On view Thursday, October 26, 2023 through Saturday, January 6, 2024
Great Gallery

The Zanesville Museum of Art is pleased to present recent work by members of the Ohio Plein Air Society or OPAS. Plein air painting or painting en plein air is the time-honored tradition of painting outdoors. And OPAS has celebrated this tradition since its founding in 2002 by creating, promoting, exhibiting, and selling works painted out-of-doors.

This year, the Ohio Plein Air Society’s juried exhibition theme is Ohio’s Changing Seasons. Fifty-five OPAS members-in-good-standing submitted sixty-two works of art in a range of media including watercolor, oil, acrylic, and pastel paintings all of which capture Ohio’s picturesque scenery. To qualify as a plein air painting for this exhibition, OPAS requires that the painting must resemble the location and that ninety-five percent of the painting must be completed outside, on location, and from direct observation. Also, while multiple painting sessions are acceptable, painting from photographs is not. OPAS members, who come from nearly every county in Ohio, remain at the forefront of the resurgent plein air movement in the United States.

 Painting outdoors was a difficult task in the early nineteenth century. It was not until 1841 that the practice of taking paint, easel, and canvas outdoors became more practical with the creation of the collapsible paint tube, invented by the American artist John G. Rand (1801–1873). Once tubes of synthetic oil paint were widely available, painters including the French Impressionists Claude Monet (1840–1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), worked en plein air to capture the essence of nature. They recorded their experiences on canvas as directly as possible. Their expressive paintings incorporated natural light, color, and movement into their art works and inspired generations of artists who established artists' colonies in France, Italy, England, and the United States. Generations of artists have taken on the challenge and joy of painting en plein air, as this exhibition by members of the Ohio Plein Air Society illustrates.

Banner Image Above: Jeffrey Suntala (Strongsville, OH), Wade Lagoon April 13, 2023, watercolor. On loan from Jeffrey Suntala. IR10/10/2023.032.