It was sunset on a Saturday in North Africa. A tall man in a black shirt and cap stood with his easel on a rocky hill, squinting into the sun. Rolling hills, sparse grass, and scattered sheep spread out in front of him in grays and blues and browns. He had pulled off the road hours away from the nearest town to try to capture the effect of the setting sun on those shifting ravines with watercolor paint. A breeze blew in the warm air, rustling palm branches.

“I’m just trying to quickly get the feel of the countryside here,” the man told his friend behind the camera in a slow, focused voice. “Not trying to be too detailed, just trying to get it down quickly. I’ve used a little bit of wet-on-wet for the sky—now I’m blocking in detail.”

With a steady stroke, he added a dark blue-green to the curve of a hillside. “The terrain is changing color because of the sun setting, and I’m not worrying about that. I’ll change it a little bit if I like it better than when I started. I put a couple sheep in. They stopped and posed for me, which was nice of them.”

The man paused, brush moving, palette in one hand, sheep munching down below.

“This is a blast. Right now I wouldn’t want to be any place else.”

The friend behind the camera was my dad. The artist in the black cap, Mr. Dave, died seven years ago. His widow gifted me his trunk of art supplies with bags of tubed paint, piles of sketchbooks, a collapsible easel, and palm-sized watercolor kits.

“He was always just keen to soak in beauty and life and the meaning of it all,” she said. Naomi, a small woman with floating reddish-blonde hair and a near-constant smile, often lets her smile go soft when she talks about her husband. “When I first got to know him, a big thing that he wanted to share with me was all of the paintings and the sculptures that he did and the wood cuts and all the things he’d taken years to go to school for. Everywhere we lived together, he wanted to find a way to bring art into whatever we were doing.”

I know this part of the story; I heard it at the funeral. In the long-distance portion of their relationship, the couple talked so long on the phone that they racked up a $500 bill on international calls. Dave knew he wanted to go to Ethiopia when they married (he’d been before, serving Somali refugees), and Naomi was ready and willing to go if only he would build her a toilet seat for their outhouse. He taught people art and card making and embroidery and chip carving—but it never really caught on, and friends at home didn’t understand what he was trying to do. “I think he was frustrated until we got to Tunisia…” Naomi admitted. “It was a struggle to get people to recognize art and recognize the value of it.”

When my dad visited Ethiopia in 2007, he met Mr. Dave, Naomi, and their three kids. As a photographer and videographer, he knew that art was devalued and wanted to invest in it instead. The two hatched a plan for a business in Tunisia, in the center of the North African coastline, to organize trips around the country and teach tourists how to paint and photograph the world around them. They would scout out locations, build connections, and teach people to photograph or paint at the beach or in the desert or on the salt flats—instead of in a studio.

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Artists create what is, in effect, a translation of reality.

No one sees the world as it actually is. We can only see our lives from inside our own heads, through the lens of our perception. Art translates that perception—that vision—through a medium, whether that be paint or charcoal, pastel or photography, clay or marble or music or drama or words. What you see is not reality; it is your unique vision. The transmission of that vision is art.

While photos can provide useful references, painters who lean on them too heavily risk creating a painting that loses the unique, tangible perspective of the eye. This shift is difficult to pin down, but a camera easily flattens an image into a rigid composition. The camera is ultimately a tool that can be used well or poorly; what matters isn’t the quality of your camera, but your skill and creativity. Talented photographers can use their camera to infuse their vision into the picture—my dad “makes an image” instead of “taking a photo”—so traditional artists who use these images introduce another artist’s vision to their subject.

When an artist works in a studio, they craft a meticulously staged vision of what they want their viewer to see. A painter like Georgio Morandi is known not for his accurate depiction of the natural world, but for his constructed still lifes. Morandi kept vases, bottles, and containers in his studio that were used solely as the subjects of art. The appeal of his paintings is the intentional artifice of the artist’s vision.

How can artists best strip away the layers of interpretation and paint a personal perspective of what they see? Many turn to plein air painting.

Plein air painting began with the Impressionists, who pushed away from the staged studio still lifes, portraits, and landscapes before them for something more expressive, free, and focused on light.

Monet used the textured qualities of oil paint to his advantage, returning over and over again to favorite spots in his garden at Giverny, Normandy. His paintings of haystacks are quick studies in light and color that could only come about with the adaptability of the outdoors. Oil paints dry slowly, so he laid down layer after layer over time until the paint rose from the canvas in whorls and ridges like tree bark. In the Art Institute of Chicago, I leaned against the ropes surrounding the expansive canvas of his Irises and imagined reaching forward, past the alarms and horror of guards, and running the pad of my finger over that rough surface.

John Singer Sargent’s painting of an Ilex Wood in Majorca pulled me up short in a travelling exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The piece is Realist, not Impressionist, but its expressive brush strokes, the depth of shadow, and the freedom and joy inherent in the paint embody many of the strengths of the plein air style. The artist kept Ilex Wood with him throughout his life—I am convinced he kept it for the idyllic, sweet memory it held of his quiet holidays on the coast of the Mediterranean. I can almost hear the breeze in those yellow-green leaves.

Sargent’s Spanish Window, comparatively tiny in its paper matted frame, held my imagination for a long while. The quiet in the paint filled me up. The deep blue wash of the sky, the almost Impressionistic spill of greenery down a shadow-drenched wall, the curves of the eaves—all reminded me of Mr. Dave’s open and masterful style.

Both artists, on the walls of a museum or of my bedroom, valued watercolors for their portability—they lend themselves most gracefully to the practice of plein air. They can be more difficult than oils, not allowing the artist to cover over their mistakes. Once you lay down a stroke, that pigment will cling to the paper and never let go. Watercolors lack the weight of tradition and opacity; they are more suited to the unassuming moments in life, to the in-betweens that stick in your mind. They are honest.

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My family moved to Tunisia in April of 2011 to join Dave and Naomi’s family, who had already settled in the capital a few months before. They had experienced the spark of the Jasmine Revolution, the national bloodless revolt that ousted a dictator and began revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria—a wave of change known as the Arab Spring. Dave was enthusiastic about the freedom in the air; Naomi sent me photos years later of him in a white t-shirt with a bat, cheerfully joining in the neighborhood watch despite his limited Arabic.

My dad says he was always like this—approaching fishermen or shopkeepers and becoming fast friends within a few minutes, smoking a sheesha pipe. “He didn’t know a stranger, and I think that also made him wide open to beauty around him,” Naomi beamed to me. “He loved going way down to the medina and checking out shops and sitting and talking and having tea with the guys and putting on scarves and sandals… Tunisians have art in their culture, and he just loved it!”

In the first years of our time in Tunisia, when his tow-headed, crazy boys and his stubborn little girl attended school with me, Mr. Dave taught us art classes. We made sculptures out of old bottles and mosaics out of scraps of plastic on the beach. He would always stop the car to pull old egg cartons out of the trash, or an old canvas he could paint over, or a hubcap he made into a clock that my brother still has hanging in his college dorm. I learned how to fill the page with my composition, to be bold with paint and color, to not obsess over the details as we sat with our sketchbooks drawing a tree in the school courtyard.

Our families grew close. We played with Mr. Dave’s kids and got in trouble breathing fire and shooting bows and arrows and playing with actual swords, all of which our dads encouraged (and occasionally joined). I remember Mr. Dave with a constant grin, vibrant blue eyes, and a chaotic, friendly, peaceful energy that poured off him. When he was with you, he was with you completely. He made people confident.

 “I just saw him come alive,” his wife said. “His whole life was an art piece.”

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Oil paints are temperamental for on-location art. They push around the canvas in textured swoops, rise in hard ridges, cake up in a landscape of scraped canyons. Oil is not only tactile, but impossible for the impatient. The same thickness that enables the artist to cover mistakes also requires waiting for paint to dry. I learned this the hard way, working in a studio on a small canvas. I stood for hours immersed in the movement of my rounded brush, wiping it on a rag, finally forced to switch out my darkening cup of oil. I added too much white to the ultramarine blue without mixing in the drying agent. It took days to dry. I can use a can of mineral spirits from the garage to break down the components of oil to a watery pigment—but once the chemicals soaked through the rag on my leg and burned the skin in an itchy welt that soured with sweat.

Acrylics—less expensive and more impatient—still require a lot of tools. Acrylics are oils’ cousin in overalls instead of pencil skirts. Less represented or respected on museum walls (they were only developed in 1953), acrylics can accomplish similar effects for a price low enough that kids use them to finger-paint. They are both less pretentious and less intimidating than their high-society cousin.

For my impatient high school self, the drying time was the selling point. I could take a large brush, cover up a mistake, and in ten minutes start sketching out the wing of a butterfly or the red-gold curve of a poppy petal. I could sit before my canvas in my room, listening to an audiobook and getting paint on my jeans and humming, and have a completed piece in an afternoon.

Though they are often more difficult to use, watercolors are preferable for on-location art. An artist may use a travel easel and board like they would with other forms of painting, but I more often opt for the sketchbook-on-the-knee option. A small tray of watercolors and single brush can easily be kept with a sketchbook in a backpack or purse. All the watercolor artist needs is confidence, a few minutes’ space, and a cup of water.

Watercolors show none of the adaptability and forgiving nature of oil or acrylic. They require a different mindset, just as plein air art itself does. Oils and acrylics can easily cover over mistakes once those mistakes are dry—watercolor cannot. It is light, but permanent. Once my brush has made a mark, I can’t get it off the page. I can load that mark with water until it forms a small dome of surface tension, swelling with swirling and diluted color, then touch a dry brush or cloth to it and suck up that droplet. But the faint mark of pigment remains, clinging to the threads of the paper, stubbornly refusing to be erased or covered over.

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In the summer of 2013, we bought a pot of flowers for our friends—Mr. Dave was dying. He had been sick for months after a diagnosis of Stage Four pancreatic cancer. My life felt unbalanced, shifting away from what control I had. Those flowers made me forget the rain against the pavement, which splashed away the oily rainbows in the parking lot. The tiny sunbursts spread in a bundle of orange and yellow silk. When my mom tossed her purse without looking, accidentally breaking one of the stems, I cried.

On November 21, 2013, I woke up after a night of fearful prayer to the surreal news that Mr. Dave had died during the night. The last time we had seen him he’d been rail-thin and eerily unfamiliar, lacking vitality. It still came as a shock, around the kitchen table with darkness crowding our windows, my vision fuzzing at the edges.

We flew back to America for the funeral. His daughter and I played hide-and-seek in the lobby of the church, even though we were normally too old for it. I didn’t know what to do or say. The video of him painting sheep on a hilltop played on loop on an old TV by the doors.

The family didn’t come back to Tunisia for years. When we visited them in America, his daughter had stopped smiling and his younger son had lost much of his frantic energy—it didn’t return until years later.

At Christmas, almost a year before he died, Mr. Dave gifted me with the promise of a few art lessons. He knew that I wanted to learn. I was ready to move past erasable graphite and into the world of watercolors. My family traveled for the summer, he got the diagnosis, and he was never able to teach me as he planned. I opened one of his sketchbooks and a watercolor kit on my second trip to the Alps, painting a thistle in a glass. Around it, I wrote, “I wish Mr. Dave could have been the one to teach me, but his paint set has been lovely to use.”

His enthusiasm set me to continue to dabble in making art for years. I rarely took classes; I practiced and watched videos online. Oils and acrylics take work to get back into, now. I relax into the challenge of watercolors—the quick, confident moment of them. The flow of the work.

Sometimes, his advice comes back to me while I paint. Light strokes with the pencil, less pressure or the hard lines in the paper will mar the paint. Don’t worry about painting each leaf, just see the shape of the colors. No need to press your drawing into the corner—be bold! Fill it up!

I practiced for years, on and off. I tried to deconstruct his paintings of Tunisia and see how they were done. I despaired of ever matching him—but I loved to paint. It made me release. It made me confident in the quiet.

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After high school, I balanced my sketchbook by the gray waters of the Mediterranean, bare feet buried in wet sand. My dad and brother wandered along the surf, searching for stones and sea glass. My mom, posing for me, sat as still as she could on her rock, facing the ocean, hair whipping around her face. Air whistled over the pitted rock at my back—the north tip of Africa is often buffeted by winds—as I brushed off the page and pushed hair from my face. I pulled soft graphite pencils from my travel pouch, sketching the composition to be pleasing to the eye. I used soft colors and thin lines for my waves, varying the use of my one brush from broad edge to sharp point. The finished painting took all of twenty minutes, a minimalistic depiction of the gray-blue water, the gray-blue sky, golden sand and golden rock, and my mom’s burgundy jacket.

Right before college I took my travel kit deep into the wilderness of the Boundary Waters, near the Canadian border. On the shore of a lake I sat, cross-legged, with my sketchbook on one knee and my open tin of paints on the other, scooping water from the lake into a crevice in the rock for my brush. Branches above me tossed in dappling light, waves lapped at the mossy shore, sun caught in a fiery trail on the lake, birds wheeled overhead. The painting was complete in half an hour, with subtle glints off the water and an almost abstract tree line. It brought quiet and attention to that moment. For that part of an hour, I saw the scene in front of me—and knew that it would never happen again.

On the anniversary of another friend’s death, six years after we lost Mr. Dave, I drove to a nearby lake and parked my van to face the water. Huddled in a multicolored quilt in the open trunk of the car, I juggled pens and paints and a water cup. The bare limbs of a tree laid down on the page in stripes of vivid color. Houses blurred into a cloud on the far side of the lake. A muskrat slipped below the surface and whirled away. I painted until my eyes strained at the lack of light and my fingers numbed and my fast-food napkin soaked through with bright pigment.

Last summer on my visit back home to Tunisia, a friend drove me to the coast for my birthday and nudged me to sit and paint overlooking a seafood restaurant built among the rocks. I used my pocketknife scissors to saw a plastic water bottle in half and scooped it in the spray for my water. The sharply pitted stone made an uncomfortable seat and the sun scorched my neck into a burn. I took bites absently from a sugar doughnut we’d bought at a beach food truck. Children ran screeching into the water, fishermen stood chatting on the sand, repairmen climbed up the restaurant awning. I leaned over my painting, absorbed, until it ached to stand. One lone fisherman stands on my beach, looking out at the ocean.

On the same I stopped at the overpriced café overlooking the city in Sidi Bou Said. My friend posed for me as I painted her hair, the plaid of her shirt, and the striped rug on the bench with the hills and houses of the city beyond. Two purple lines were smokestacks from the factory in my little brother’s best friend’s neighborhood. I sipped my citronade, sour and sweet and thick, refilling the cup with water for my brush.

Paintings like this are quick and engrossing. They take focus and confidence and slowly-building skill. What they take most of all is focus on your surroundings. They force you to be aware of yourself in your environment. To make good art, I have to know myself; good art reveals myself when I don’t understand who I am. And when I can see my own perception, I see others with empathy. When I’m aware of what it’s like to be in my own head, I can better understand what it’s like for someone else.

When working on a plein air art piece, I lose the pressure and distractions of studio work. I don’t need to worry if the terrain is shifting or I choose to change it or add something in. There is only the work of this day, of these few hours, in this place.

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When I asked Naomi why her husband gravitated toward watercolor paintings, she knew only that it was a challenge for him. She did notice that “the longer we lived in Tunisia, the more he loved doing watercolor.” My dad shared that, when they first went on trips around the country to scout out locations for art tourism, Mr. Dave set limits on himself to only paint for an hour—“he wanted to see if he could capture the essence of a place in a short amount of time.”

This approach to art appeals to me still. I can’t recall if Mr. Dave taught me specifically to embrace limitations to create better work, but he did embrace limitations in his own life and learn to work around them. When he got lost, he made friends. When there was no shade in the desert, he found the one tree that offered some relief. When he had no time to make a Halloween costume, he constructed cardboard armor and threw so much energy into his persona that we laughed along with him. When chemotherapy beat down his body, he turned to the story of Job and, through pain, continued to praise God.

Perhaps the artist from whom I inherited my supplies could multitask easily and carry on full conversations while he painted. He was certainly skilled enough for it. I cannot. I lose track of the world around me when I’m painting. Every detail—every sun-spotted leaf, every call filling the air, every chill in my toes or heat on my neck or sour taste of lemonade on my tongue are absorbed when I open myself up. They are seared onto the paper.

That is the real draw to art in general and to plein air art in particular. Real art, not mass-produced art that you can pick up at a Hobby Lobby, but personal art, is a monument to memory. It holds all the tensions and joys of a moment captured, instead of a rigid construction of the self.

“And you know, once it’s on paper, we have it forever.” What a gift art is, Naomi says, marveling. “You never know when you’re going to lose the present to sickness or death, but if you have lived every day with that kind of openness and that kind of intentionality to soak it in, when the time comes, when the present is no longer with you, you have that inside in your mind’s eye.”

Watercolors and the practice of plein air have taught me that kind of openness and awareness. When I paint, I must shut down my worries and scattered thoughts and be where I am.

I was too young to know the question at the time, but as I look at Mr. Dave’s paintings on my walls, I wonder what memories are tied up in each of them. I wonder if he’d be proud of my revelation, and if plein air art made him more aware, too. Did it train him to be present, or was he already open to the world?

The artist in the black cap is gone. He never had the opportunity to make good on his promise to teach me watercolors. But I still have his paintings on my walls and his example in my mind. I have my own painting of a poppy tattooed on my skin—representing growth and stability in loss—in watercolor ink to honor him. I have my own paintings on my wall, and his easel in my room, and lifelong friendships with his strange and wonderful kids. I have his sketchbooks to take somewhere new.

For those new forests and cities—in the tradition of the man in the black shirt on that rocky hilltop—I will use my watercolors.