SAG October Featured Artist ~ Potomac Artworks

10.14.2011

SAG October Featured Artist

This month, I am Featured Artist for Springfield Art Guild at their Springfield Mall location near JC Penney and the Information Booth. It's only appropriate to have a full show of photography, as I am now a juried Photographer at the Workhouse Arts Center! Gaining this exposure (ha!) had been a long journey and I am thrilled to be able to primarily focus on and show both pastels and photography, plus whatever else I might mix in.

My Featured Artist exhibit at the Loft in Occoquan will be pastels based on my photography in Italy and my Featured Artist exhibit at the Workhouse next June will have one wall of each medium. It has been a long time coming and I look forward to marrying the two media in my efforts to exhibit. Please look to my photo blog for more examples.

NOTE: The exhibit will continue throughout November as well.

2 comments:

Lynne Grossman said...: Congrats! The P's: Photography and Pastel and (Oil)Painting

Bet you have a lot of ideas for Pictures from your Prolific travels this Past summer. :); October 28, 2011 at 9:24 AM
Bonnie said...: Thanks, Lynne. Mostly photos and pastels these days and I plan to leave it at that for a while with two big Featured Artist gigs coming up in December and June. It's all so much fun, yet I confess I need more balance.; October 28, 2011 at 4:27 PM

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The Charm of en Plein Air

Much of my work is done en plein air, French for "in the open air." People often associate it with the Impressionists, but the move to paint outside preceded them by a number of decades. The trend to appreciate landscapes as a genre at all was new for the time.

Several characteristics contribute to the distinctive beauty of en plein air painting. They are generally smaller in size in order to be able to capture a scene in a single sitting. Because of the time limit and environmental factors such as the sun and shadows moving, they often lack extensive details and might appear slightly fuzzy or unfinished. Lastly, they tend to have a freshness and spontaneity which makes them impossible to compare to traditional and methodological studio work. That said, my own studio work tends toward the same feel as en plein air, which then identifies my overall style: softness with an edge.

My aim when painting en plein air is for alla prima paintings, which roughly translates for me as "what happens outside, stays outside." It adds another level of difficulty to the work.

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10.14.2011