en plein air

Whenever I'm outdoors, I feel most inspired, grounded, and present. Also outdoors, a completely different approach to art, my "en plein air" style, emerges. There's a sort of urgency, spontaneity, and chaos that my body thrives off of every time I engage in a plein air painting. The phrase plein air directly translates from French as "in the open air." I'm obsessed with the challenge of engaging in such practice. It differs from the traditional studio approach where artists typically rely on reference images, sketches, or memory to complete a work. Instead, it's centered around depicting natural light, colors, and weather as it appears in real time. A challenge because en plein air paintings require me to commit to sensory reality, not my studio imagination to complete the piece. Time is fleeting and an en plein air painting captures a moment in time directly from the source.