A special word about
Plein Air & California Impressionist Art Forms:
Literally meaning
"open air" in French, the term Plein Air is generally used to refer to paintings
executed out of doors. The Plein-Air approach is most often associated with the
style of Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and
Camille Pisarro. Their love of nature and fascination with light led them out of
doors, where they painted with pure colors and broken strokes in an attempt to
capture the transitory nature of light.
By painting in the
open air, Impressionist artists were in turn following a tradition begun by the Barbizon School of painters, a group of landscape artists from the 1830s to the
1870s associated with the town of Barbizon, France. They inspired fellow
painters to go outside and experience nature directly in order to render it more
naturally than the artificially composed studio works of their predecessors.
