The Dunes as classroom

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The second in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is “Find Your Park,” a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Sun will offer stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.

Landscapes, waterscapes and natural areas have long motivated visual artists to get out of the studio and move outdoors to create. The lures are many and obvious, and art history is lousy with examples.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — with its 64 miles of freshwater shoreline; its massive, eponymous dunes; its forested hills; its ridge and swale wetlands; its inland lakes where the only domestic architecture might be a beaver lodge — is an artist magnet. “Artist magnet” applies to national parks across the board. According to the National Park Service document Drawing New Audiences, Expanding Interpretive Possibilities, “Artists have been part of the National Parks since the 1870s when famed Hudson River painters played a vital role in documenting the majestic landscapes of the West. It was through their works of art that the public came to see these special places in America — places destined to become the first national parks.”

“Special” is an adjective used frequently by Manistee County painter Richard Kooyman when he talks about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. He was introduced to the park by another artist, Melanie Parke, whom he married in 2001. Kooyman has found this place of unending inspiration to his practice, and now, to his teaching. On Aug. 17-19, Kooyman will create a moveable classroom in the Dunes where he’ll teach advanced painting students.

“I think of the Sleeping Bear Dunes as one of those special places on earth and an important location for a workshop where we can talk about what place means in our work and how we best convey that place through painting,” Kooyman writes on his website, RichardKooyman.com/new-blog-1.

The workshop is offered through the Old Art Building in Leland where Kooyman has taught many outdoor classes on its shaded, riverside front lawn. “But there, one always has to deal with crowds of people,” he said. Not so much in the Dunes if one is willing to walk. Over the course of three days, Kooyman will conduct class in a range of off-the-beaten-path environments.

“We will not be hiking for miles across the open dunes but we won’t be always painting right out of the trunks of our vehicles either,” Kooyman writes. “Be ready to satchel or backpack your materials down some paths to some dynamic locations in the park that not everyone gets to see.”

For this workshop, Kooyman seeks to create a classroom where his students be immersed in the natural world. “I wanted the experience of the ‘biophilia.’ I wanted the pleasure and wonderment of the … wilderness that is the park, to be the influence on the painting process,” he said.

Rather than being an al fresco seminar in method, materials and techniques, Kooyman will take advantage of what Sleeping Bear offers in spades. “The park provides spaciousness, the big vista, preservation, along with contemplative places to converse and teach,” he said.

Kooyman said he’ll have a “car full of books, so we can learn from artists who have come before us.” Like Georgia O’Keefe whose views of New Mexico’s big sky and arid land are indelible icons. Like Tom Thompson, part of the Canadian Group of Seven. This early 20th century painter got out of his car and into a canoe to go deeply into Algonquin Provincial Park in search of his subjects: jack pines, the west wind and inland lakes full of chop.

“This isn’t just a class about how to mix colors or composition,” Kooyman said. “This is a class about having experiences in a pristine environment, and using those experiences to create a landscape painting.”

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is 71,213 acres, a majority of which have been left to return to a natural state; turns out, a wild park is a living classroom with a million teachable moments.

“I used to think that painting was about trying to capture what was special about the environment onto a (canvas),” Kooyman said. “I tried to approach making paintings in the park by capturing the time and place in the traditional ways of plein air painting” — which is to say, painting quickly in an effort to reproduce what one actually sees before a cloud covers the sun or a family parks its picnic in the painter’s sight line. After more than a decade of painting in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Kooyman’s approach has moved from scene transcription to full-body experience.

“Now, I’m more interested in being in a place and letting it impact my painting process. The best paintings I’ve made are when I’ve worked … for an hour and then had the strong lake wind blow over my easel and the painting fall wet-side-down into the sand,” he said.

Recently, after yet another of his wet paintings took a header into the dunes, Kooyman scraped away sand with his palette knife, removing “a good portion of the paint” in the process. What remained “was more exciting than what I had.” Sometimes, he said, “it’s better to get out of your own way and let the Park step in to help.”

More information about Richard Kooyman’s painting workshop can be found at: OldArtBuilding.com/0817-192015advanced-paint-in-oil-with-richard-kooyman. And for a taste of what park painting might look like, watch Kooyman’s video from his You Tube channel Studio Life. The six-minute video finds the artist 460 feet above Lake Michigan on a windy day in April: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqVMiPnbUU8