PleinAir Magazine Feb/Mar 2017

The Danish artist Paul Gustave Fischer had an unusual opportunity to learn about painting from his father, who was both an artist and a manufacturer of paints and lacquers. His earliest paintings were influenced by his father and his teachers at the Royal Danish Academy, as well as the young Danish naturalists gaining attention at the time. Fischer’s paintings changed dramatically after a four-year stay in Paris (1891-1895), during which he gained a greater appreciation for plein air painting, a brighter palette, and a looser application of oil colors. This painting of a friend resting in a wooded setting was created before Fischer’s time in Paris. The grasses and trees have a gestured quality that suggests they were painted completely outdoors, but the detailed rendering of the figure, easel, and painting…

You are a part of something very big. The plein air movement is currently bigger than any movement in the history of art. Your role — whether painter, collector, museum, sponsoring organization, or gallery — is to play a critical part in this historic movement, which will be written about for generations to come. In case you just joined the movement recently: Plein air has not always been so dynamic. Although there was a special moment for the Impressionists in 19th-century France, and in the 20th century a small movement of outdoor painters on the West and East coasts of America, those movements eventually all but died out. The tradition was only held together by a chain of young plein air artists who ultimately lived long enough to pass the torch…

In the middle of winter, when the temperature drops below freezing and the days keep getting shorter, I spend time in my studio on special projects and reviewing the drawings and paintings I created outdoors under more favorable conditions. It’s an opportunity to make critical evaluations and to find images worthy of further exploration. I might develop a larger and more refined studio piece that expands on what I observed last summer, or I might translate an image recorded in charcoal into a colorful oil painting (as with the painting on the easel). This process is one of relying on memories, invention, and imagination more than observation. That is, it is a shift away from creating plein air paintings of what I actually see toward scenes that don’t really exist. Several…

Following our focus on artists whose paintings centered on conservation and preservation, we feature the early Taos, New Mexico, painter and printmaker W. Herbert Dunton. He was passionate about preserving the vanishing spirit of the Old West in his oil paintings, murals, and lithographs. Dunton grew up working as a ranch hand and cowboy, studied at the Art Students League of New York, created illustrations for major magazines, and ultimately struggled with financial and health setbacks during the Great Depression. Dunton is shown in this hand-tinted photographs working in New Mexico on a plein air painting of a cowboy on horseback.…

Gloria Chadwick Artists For Conservation “My art conservation pledging began in 2003 after responding to a Starbucks/San Diego Zoo competition to design a limited-edition debit card and tumbler design with the purpose of raising funds for the zoo’s Conservation and Research for Endangered Species program,” says Gloria Chadwick. “My winning flamingo design sold out in six weeks, and 20 percent of the funds went to research. The zoo now has a new, broader program, San Diego Global, to educate and promote conservation while engaging the general public. That event led to my becoming a juried member of Artists for Conservation [www.artistsforconservation.org], which is an international nonprofit, located in Canada, representing 27 countries in five continents, with a limited membership of 500 artists all dedicated to contributing time, funds, paintings, and research…

ARTIST DATA NAME: Dan Young BIRTH YEAR: 1959 LOCATION: Silt, CO INFLUENCES: “Chauncey Ryder, Emil Carlsen.” WEBSITE: www.danyoungstudio.com Dan Young’s work sells in some of the top galleries in the country, and he is living the dream, painting all day and painting what he wants, usually outside. But most everyone wishes they could go back in time and pull themselves aside to offer advice on how to navigate the future, with the benefit of hindsight. What would Dan Young say to the Dan Young of 30 years ago? “Be more patient with the whole process,” Young says. “We are influenced by a lot of painters and see a lot of great work when we are hungry young artists, and everyone wants it to come quickly. But we have to be patient with the process. It’s tempting to…