Public Character #9: Philip Carlton, Sidewalk Painter

[Philip Carlton is a plein air painter who has lived, on and off, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When he's not traveling the west painting landscapes, I've seen him on the sidewalks and breweries of Saint Paul painting, and here's a short chat with Philip.] 


Q: How did you get into plein air painting, aka painting stuff outside?

I discovered painting early in college. I had intended to get into computer science and engineering, and then I when I started my undergrad freshman year, I fell in love with studio drawing and figure drawing, especially from live models. And got into art from that. I started painting a year later, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Q: Why do you paint outside? How did you start doing outdoor work?

So I actually in college, I was taught painting from an indoor perspective. And it was all about using photographs and sitting a studio and not necessarily sitting in front of what you want to paint.

After college, I realized I enjoyed painting from life, whether its a person or a landscape or a still life. I like seeing something and translating it onto a canvas. Also I realized I really liked being outdoors, I like exploring and going and finding something to paint and dealing with all the elements that may or may not constrain that search.

Q: How long have you been at this? 

I’ve been painting now for 15 years, and the last year and a half it has been full time, pretty much been my day job so to speak. I spend some time here painting urban stuff in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, but I also travel for various painting events in the western states. I’ve been painting a lot in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Arizona.

There’s a cool story behind all of this, Originally when I got into outdoor painting, people were like, “go to the nature center, go find a lake, a forest.” Traditionally pretty things to go paint, and for a while that was an easy thing. I was living south of the Cities, by Prior Lake, and there was a lot of that traditional scenery. But then I ended up moving up to live right off I-94, by 94 and Cretin, and I had an art studio there for year. And started to simply paint in the Creative Enterprise Zone, the industrial area by the train tracks, by my art studio. All these broken down palettes pallets and power lines and industry, and I was like, oh I can go to my backdoor and there’s all this old urban stuff to paint that not too many people are painting. One of my favorite paintings a few years ago was the old Rock-Ten plant, that has a cardboard pile 24 hours a day, with a giant front-end loader. I did a painting of that 2 years ago, and thought this is kind of cool.

It turns out that’s a cool area too, that plant. When it gets cold out the smokestack makes this awesome billowing clouds, and the colder it gets, the prettier it gets.

Q: What conditions do you paint in? How cold are you willing to go? 

I have painted in temps as low as like 15 or 10 degrees. It’s not particularly fun, but I’ll paint down to about that. In truth, these days I chase warmer weather in the winter, but you never know. One day I was in the Grand Canyon. It was 5 degrees that morning. Around 15 or 20 is where I feel like I can paint decently a good job

Q: How long does it take you to paint a painting, in general?

It varies a lot. I would say, around 90 minutes or 2 hours is probably the minimum amount of time, I feel like I can do a complete painting then. My sweet spot these days is 3 to 6 hours, sometimes multiple days. I’ve spent up to 16 hours working on them over a couple of days.

Q: So I bet you have some stories about running into people while you're working...

I do have interesting encounters. One time that was memorable was over by the McDonalds on University and Vandalia, and this guy came up to me. “Oh, your an artist? he said. “I’m an artist too,” and he started to freestyle rap for 3 minutes. I was floored by it, in the middle of winter, on University. Thee’s some fun stuff for sure. People seem generally amused to see it. I like being out there. I like showing people that, hey painting is a thing. It’s fun and this neighborhood that you think is mundane is really cool.

Another funny story: I was out in Moab , a beautiful place by the side of the road. Some guy came by on a bicycle to tell me it was too close to his property, but he was too drunk and fell over and then disappeared.

Q: Is there anything else people should know about your work?

You might mention, its kind of the style. The idea of painting outside is called plein air. It’s kind of a one of the things that’s coming back into vogue.

It’s something that I used to avoid. I thought it was like the realm of like stuffy old white men, the Monets and the bearded fresh men from 1890. But we can make this accessible and cool and exciting for people of all ages and living in all places, like to do it differently. Like I’ve been having fun lately doing a series of work for Insight Brewing. It’s just cool to realize that these are people that aren’t artists, they’re just stoked to see this cool part of their backyard turned into interesting art.

[Carlton finishing a painting on the Bad Weather patio.]