Part of the joy of painting outdoors is running into friends at plein air events. I’ll be at Olana Plein Air from July 9 to 11. The event itself is a new one for me, but I’ve painted at Frederic Edwin Church’s Moorish villa overlooking the Hudson many times.
I’ve done Rye’s Painters on Location with Tarryl Gabel for years. She has a unique, detailed style that captures Hudson River School romanticism. That’s peculiar, since she was born and raised on a cattle ranch on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota, and she is an enrolled member of the Hidatsa Tribe. You’ll know Tarryl because she’s usually the only painter who shows up in cowboy hat and boots.
Jamie Williams Grossman is the head of Lower Hudson Valley Plein Air Painters, and has built that organization into the biggest, most active chapter of New York Plein Air Painters. She’s also an accomplished Hudson River painter, with a loose, fluid style. She’s a natural-born tinkerer. There are scores of painters using her ideas, including me. She knows and paints the northern Catskills—where the Hudson River School movement was born—better than anyone else.
Sandra Hildreth is the powerhouse behind the Adirondack Plein Air Festival and a retired art teacher. She’s an accomplished outdoorswoman and it shows; her paintings are full of observational detail that other painters would just gloss over. Last year I painted with her in Barnum Bog on a sopping wet day, and it was as much fun looking at plants as painting.
Matt Chinian is one of the most prolific painters I know. Born in Cambridge, NY, he has an MFA from SUNY Albany. Most of his paintings are based in Cambridge, where he still lives, and often focus on the Battenkill River and its bridges. His brushwork is both loose and energetic.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in August 2015. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.