The Salon Springs Eternal!
Every month the judges of the PleinAir Magazine Salon art competition select 100 of the best entries, from which the celebrity judge chooses the top winners overall as well as the tops in about a dozen categories.
The current crop of 100 turned in an exceptional array of floral paintings, spring landscapes and traditional still life paintings you ordinarily wouldn’t see otherwise. We already covered the winners, so this issue of Inside Art is devoted to them – and perhaps something here will help your own inspiration to blossom.
Note: While each images is labeled with the artist’s name, titles, mediums, and sizes were not immediately available in all instances.
Kinsey Aleksi, Runner Up, Floral
The traditional “floral” usually means a vase or some other still arrangement of colorful blooms, but as the first two examples above show, artists have been known to bend the rules to great effect. Both Kinsey Aleksi (above) and Robert Kraszewski (top of page) paint their florals in the landscape, the flowers still growing, stems in soil and petals in sun.
The painting by Paula Holtzclaw below would be considered more of a traditional floral still life. There’s a quiet dignity and a marvelous balance to the composition.
Paula Holtzclaw, floral, oil
Still life, however, can mean a vast array of approaches and subject matter. Rebecca Korth’s colorful still life with glassware and songbirds (below) garnered a runner up in the still life category.
Rebecca Korth
And there’s a timeless, silent quality to the dignified colors, varied surfaces, and classical composition in Suzanne Batchelor’s elegant depiction of peaches, cherries and a delft/brass pitcher (below). The proportions alone carry power.
Suzanne Batchelor
John Booth takes the two genres, the floral and the classical still life, and mixes them together. His playful depiction of fine china and formal serving-ware (below) grabs your attention, makes you look twice, and then holds you there for an indefinite period as you study the various lusters, reflections, shadows, lights, and the deftly blurred-out secondary imagery of the background. This painting shows a fine wit in the way dignified and splashy, inside and outside, wildness and order collide and play off of each other throughout.
John Booth
We might say something similar for Terry Evans’ warm, complex floral (below). This is a floral set neither within the confines of the drawing room nor the growing fields of nature, but in between the two – cut flowers in glass (and on glass) placed on an outdoor patio, perhaps, surrounded by the lively outdoor landscape.
Lush and colorful, this is one of those paintings that beautifully breaks the one of the cardinal rules of paintings – the one against centering your subject smack-dab in the middle of the canvas. However, the effect, in fact, is mesmerizing; it’s darn hard to take your eyes off those undulating petals.
Terry Evers
Jan Perley’s stunning still life with ram’s skull, blue jay and acorns (below) brings life, death, and rebirth together with understated drama and consummate skill. This painting has what they call gravitas, a resonant seriousness combined with dignity, depth, and a strong sense of purpose or meaning. The composition reinforcing this impression beautifully by balancing the horizontal with the curvilinear and diagonal lines and creating subtle harmonies between colors, surface patterns, and shapes.
Jan Perley
Many a strong painter, plein air and otherwise, turned in a strong landscape. Jane Hunt’s poppy field and Kelly Charlesworth’s garden path put one firmly in the mind of the warmer days of spring and summer. Thanks to them, we’re reminded of the re-flowering of the natural landscape we can be assured is on its way.
Jane Hunt
Kelly Charlesworth
The monthly PleinAir Salon rewards artists with over $50,000 in cash prizes and exposure of their work. A winning painting, chosen annually from the monthly winners, is featured on the cover of PleinAir magazine. The deadline is ongoing, so visit PleinAirSalon.com
