PLEIN AIR PAINTING FOR A CAUSE

by Gail Braccidiferro, March 2004 issue of American Artist Magazine

When Jane Zisk arrived at the garden at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1996, she had spent months trying to recruit other artists to join her.  She had spent years as a solitary outdoor painter, but she now wanted to form a group that could provide mutual professional support, safety, and camaraderie.  Arriving at 8 a.m., hoping to find others unfolding easels in the soft summer morning, she instead found herself alone.  “I went for coffee,” she recalls.  “I thought, ‘No one wants to paint with me.’”

Fortunately, her dejection was short lived.  When she returned, four other painters were dabbing paint on canvas amid the museum’s 152 acres of rolling hills, trees, rustic stonewalls, and sunken gardens.  By the end of the day, 20 artists had gathered, and thus the Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society, a group that now boasts nearly 60 members, was born.

The society’s activities include monthly paint-outs in various corners of the state, juried art auctions, exhibitions, and demonstrations, as well as workshops by individual professional members.  Perhaps its most important activities, however, involve the preservation of local farms: Over the past three years the society has joined forces with a nonprofit group to raise more than $30,000 in the annual Celebration of Connecticut Farmlands.

“There are some really solid painters in Connecticut,” says David Lussier, a Woodstock artist and the society president.  “There are quite a few organizations of plein air painters, many of which are on the West Coast.  We’re looking to stand out.  We want to be recognized for our fund raising as well as our painting.”

Lussier has led the Connecticut society through a maturation process that parallels a nationwide trend of increasing interest in, and recognition of, plein air painting.  This trend is evident in the large number of events celebrating open-air painting conducted all over the country.  In September 2003 alone, notable events included a worldwide paint-out sponsored by the International Plein Air Painters, the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association’s Paint Annapolis weekend in Annapolis Maryland, a major Plein Air Painters of America workshop in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the National Academy of Professional Plein Air Painters’ Central Park Paint out in New York City.  Lussier and others from Connecticut were among the nearly 80 artists who gathered for the Central Park event that was a collaboration of arts groups from Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and the Midwest.

The increasing depth and sophistication of the Connecticut group was obvious at this year’s Celebration of Connecticut Farms, held in September.  The event took place at Beaver Brook Farm in the Connecticut River Valley town of Lyme.  Actress Meryl Streep toasted the group’s efforts to raise money as onlookers nibbled gourmet natural foods and examined canvases bursting with buttery sunflowers, the shimmering greens of summer pastures, and the streaming grays and blues depicting late winter’s melting snows.

Bids on most paintings began at $500, but within minutes many had sold for more than $1,000 each.  A jury process by society members chose 17 of 100 paintings submitted for the art auction.  “The public is starting to catch on that this is a good cause and that there are some really good paintings here,”  Lussier adds.  I tried to get everyone on the bandwagon to get their best work out here.”
Appropriately, these contemporary painters are in the public’s eye in a part of the state where painting from nature has deep roots.  A century ago, several American artists began following the lead of French painters such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, who had shocked the art world by dragging painting out of the studio and into the open air.  In 1899, Henry Ward Ranger visited Old Lyme and decided the gentle and varied landscapes made it a perfect setting for a new school of American landscape artists.  Ranger had already been painting bucolic Connecticut shoreline scenes near the New York border at Cos Cob, but he encouraged fellow open-air artists to experience the Old Lyme landscape as well.  The Lyme Art Colony became one of America’s most famous.

Ranger and artists such as Childe Hassam, Arthur Heming, Willard Metcalf, Matilda Brown, and William Chadwick began renting rooms in a graceful but timeworn Georgian-style home owned by Florence Griswold.  Dubbed the “Holy House,” the Griswold home offered inexpensive lodging for the artists as they wandered the nearby fields and salt marshes, painting scenes of undulating cattails on the Lieutenant River, cows and sheep grazing amid daisies, and stately clapboard-sided village homes.
In 1936, just a year before Griswold died, the artists banded together to raise money to prevent their longtime hostess from losing the house she adored.  The Griswold house ultimately was saved, although not by the artists, and today is a museum and art gallery.  A similar passion brought the contemporary Connecticut artists to the realization they should work to save the disappearing Connecticut farmland they love. 

Beth Ellis, the Glastonbury artist who helped join the Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society with the Hartford Food System, Connecticut Farmland Trust, and the Working lands Alliance, says having a cause has helped cement the group.  She met Elizabeth Wheeler, the program director of the Hartford Food System, at an art show.  The two talked about farmland preservation and ways the artist could get involved.  “She suggested we had a lot in common,” Ellis says.  “Farmland is definitely one of the resources we all appreciate.  We came out of this with a real conviction that this was probably the mission we were waiting to find.”

Terry Oakes Bourret, a Durham artist, says working to preserve farmland has helped the group evolve.  “We are cataloging the changes in the state’s landscape,” she says.  “People in the state don’t notice when a vegetable stand leaves or when a farm leaves, but when they are gone, they’re gone. 
While saving farmland may be mortar for the group, the joy of sharing a common love and the desire to more effectively promote plein air painting remain its building blocks.  Bourret is a former nurse who describes open-air painting in terms of that profession.  “The experience of plein air painting is kind of like working in an emergency room,” she says.  “It is quick, emotional, spontaneous, requires special skills, and ultimately, tugs at the soul.”  Pamela Simpson, a Woodstock painter, likens plein air painting to a trip back to childhood, saying, “Remember the wonderful feeling of being a little child and discovering the first snowfall?  This allows me to experience the outdoors as I did when I was a child.  There is a truth to being outside.”

Simpson says she began her career as a sculptor before bringing her easel and canvas outdoors.  Many members of the Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society say they had careers in other fields, or worked in areas of art ranging from studio painting and art promotion to teaching and commercial art, before following their hears to plein air painting.  The society now has a two-tier membership that provides special recognition such as exhibitions and gallery shows to those who are full-time, professional plein air painters, but also affords plein air painting opportunities to members who paint outside only part of the time.
 
“We are trying to turn people on to the emotion of painting outside,” Lussier says.  “Here is nothing wrong with studio painting, but too much rendering takes the life out of paintings.  I think any studio painter would benefit by getting outside sometimes.  Nature is our greatest teacher.  Every single day is different.”

For Zisk, the growth of the group, the caliber of the artists it has attracted, the recognition it has received, and the focus of farmland preservation, are all signs her dream has been realized.  “To see my vision coming true, it really brings tears to my eyes,” she says.

Gail Braccidiferro is a freelance writer in Pawcatuck, Connecticut.  She teaches journalism at the University of Connecticut and is former newspaper reporter.