PleinAir Magazine Oct/Nov 2018

Inspired by Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903) often fled the hustle and bustle of Paris to paint the countryside. Like many of his contemporaries, he preferred to paint in the open air, but while others chose to complete their work in the studio, Pissarro finished his outside. In later years, the artist suffered from a recurring eye infection that prevented him from working outdoors much of the year. He spent more and more time in the city, often renting apartments or hotel rooms, where he painted views of the urban landscape from the windows. In February 1897, he took a room in Paris at the Hôtel de Russie on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Drouot, and produced a series of paintings of…

You and I live in an exciting time. There are more artists painting en plein air now than at any other point in history. Today, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of artists go outdoors to paint. Hundreds of local and regional plein air events take place each year, and thousands of people around the world buy original paintings from these events, from galleries, and from plein air artists themselves. History will smile on this era of plein air painting because of the passion to keep quality high, because participants are driven to perfection through workshops and video training, and because there are probably more original plein air paintings in homes than any other kind of original artwork. You and I are experiencing a plein air boom. Years ago, onstage…

There’s no one path to becoming a successful artist (and by successful, I don’t just mean financially). Whether you studied art in school, have taken workshops with your favorite painters, or are developing your skills through books, magazines, and videos, you have to put in the time if you want to improve. This issue is bursting with examples of how your fellow artists have made that kind of commitment to their art. Like many, Jayson Yeoh finds making time for painting can sometimes be difficult. Still, he strives to get outdoors as much as possible. And when he doesn’t have two to three hours to complete one painting on location, he sketches. With energetic linework and an attention to composition, spatial relationships, and rhythm, he can capture several scenes in the…

It’s easy to see why plein air painters are drawn to dramatic waterfalls, majestic mountains, and wide open skies. But the urban landscape holds its own charms. Here, 13 artists reveal 13 different takes on the city. From back alleys to busy intersections, views from high above to down below, these diverse paintings share a unique energy, the feeling that anything could happen next — and whatever it is, we can’t wait. “A cityscape is not a landscape painted within city limits,” says Stewart White. “A cityscape is a painting that reveals the urban fabric — the textures, colors, and energy that express the density of urban life. Too often, I find a painting of a rural setting with a faint outline of the city skyline in the background described as…

For Joseph McGurl, painting is far more than a technical exercise or even a pleasurable day out; it’s a voyage of discovery. But he’s not only investigating what’s in front of him, he’s delving into a deeper exploration of how reality works and what it means to be in the world. He styles himself a “contemporary luminist,” after the 19th-century Luminist painters who were influenced by the transcendentalist views of writers like Emerson and Thoreau. They believed that there is a spiritual component to nature that is accessible to everybody. “Luminism was more of a philosophy than a style,” McGurl explains. “In fact, the word ‘Luminism’ was adopted by 20th-century art historians to describe a group of 19th-century painters that included Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, and John…

“I tell my students that they need to paint not just the objects, but what’s next to them," says McGurl. "If you have two objects that are close in value, then you are going to get a soft edge between them; visually it’s going to look like the edges are softer. Also, if the whole area is in shadow, then it has softer edges. I think we look at paintings more carefully than nature. In a painting, a hard edge looks really hard, but when we look at nature at a glance, things can feel soft. If you stare at nature, you’ll see more hard edges. What I’m trying to do is paint the appearance of nature, the experience of looking at it. In addition to softening edges with a…