Plein air painting

En plein air, or plein air painting, the act of painting outdoors, is taking place in Holly Springs.

It honors the late artist Kate Freeman Clark, who studied plein air under the renowned William Merritt Chase, the American painter who taught impressionism. He also established the Chase School in New York.

Suzanne Farese is teaching plein air classes and has a handful of student followers and at least one child studying the technique.

Farese and her sister, Martha Pollan, both originally from Tunica, live in Holly Springs. Farese received a BFA at Ole Miss in art and worked as a commercial artist in the Memphis, Tenn., area in an ad agency studio. In the last few years, she has spent time in Los Angeles, Calif., studying with plein air artists in workshops up and down the Pacific coast area.

“That’s what I want to teach, to bring here,” Farese said. People like George and Laurie Gwin are taking lessons. They set up easels outdoors, but sometimes work inside in locations like Regel & Company, where they paint still lifes.

They work almost exclusively with oils and palette knives.

The Gwins have been taking lessons from Farese for about a year. They work once a week or twice a month.

“The technique I teach is under the direct lineage of Kate Freeman Clark,” Farese said.

Impressionism goes all the way back to French painter Oscar-Claude Monet, born in Paris.

His paintings were devoted to capturing the play of natural light and shadow on surfaces outdoors.

“This comes down through Monet. He was studying the light big time – how the light changes with the time of day and season to season,” Farese said. “I teach one how to see the light more than how to paint.”

She said the famous artists who learned plein air would set up something like a haystack and go back and paint it over and over at different times of day and different seasons to learn more about how ambient light affects what an artist sees.

Farese has three students from the Collierville, Tenn., area studying with the group.