By Norman Kolpas
“So much of my painting process is plein air,” says Tina Bohlman. “Even the 50 percent of my paintings that I produce inside my studio result directly from work I’ve done outside.” Bohlman is Texas-born, Oklahoma-raised, and has long made her home in the historic little city of Waxahachie, about 30 miles south of Dallas—and she is drawn to portraying the small-town and rural scenes she knows and loves so well.
Bohlman painted SATURDAY SHOPPERS in historic downtown St. Michael’s, MD, during the 2018 Plein Air Easton competition. The actual shadow in the foreground, she says, “was very square, so I added some organic shapes to it to lead your eye down the street.”
A talented artist since childhood, Bohlman began painting seriously every night as a single mom in her early 30s, more than four decades ago. After taking a weekend watercolor workshop, “I spent the next 10 years teaching myself” the medium, she says. She couldn’t afford a decent camera to take reference photos, so instead, she simply painted outdoors. “I didn’t even know what plein air was back then!” she adds.
Bohlman’s basics start with “a subject that speaks to me personally.” Using a mechanical pencil and a sketchbook, she produces small “what if?” sketches that “break it down into a workable composition,” she explains, “with a focus that somehow tells a story without getting too wrapped up in details. The entire painting takes place in my mind before I ever pick up a brush.”
Terlingua, a ghost town near Texas’ Big Bend National Park, has provided Bohlman with a wealth of inspiration for sketches just waiting to become watercolor paintings.
“I paint upright,” says Bohlman, standing at the easel in her studio. “If you lay the paper flat, the paint goes in all directions. When you’re upright, it only flows down, so you always know where it’s going.”
On 140 lb. Arches oil paper, “which stays flat when wet,” she draws her final composition in light pencil, then “lifts a lot of those lines with a kneaded eraser so they’re just ghosts,” she says. Finally she paints, starting with the sky and other background elements and working forward to finer details. Her paints follow a related progression. “I start wet into wet, and gradually the puddles in my palette go from watery to creamy to sticky,” she adds. Explaining the logic behind her process, she emphasizes that “watercolor has a mind of its own, and you’ve got to be willing to embrace where it wants to go. As long as you stick to the basics, you’ll come out with a painting you’ll like.”
To learn more about Tina Bohlman’s artwork and creative process, visit www.tinabohlman.com.
“My style is not as tight as realism, but it’s not real loose either,” says Bohlman. “I’m kind of in the middle, keeping the sharp focus on my area of interest and leaving everything else around it softer and lighter.” WAITIN’ FOR THE CREW expresses that approach eloquently.
“Generally I allow the white of the paper to be my white in a painting,” says Bohlman of SYCAMORE SHADOWS, immortalizing a 150-year-old tree in downtown Waxahachie. “But up there on the tree trunk, I watered down gouache and tints of yellow, and it just seemed to change the whole personality of that bark.”