"Nature I love, and next to nature is art"
Maria Liberto Bessette
Simply stated en plein air is the art of painting directly from nature. The artist responds with quick and spontaneous brush strokes to capture the true effects of color and light
Painting outdoors started in the late 1700's. Landscape painters in France began taking their oil paints to the field in pig bladders. And by the 1840s, collapsible tin tubes were being introduced.
It was about this time that Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) started the Impressionists group.
By 1869 Monet and Renoir were using portable easels and traveling paintboxes. They painted rapid studies in free sketchy brushwork, attempting to capture fleeting moments. The basis for outdoor painting techniques were firmly established although methods and palettes would change.
Many might think Impressionism is the style of choice by current plein air artists. Each artist develops his own unique way of seeing, their own style and choice of mediums. But all have one common theme: truth to nature.
It is therefore only fitting that the love of nature and creativity is also the subject to the gifted writers and poets.
Below is a sequence of penned works and plein air painters
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time." - John Lubbock
AN ARTIST IS JUST LIKE A LAKE
An artist is just like a lake:A mirror that's alive;
With trees that shimmer, laugh, and shake,
And high clouds hung like towers.
With trees that shimmer, laugh, and shake,
And high clouds hung like towers.
Why do we watch a mountain quake
As feelings dip and dive?
The worlds inside and out will make
A moment that is ours.
As feelings dip and dive?
The worlds inside and out will make
A moment that is ours.
Nicholas Gordon
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| Maria painting at Wyoming Park,Wyoming DE 2012 |
is the courage to speak and write and paint
what you know and care about."
Audrey Flack
We are alive our very breath singing.
We live beyond certainty, constantly stretching.
We are the lucky who live beyond,
in a swirl of questioning,
broadening. Reach...
We stretch in our borderless
matrix of gestures,
our instruments urge us,
our melodies carry us...
towards where you sit,
in that daring front row.
You await our flowering intonations,
the hint of the glorious flourishing new.
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| Maria painting at Willow Rock Gardens, Clayton DE, 2012 |
Paintbrush, melodies, give us their clues,
In hours of practise, its you were befriending.
Authentic, blended and lifted, we woo
the small beauty of a perfect ending.
In hours of practise, its you were befriending.
Authentic, blended and lifted, we woo
the small beauty of a perfect ending.
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| Maria Painting at Mirror Lake, Dover DE, 2011 |
With golden fingers our harmonies fuse,
the secrets of the gardens weve tended
the streggle for the pure, authentic,
were dancing on strings,
towards a God amused,
a cosmos applauding.
What weve tried to accomplish,
at such great odds,
is beauty, melding audience with artist.
Humanity flourishing true.
We are the workers who bring you the true
and the new and the old again, remade for you,
we are alive, our breath has a view,
Weve striven and surfaced, and now were all new.
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| Maria Painting at Lavender Fields, Milton DE, 2012 |
"Nature I love, and next to nature is art"
Maria Liberto Bessette
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