This review appeared in the December 2008 issue of The Art Guide

"Apple Blossoms and Dandelions", Oil by Thomas Adkins, CPAPS Award of Excellence


Top Award Winner Thomas Adkins and gallery owners Bill and Lauren Plage with Tom's award winning painting.

CPAPS President Katherine Simmons with Show Chair Margaret B. Dean

2007 Annual Membership Exhibition
Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society, Nov. 9, 2007 - Jan. 5, 2008
Hartford Fine Art, 80 Pitkin St., East Hartford, CT
Reviewed by Steve Starger

The art of plein air painting requires patience, a sharp eye and a quick but sensitive brush and palette. Plein air artists work literally in nature, pitting their talents against a challenging environment of shifting light and its effects on the landscape. One of the most poetic forms of painting, plein air is a daunting undertaking, akin to capturing sunlight in a bottle or arresting ocean waves in their implacable march to shore.

Plein air painting conjures the work of Connecticut Impressionist masters such as Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir and Willard Metcalf. More than a century after they painted their masterpieces, the Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society continues the tradition and recently exhibited more than 100 paintings by society members in the group's annual exhibition at East Hartford's Hartford Fine Art gallery.

Paintings large and small filled the gallery and frame shop's rather cozy space. The show was juried, which surely presented a challenge to the juror. Evidence of high quality and master of technique and media could be found everywhere a viewer looked. There had to be award winners, of cours; that's the nature of a juried show. But few visitors to the exhibit could be disappointed with the high level of talent on display.

Many classic art influences could be found in the show's work, including American and French Impressionism, the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and Tonalism. Space does not allow a mention or description of every painting in the show; suffice it to say that there was nothing that could be condescended to as "weekend painting." The works were bold, sharp, and subtle, evincing a wide palette of color and approaches to the changing landscapes as individual as each of the painters who exhibited work.

Amon the paintings that caught this reviewer's eye was "Heron Home," a small oil by Judity Meyers, comprising a sylvan forest scene bisected by a curving creek. The water bird of the painting's title stood in the water, a subtle, ghostly presence, limned by a few strokes of white paint. It was as if a walker in the woods had stumbled upon the heron and stopped at a respectful distance to take in the scene.

Susan Jositas' straightforwardly titled oil "Autumn Afternoon - Main Street" presented an avenue of stately homes in sharp representational style. The viewer's eye inevitably traveled to a matrix of tree branch shadows falling on a yellow house. One could almost feel the light shifting and changing, the shadows elongating as the earth moved along around the sun.

This is an exhibit well worth seeking out, if only to immerse oneself in a plethora of homegrown talent.