Easton Art Galleries Host Plein Air Shows by Steve Parks

On Plein Air Easton/s opening night, July 12, Trippe Gallery celebrates with its “Variations 3.0: 1 Photograph, 15 Painters” exhibit and party. This third annual “Variation,” like its predecessors, is in part a contest involving both artists and appreciators. Fifteen painters participating in the Plein Air festival create their own interpretations of a single photo challenge presented by gallery owner and photographer Nanny Trippe. Viewers compete in matching the artist to his or her painting and then vote for a people’s choice winner.

“Mingle with the artists,” Trippe says, adding that the opening night “party starts here.”

The 15 artists who will paint their own variations on the photo include some who have been in most of the previous 19 Plein Air Easton festivals. They are, alphabetically, Olena Babak, Jill Basham, Beth Bathe, Zufar Bikbov, David Diaz, Vlad Duchev, Stephen Haynes, Charlie Hunter, Len Mizerek, Diane DuBois Mullaly, Elise Phillips, Crista Pisano, Cynthia Rosen, Nancy Tankersley and Mary Veiga. The first “Variation” came about during the 2020 COVID shutdown when the only public event was a show and sale of paintings in the Talbottown space that was formerly the News Center bookstore and gift shop.

A few doors south from Trippe on Harrison Street, Spiralis Gallery, which shares space with Zebra Gallery, opens its “Vistas and Viewpoints” show on First Friday, July 5, featuring interpretive landscapes by Larry Horowitz, Leslie Lumen, Kerream Jones, Francis Eck and James Stephen Terrell.

In adjoining rooms, Zebra has welcomed three new artists with exhibits ranging from Gabriel Lehman’s delightfully colorful paintings, which are essentially children’s-book illustrations of fairies and “real” kids in fanciful settings, to Adam Himoff’s patterned-face oil portraits “Plain Sight” and “She Looked Right Through Me,” among others. Golsa Golchini completes the threesome with mixed-media constructions, including “Knock Knock,” a document displayed within a frame on which a woodpecker is hammering away and “The Snow Shortcut” enveloping skiers riding a three-dimension avalanche downhill. Both, weirdly fascinating.

Heading further south on Harrison, just past the Avalon Theater, the Troika Gallery renews its popular “Fabulous Forgeries” format with paintings by member artists creating paintings inspired by – “after” is the word – of various masters with photos of the original masterpieces posted next to their “forgeries.” That show runs before and after the Plein Air fortnight, along with Kevin Fitzgerald’s “Points of Departure II” exhibit of horizon-view land-and-seascapes.

On Goldsborough, between Washington and Harrison streets, Studio B Art Gallery hosts its First Friday salon-style open house July 5, featuring new paintings by previous Plein Air Easton winners and participants in this year’s event, as well as paintings by Bernard Dellario and Studio B owner Betty Huang who just returned from France, where they applied their brushes in capturing Provence landscapes. On July 16, Dellario leads a live painting demonstration in floral still life for those who’d like to learn the technique or who just enjoy seeing how it’s done.

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For this 20th anniversary Plein Air Easton, Nancy Tankersley serves as awards judge of the festival, now managed by the Avalon Foundation.

Tankersley, who founded Plein Air Easton two decades ago this month in partnership with the Academy Art Museum and Al Bond, then Easton’s economic development director who now leads the Avalon Foundation, brings her founding partners together again 20 years later.

Academy Art Museum opened its “Reflections: Nancy Tankersley” exhibit in the upstairs landing gallery, running through July 28, which bookends, calendar-wise, 2024 Plein Air Easton. Her art talk late last month revealed her reasons for choosing these particular reflections on her career – not only as an artist but as plein-air enthusiast, promoter and co-founder. Before 2004, such painting, historically associated with French art painted outdoors, was popular mostly in this part of the world along the West Coast.

Tankerley encountered the regional phenomenon first at Carmel, California, in 2004, and brought the idea to Easton and to Bond, who was seeking attractions in the summertime that might lure tourism to Easton rivaling the hugely successful Waterfowl Festival in November. It took only a few years to catch on, and Plein Air Easton is now regarded as one of the premiere events on the plein-air circuit.

Painters who come from all over the United States and other countries find that they can sell their artworks even before the paint is dry. It’s practically a Plein Air Easton trademark. From day-two’s “Meet the Artists” painting-and-purchase frenzy to the closing-night sales and festival awards, you can sniff the aroma of oil-on-canvas as prospective buyers are warned that they can look but not touch still-wet paint. It’s the closest that fine-art painting comes to matching the spontaneity of live performing arts.

Tankerseley’s “Reflections” attempts but never quite achieves that spontaneity, although a few of her most recent 2024 oils in this show gave me a still-drying whiff. Of course, you’re not allowed to touch them anyway. “Old Partners” (2024), portraying friends out for a leisurely crabbing-by-boat expedition – laughing and likely sharing old stories – practically reeked of fresh paint when I took it in. Or was it just my imagination? I don’t think so.

Several other paintings were chosen, it seems, to show the geographical extent of Tankersley’s plein-air experience, ranging from 2015’s “Curacas Ball” at Plein Air Curacao, South America, to “The End of the Island,” painted at 2019’s Plein Air Easton’s “Tilghman Island Paint-Out” at midday.

You’ll also see decades-apart Tankersley self-portraits, from her current home and studio on Aurora Street, still evoking fresh oil scents, to her first studio in Arlington, Virginia, in 1990. No such sniffs. One of my favorites comes from the mouth of what defines our region: “Bound for Baltimore” depicts in large-frame oil the view of Bay meets Ocean as you approach by automobile one of the apertures of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in far southeast Virginia. I vividly recall feeling on my first crossing that we might drive directly into the ocean before the enveloping tunnel ahead became apparent. Still-life drama in oil.

For this 20th Plein Air Easton, Tankersley serves as awards judge of the festival, managed by the Avalon Foundation.

Gallery Happenings During Plein Air Easton
“Reflections: Nancy Tankersley,” through July 28, Academy Art Museum, 106 South St.
“Fabulous Forgeries” and Kevin Fitzgerald, through July 29, Troika Gallery, 9 S. Harrison St.
New artists at Zebra and Spiralis galleries, through Aug. 18, 5 N. Harrison St.
“Variations 3.0,” opening night July 12, Trippe Gallery, 23 N. Harrison St.
First Friday Salon, July 5; still-life demo, July 16, Studio B, Goldsborough St.Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.