April 24, 2009 (CHAPEL HILL, NC) – Artist Kimberly Alvis loves her gardens, which spread out among the trees and pond around her home just outside downtown Chapel Hill. Well tended, they provide her with constant sources for still life paintings, landscapes, and people in landscape paintings – especially when she can capture one of her sons outdoors among them.
On April 27, Alvis will share her gardens and the subject matter they provide with PAINT NC, a group of emerging and professional artists from Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill who meet together regularly to paint en plein air, or “in the open air.”
Alvis is a regular participant in plein air events, both through PAINT NC and
Outdoor Painters, a group based in Graham, NC.
“I love plein air painting because it’s so challenging,” she said. “You never know what you’ll have to deal with. It could be wind, cold, manipulating the easel so the sun isn’t shining on it, which messes up the values.”
Frank LaLumnia, a founding member of Plein-Air Painters of America, explains the challenge – and attraction — of plein air painting:
“Painting from life is a pursuit unlike any other painting technique,” he writes on the organization’s website (www.p-a-p-a.com). “It challenges artists to concentrate every sensory nerve on the information in front of them. They absorb it all, from sight to sound, from temperature to atmosphere, and then channel those feelings from head to hand, re-creating the vision in paints on paper or canvas.”
The late April session in Alvis’ gardens will offer PAINT NC artists a vast assortment of flowers on which to focus their attention and talents including “Lady Banks” roses, Vibirnum and Foxglove. Ducks also wander through Alvis’ gardens regularly, and their likenesses are bound to wind up on a painter’s canvas.
Artists visiting from out of town are welcome to join the PAINT NC group at this spring event by contacting the organizers via the website: www.paintnc.org.
Kimberly Alvis is an accomplished artist represented in the Triangle by Somerhill Gallery in Durham and the Little Art Gallery & Craft Collection in Raleigh. To see more of the artist’s work, visit www.alvisart.com.
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