PleinAir Magazine February/March 2022

In the fall of 1890, Claude Monet arranged to have the wheat-stacks near his home left out over the winter. By the following summer he had painted them at least 30 times, at different times of day throughout the seasons. Focused on a single subject, the paintings in the series differ only in color, texture, composition, lighting, and weather conditions. Monet said, “For me a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; but it lives by virtue of its surroundings, the air and the light which vary continually.” After beginning outdoors, Monet reworked each painting in his studio to create the color harmonies that unify each canvas. Here, the pinks in the sky echo the snow’s reflections, and the blues of the shadows can…

PleinAir Magazine, and with it plein air painting, is seeing a massive growth spurt. Though there is little else good to be said about the health crisis of the past two years, a bright spot is that a lot of new people have discovered plein air painting. In case you were not aware, when the initial “two weeks to flatten the curve” lockdowns occurred in March 2020, I felt the need to reassure our friends and readers that we would get through this together, so I launched a daily Face-book Live at noon Eastern time. Guest artists appeared on the broadcast to teach and discuss art, and I gave advice on art marketing. The show ran seven days a week for seven months, went to five days a week for the rest…

As I sit down to write this note, I’m less than 24 hours away from the printer deadline for this issue, with a to-do list at least 20 items long waiting for me. Still, when my mother dropped by unexpectedly this afternoon, I was happy to stop for a cup of tea. If the past couple of years have taught me anything, it’s to not take the people or activities I love for granted. Although I’m not much for making New Year’s resolutions, our recent collective experience certainly has me thinking. How much have I missed out on by being “too busy”? Would I really not hit a deadline if I took just five minutes out of my day for a surprise visit? Couldn’t someone else in the family drive my…

The end of a famous artist’s life might be thought of as a time of tributes and celebration of the artist’s work. But not for Robert Indiana, who is best known for his 1965 image of the stacked letters L-O-V-E. He died at his island home in Vinalhaven, Maine, in 2018, a few months short of his 90th birthday. Just a day before his death, however, a lawsuit was filed by the artist’s agent, the Morgan Art Foundation, against his studio manager, Jamie L. Thomas, and another company, the New York-based American Art Image, which Thomas allowed to produce allegedly unauthorized editions of the artist’s work. Indiana, whom the lawsuit claimed was “bedridden and infirm” and intentionally isolated by Thomas, had a new will drawn up in 2016 that turned over…

Nothing strikes joy in the hearts of young children and intrepid plein air painters like the call for a snow day. Here, 17 artists braved the elements to give us their responses to the snowy landscape.…

A master class on what watercolor can do, Carrie Furnace #6 has the crisp lines and dead-accurate drawing of a realist painting, but with the kind of expressive color and varied technique that can bewitch the eye of a viewer with a more poetic sensibility. Wonderfully loose washes give broad areas a sense of variety and texture that would take three times the work to look natural with oil paints. Use of a fan brush provides more broken color and texture. Lights are preserved in the early stages to allow the white of the paper to illuminate from behind layers of paint, and, because Sneary is not a strict traditionalist, white gouache provides a few scant highlights. Even though the Pennsylvania steel mill offers the scrumptious textures of rust and crusty…