Gualala Arts: Plein Air Group

The Gualala Arts Plein Air Interest Group was established in 2004 to get painters out to an array of scenic places on our beautiful coast - not just talking about doing it, but actually doing it, and trying to do it every week.

The Plein Air Group is carrying on the tradition of Monet and Renoir, getting out of the studio and painting on location - capturing the real light, real colors and real textures in our environment. Of course, the hard part is the real wind and the real changes in weather, light and shadows over a several hour period - but dealing with the problems is part of the fun of it too.

Bruce Jones gives the history, "Iris Lorenz-Fife and I started the Plein Air Interest Group, patterned loosely on the 'Hikes for Health' groups: meet every few months to establish a schedule, publish the schedule and meeting points to people who are interested, and try to get to the meeting points at 10:00 a.m. each Monday morning. No money is involved and no real structure, but we figured if we published it we would get ourselves up and out on Monday mornings, starting the week right with some painting.

Since then, Iris has gone on to other things but she still attends occasionally. Usually only a couple of people attend, but sometimes we get 6 or 7. After a couple of hours we usually wander around and look at what each other has done, which is always interesting and results in more ideas about composition, how to simplify and interpret a scene and what emphasis works well.

If someone is interested in joining they should email me at bsjones@hughes.net to get the current schedule and get on the email list. When a schedule is about completed, I'll email everyone on the list to say the date and time we will meet (at Café Lala in Gualala) to decide on places for the next three months. Whoever comes helps decide on locations, I publish the results on email and publish any special opportunities to the same list - like when the lotuses open in Sanyal's pond and Mary Elizabeth says we can come paint them.'

Yes this is a very informal way of going about it, and more structure might work, so if you have different ideas and want to try them out it would be fine with me. I just want a mechanism that encourages me to get out and paint on Monday mornings."

The Gualala Arts Center, located at 46501 Gualala Road in Gualala, CA,
is open weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and weekends from noon to 4:00 p.m.
Please call (707) 884-1138 for more information, or email info@gualalaarts.org.