I gained a glimpse into my dream life – one where I work my engineering job in the morning, then paint in the afternoon. The four hour window with a little show-and-tell break in the middle was perfect. Being in a class kept me focused for the full window which was highly productive, but also about the max duration I can paint before growing tired.
Over the course of the week I created four paintings in Alla Prima style, all of Denali. By the end, I felt I had memorized the shape and shadows of the peak and its ridges. My appreciation continues to grow for Laurence’s achievement – successfully putting this larger than life mountain to canvas in a style that captures its majesty. He had a unique combination of both artistic and survival skills along with the tenacity needed to approach the mountain under the conditions of 1913. I began to empathize with his description of some of these Denali paintings as his “potboilers”, painted over and over again to please his clientele.
This was phenomenal practice! I really enjoyed painting quietly side-by-virtual-side with others. I felt energized afterward, excited and eager to apply some of the tonalist Laurence technique to my own paintings. The photos below show a bit of the process for what I thought was my best study.
This an 11×14 study of Laurence’s painting titled Mt. Mckinley from Bird Creek, date unknown. The original is an 18×24 and sold for $17,550 at the Scottsdale Art Auction in 2023. The canvas is prepped with Burnt Sienna, thinned down with Gamsol. I find prepping with some non-white color is especially helpful when painting snow. I sketched the image with a light color marker, then paint from the back ground to the foreground. The color palette was cobalt and phthalo blue, quinacridone red, hansa yellow, and yellow ochre.
