Off the Beaten Path
Nantucket's En Plein Air Artists
Written by Brian Bushard
Photography by Kit Noble and Brian Sager
llya Kagan’s office for the day is beside the easel he’s set up in the heart of the Middle Moors. Kagan, a plein air painter since 1989, is by himself, watching as the wispy cirrus clouds drift by slowly overhead and the afternoon sunlight turns a warmer shade of orange. Plein air painting, or painting outdoors, a style made famous on Nantucket 100 years ago by landscape artist Frank Swift Chase, is fundamentally a solitary and cerebral experience, Kagan said.
“That’s the nature of plein air,” he said. “When you’re working in the studio, you have all the time in the world to fix things up and move things around, but when you’re en plein air, you’re looking at something, it’s moving and the light is changing on it. It’s like live music versus studio music. Studio[recordings] have a nice finish, but live music has spontaneity that makes it more direct and more interesting."
"You can’t help but change. Change is inevitable,” Kagan added. “When I find myself coming back to the same subject, I’ll try to interpret it the way I did when I was 20 but I’m different now. The way I see darks and lights has changed. James Taylor said that everyone wants to hear him play ‘Fire and Rain,’ but you have to bring something new to it or else it becomes a trope. It’s just the same thing over and over again.”
Kagan is one of dozens of Nantucket painters participating in the Artists Association of Nantucket’s Plein Air Festival this June. Some artists, like Kagan, bring a more traditional perspective to interpreting the natural world around them when they paint outside, giving each painting a unique look while staying true to the familiar surroundings they’re painting. Other artists, like Katherine Miller, take an abstract approach.
It's not like an anatomy course,” she said about her approach to painting. “It’s not about representing exactly what you see. I never know exactly what the painting will look like. I think I have good intentions about what the painting may look like.” Miller is not technically a plein air artist, though she takes inspiration from the style. Rather than paint outside, she photographs natural landscapes and brings those photos to her studio, blows them up and hangs them on the wall. Then she paints what she sees in those photographs. “It’s almost like an intellectual investigation of the landscape,” she said. “It’s a deconstructed, abstract landscape. They’re still recognizable, but it’s not like looking at a hydrangea.”
In ’Sconset, Marcus Goulding takes inspiration primarily from the historic cottages, vegetation and people in the village. Most of his work is done in the bed of his truck, where he has set up an easel, a canvas and either watercolor or oil paints. A watercolor painter, he pivoted to oils after he found a selection of oil paints at the Take-It-or-Leave-It at the town landfill. “Things just come into my head,” Goulding said. “I’ll suddenly see things in it. I just make a mess of black paint and purple and start to put some other paint in, and it all just seems to grow as I go along. The mind takes over.”
Plein air paintings often take a few weeks to complete. In order to capture the same light and shadows, painters need to be patient, returning to the same light at the same time of day as they started painting. “I was sitting in my truck painting, and my son said to me, ‘Let’s go fishing today. It’s a beautiful day,’” Goulding remembered. “I always feel in my mind that’ll be the one day that someone would have come up for a $10,000 painting. I’m just like that. I just paint and paint and paint and then the end of the summer comes and you think, ‘Wow, I’ve done a lot of painting this summer, probably seven days a week.’”
The 15th annual Plein Air Festival is scheduled for June 12-18 and is free and open for artists of all levels to participate. Freshly painted works will be hung daily for sale at the Cecelia Joyce and Seward Johnson Gallery on Federal Street.
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