Glenna Hartmann Invitational Fine Art Exhibition

California pastelist Glenna Hartmann was an adventurous and gifted member of the plein air community and a signature member of Plein Air Painters of America. There will be an exhibit in her honor at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History on Saturday & Sunday, February 20 & 21 from 10:00a.m.–5:00p.m.

Nearly 60 of California's top landscape artists have been invited to participate, with 100 of their new paintings being sold to help support two of Glenna's beloved nonprofit organizations: The Nature Conservancy and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

For the opening reception with the artists on Friday, February 19, tickets are $50. On the weekend, the exhibit is included with museum admission ($6-10 for adults, children are free).

Anna Ancher (1859-1935) - An Impressionist in Denmark

The Skagen Museum celebrated the 150th anniversary of Anna Ancher's birth this year. She was a member the Skagen School of Impressionists that formed in this picturesque, sunny village which sits on the north end of the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. She had actually grown up there, the daughter of an innkeeper. When she was born, Hans Christian Andersen was a guest, and Anna's mother saw this as an omen of special talents in her daughter. As a teenager, Anna studied art in Copenhagen for three winters, and ten years later in Paris at the atelier of Pierre Puvis de Chavennes. As Skagen became an artist's colony, she learned from the artists who spent time at her parents' inn: the poet and artist Holger Drachmann, Carl Lacher, Karl Madsen, Christian Krohg, P.S. Kroyer, Viggo Johansen, Swedish painter Oscar Bjork, Danish court portraitist Laurits Tuxen, and painter Michael Ancher, who would marry Anna.

She became a sucessful painter, receiving medals in Paris for her entries in the Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900, one of only two Danish painters to receive praise by the French critics. She won medals at other international and Danish exhibitions, including the Ingenio et Arti medal from the Danish king in 1913.

Her subject matter was primarily domestic scenes and figures, but she focused to a great extent on color, light and the abstract arrangement of shapes (see "Sunshine in the Blue Room," below).


The Skagen Museum was founded by the artists themselves in 1908 and has about 1500 of their works. More paintings are on view a few blocks away at the restored, 200-year-old Ancher house, which includes both Michael's and Anna's studios. Many doors in the house have been painted with birds and tulips by Michael and Helga, their daughter.

Sources:

Dictionary of Women Artists
Delia Gaze (Editor) Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997

Gourmet Magazine, July 1997, "A Painters' Paradise by the Sea" by Anne Roston

Laguna Plein Air

This week, October 11-18, is the 11th Annual Laguna Beach Plein Air Painting Invitational, a week-long celebration of plein air painting. Due to the rain today, many artists will be painting inside the Laguna Art Museum's Steele Gallery.

On Saturday morning (the forecast is for a clear, sunny day), the 50 artists will participate in a Quick Draw held in Heisler Park, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and immediately adjacent to the Museum, from 9-11 a.m. with a silent auction immediately following.

Saturday evening the museum will host a "Collectors' Soiree and Sale" at 6 p.m. ($125 for members, $150 for non-members).

Sunday, October 18 (11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.) is the public exhibit and sale, with admission free to the public.

Clive Pates - Essay

Clive Pates curated an exhibit of landscape painters for the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, two years ago ("The Will to Endure - Six Contemporary Landscape Painters"). He wrote an introduction for the exhibit in which he points out the role of plein air painting in breaking down the conventions of 19th Century academic painting and eventually leading to abstract and non-objective art.

"The uniqueness of the Plein-Air painting is its reliance on direct perception. ... Experimentation and the need to break down older structures of meaning extended boundary lines in terms of the way we understand painting. There were created rich new techniques and possibilities for using paint that could only have evolved with an understanding of purely abstract forms of painting developed through this conscious act of looking."

He goes on to say that we seem to be at a similar crossroads today, with imposed meaning again becoming the gatekeeper in the art world, and the plein air painter in a position to stand for the value of direct perception.

"Contemporary painting is often prescriptive and relies on a very developed art community structure for success or failure, so once again we can see a new academia reigning over the way we perceive art. There is a need for re-appraisal within contemporary art; a re-evaluation of traditional realism is also long overdue. Purely perceptual painting is now placed outside of the newly formed arts academy structures, the low art counterpoint to the glorious and triumphant modernist experiment. The landscape painter has the potential to re-integrate the last century of experimentation into the landscape. The landscape can now be seen in its purist form of the abstract mark, perceived and invested with meaning."

American Landscapes - Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum

This weekend is the opening of an exhibit at The Parrish Art Museum that traces the progression of American landscape painting, from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists, from the early Modernists to contemporary painters. Located in Southhampton, the Parrish Museum is devoted to American art, with an emphasis on the art of Eastern Long Island.

Here are some of the programs associated with the American Landscapes exhibit:

“Talking Landscape” Exhibition Opening and Reception
Saturday · September 26, 2009
6 pm
Parrish Members free|$7 Nonmembers

Join us for what promises to be a lively exchange among three leading contemporary artists, Jennifer Bartlett, April Gornik, and Will Cotton. Moderated by Parrish Director Terrie Sultan. A reception will follow at 7 pm.

Special Lecture and Book Signing William Merritt Chase: Landscapes in Oil
Saturday · October 10, 2009
6 pm
$5 Parrish Members|$10 Nonmembers

On Oct. 9, the subject will be “Up and Down the Coast: Plein-air Art Colonies." Dr. Longwell will discuss the fashionable East Coast resorts that have attracted artists as well as beachgoers for more than a century.

And *this* one sounds interesting:

The Oct. 16 talk, “Whither Landscape: Contemporary Trends," will consider the effects of our changing ecological climate on the tradition of plein-air painting and how today's artists incorporate those concerns into their work.

American Legacy - Our National Parks at the Haggan Museum

The Haggin Museum, an art and history museum in Stockton, California, is hosting an exhibit of plein air paintings done during the past year in 35 National Parks from coast to coast by 36 members and guests of Plein Air Painters of America. The exhibit also includes some studio work done from plein air references.

The paintings are arranged starting with Yellowstone, our earliest National Park (designated by President Grant in 1872) through the Old Spanish National Historic Trail (designated by President Bush in 2002).

An additional segment of approximately 15 paintings celebrates the centennial of Zion National Park, in southern Utah, which was established in 1909. Fifteen PAPA members spent a week there last March, focusing on the spectacular gorges and intimate creeks and glades in this park whose Hebrew name means a place of refuge or sanctuary.

The exhibit runs from October 3, 2009 - January 10, 2010. Beginning October 2nd, special opening events include:

Gala Opening Reception, Friday, October 2, 7:00-9:00p.m.
Prior to the official opening, a gala reception with the artists allows attendees a first opportunity to view the exhibition and purchase the paintings. Connoisseur ticket-holders have an exclusive opportunity to purchase the paintings from 5:30-7:00 p.m.

Painting Demonstration, Saturday, October 3, 9:30a.m.-12:30p.m.
Participating artists set up their easels at Stockton's Victory Park. Attendees can watch the artists at work and bid on their finished paintings. Admission is free to both this event and the museum, which will be open from 9:30a.m.-5:00p.m. Box lunches and drinks will be available for purchase beginning at 11 a.m. Lunch will be provided to Connoisseur ticket-holders.

Gallery Talk, Sunday, October 4, 2:00-3:00p.m.
Catalog essayist, Jean Stern, executive director of The Irvine Museum, presents "100 Years of Landscape Painting in California." This special event is included with regular museum admission and free for Connoisseur ticket-holders.

The Haggin has the largest museum collection of major Bierstadt works, in addition to renowned 19th- and early 20th-century American and European artists, including Jean Béraud, Rosa Bonheur, William Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, George Inness and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud is best known for his Pop Art images of cakes and pies sitting in a bakery shop display. The retrospective of his work on view this summer at the Loveland Museum and Gallery in Loveland, Colorado, includes those paintings along with other still-lifes, charcoal sketches, figures and abstract landscapes. We were fortunate to be able to see it last Friday. The exhibit even has its own Facebook page. There's a 60-minute interview that you can watch in a room alongside the exhibit. Thiebaud is animated and articulate (at 88, he still plays tennis and teaches) and his sense of humor is as keen as his knowledge of art history.

Thiebaud is also known for using thick layers of paint (like frosting on a cake) and "halation," which is a line of bright color that our stereoscopic vision causes us to see on the edges of a subject in bright light or strong sunlight.

These works are obviously not plein air, but he doesn't work from photos.

"Photography takes the world all together as a source...Painting starts with nothing and has to get something...it's a world of its own. So if you are trying to mix the two together, it's probably okay if you're Degas, who used photographs, but, how deeply he was trained first to be able to use those options. If you start copying photographs, you're going to always be on this flat surface, and it's so easy to tell when something is photographically based. You can't lie about it.

"I just spend a lot of time drawing from objects and people and things, and then, like reading a visual dictionary, you develop tools." - Wayne Thiebaud

The exhibit will be at the Loveland Museum through August 16.

Don Coen - Artist

Don Coen has a painting in the new Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum. Most of his paintings are large-scale (8' long or more), hyper-realistic images of the rural West. Some are air-brushed acrylic on canvas, some are oil-stick on paper and some are monotypes. With their size and level of detail, they could never be mistaken for plein-air.


His ink-and-wash drawings, however, do look like they were done on the spot. That's the only way you could get that combination of accuracy & spontaneity.