7th annual Telluride Plein Air: LaRock featured among 30 artists

Telluride Plein Air traces its lineage across the pond to the end of the 19th century.

Eugene Boudin was one of the more adventurous 19th-century painters, known primarily for his beach scenes and seascapes of northern France and luminous skies. One of Boudin’s students was a young painter named Claude Monet, whom Boudin taught the importance of painting a scene directly from nature in the light, in the air, just as it was. In the stroke of Monet’s brush, painting en plein air was born. Out went the dark palette of Realism and the Barbizon School. Here comes the sun. (Go ahead, sing it.)

Monet and his circle mounted their first exhibition in April 1874. The show included an image by Monet of dawn over a foggy harbor. Its title:” Impression: Sunrise.” A critic who wrote a satirical review borrowed and popularized the term “Impressionism.”

America’s love affair with Impression began when a popular French dealer mounted the first professional show of Impressionist images at the American Art Association’s galleries in New York in 1896.

Fast forward to the present. The Sheridan Arts Foundation’s celebration of outdoor painting is the result of happy accident. During a visit to Sonoma County and the Napa Valley, Mark and Susan Dalton happened upon an outdoor show of paintings in the Impressionist tradition in the Sonoma town square. Impressed by the quality of the work they saw, they met with the show’s organizer, Keith Wicks, himself a laureled artist. Seeing a unique opportunity to raise funds for the Sheridan Arts Foundation’s programming, Mark retained Wicks to mount the first local event over Fourth of July weekend, 2004.

Since that first summer, for seven summers now, they have come to Telluride in force, 30 strong this year, a select group of American Impressionists or plein air painters in the region to record their responses to our mountains and meadows, highways and byways, historic buildings, street scenes, and people. Among the artists is three-year veteran Greg LaRock, whose work has been displayed in numerous juried shows where LaRock has often won gold.

To learn more about Telluride Plein Air from Greg’s point of view, click the “play” button and listen to his interview.