Why Where You Are Changes What You Make
The Italian lakes taught me something about place that I couldn’t have learned in a studio.
There’s a particular kind of day that I think every artist needs to collect.
Not the productive studio session. Not the workshop where everything goes right. Not the morning walk that generates three voice memos worth of material. Those are all good — but they’re not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the day you spend entirely somewhere else, drawing what is directly in front of you because it’s directly in front of you and there is no alternative.
On-location days. Plein air, if you want the French term. Out in the world, drawing the world, in real light, in real weather, with people walking past and the ambient noise of a place that exists completely independently of whether you are there recording it.
These days change something. I want to try to describe what.
I was on location at the Italian lakes recently. Not thinking about Substack posts or course architecture or the long list of infrastructure tasks that currently constitutes a large part of my working life. Just there, with a sketchbook and materials, in front of genuinely extraordinary light on extraordinary water, trying to do something with it in the time I had.
And it struck me, standing there, how different this is from working in the studio.
The studio is a controlled environment. You’re working from reference, from imagination, from memory — but not from direct confrontation with the thing itself. You’re always at one remove. There’s time. You can put it down and come back. You can adjust the lighting. You can stop when you need to.
Location doesn’t give you any of that. The light is changing. The cloud is moving. The boat that was creating a nice compositional element has gone. You have what you have, for as long as you have it, and then it’s different.
This is not a disadvantage. It’s a different kind of learning.
When you draw on location, you make decisions at a speed that studio work never demands.
What to include. What to omit. What the composition actually is — not the ideal composition you might construct with unlimited time and reference, but the real composition available in the real scene in front of you. You have to commit. You have to make the choice and the mark and move on.
This is exactly the muscle that transfers back to everything else.
Because the thing about studio work — and about many creative disciplines — is that you can always defer the decision. You can always do one more pass before committing. The perfectionist’s natural environment is the one where nothing is final until you decide it is. Location strips that away completely.
You’re making decisions in real time, from real observation, with no safety net.
And you start to find, if you do it regularly enough, that your studio work becomes bolder. More decisive. Less precious. Because you’ve practised committing under pressure, and the muscle has developed.
There’s also the place itself.
Good drawing is never purely about technical execution. It’s also about what you’re paying attention to, and what you’re attending to when you attend to a specific place is not just the visual composition. It’s the quality of the place — the atmosphere, the light-at-this-hour, the quality of the air, the particular feeling of this geography and this weather and this moment.
The Italian lakes have a quality that no photograph fully captures — something in the interplay of reflected light and mountain shadow and the specific colour of the water at certain times of day. You can approximate it in the studio. On location, you’re in it.
And that changes what the drawing knows. Not just what it looks like — what it knows. A drawing made on location carries information that a studio drawing can’t fully reproduce, because some of that information only arrives through direct, present, physical encounter with the thing.
This is what plein air painters mean when they talk about the work having “air” in it. Presence. The record of someone who was actually there.
I think there’s something important here for creative people who are trying to build a practice that sustains them over a long period.
Studio work gives you control and consistency. Location work gives you aliveness and surprise. Both are necessary. The long-term practice needs both — the controlled environment where you develop technique and explore ideas at your own pace, and the regular immersion in the real world that keeps refreshing the material and keeping the instincts sharp.
It’s also, just practically, one of the best ways to remember why you wanted to do this in the first place.
There are days when the creative work feels administrative. When you’re processing rather than making, organising rather than discovering, servicing the infrastructure rather than doing the thing the infrastructure is supposed to support.
On-location drawing days cut through that. You’re just there, with the view and the materials and the time running out, making something as good as you can make it from what’s actually there.
That’s the whole thing. Stripped back to its essentials.
Go somewhere and draw it. Bring the drawings home. Let them remind you of what you’re doing this for.
Is there a place you keep meaning to go and draw? The view from a particular spot, the building you pass every day, the landscape that calls to you when you drive through it? Don’t wait until you think you’re good enough. Go now. Draw badly if you have to. The place will give you something anyway.
CP52 Stage: Stage 7 — The Life (living it fully)
Series: Morning Walk Dispatches
Image note: A sketchbook open in an outdoor setting — not a clean studio, not a perfectly arranged shot. Just the page and the view behind it.
