An art exhibition at Salt Lake Community College called “The Landscape En Plein Air!” recently concluded a weeks-long display of landscape paintings by SLCC art students, instructors and other local artists. The installation ran from May 16 to June 21 at the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery at South City Campus.
The French phrase “En Plein Air” translates to “in the open air” and refers to the act of painting outdoors, according to TheArtStory.org. The SLCC exhibit consisted of pieces created by students in the college’s Landscape Painting (ART 1580) course.
Over 30 paintings adorned the partitioned walls of SLCC’s Eccles Gallery, a glass-paneled room off the Edna Runswick Taylor Foyer. The spacious, sun-lit space provided a comfortable environment for visitors to view the art.
Professor Rob Adamson curated the exhibit and its landscape theme.
“Art [can] bring a whole other dimension to someone’s life that maybe they have not yet considered,” Adamson said. “In the visual sense, the artist can bring to people and society a vision of … something that they may not have [been] looking at or appreciating in their surroundings.”
“With landscape [paintings], the artist’s job is to help others see what they may be missing,” he continued. “It could be the way colors are in the landscape, or the way there’s certain compositional things that are beautiful in the landscape … [this helps] people gain a greater appreciation of their surroundings.”
Studying the subject
One of Adamson’s students, Emily Engh, used a digital illustration app called Procreate to initially draw her landscape. With the app on her device, Engh used a stylus to compose color sketches, or studies, to help her make artistic decisions.
“She [drew] studies to give her a sense of what her painting might look like. We [then] tried to visualize something that [was] interesting to us to make it a little more focused in a certain area … and that’s what she did,” Adamson said, referencing Engh’s final painting, in which she artistically accentuated a path and a tree so that they stood out from the rest of the landscape.
Since landscape paintings can be vast, Adamson explained that creating a study allows student artists to be more focused on a section of their scene.
“[The artists] are taught how to move the eye around in a composition to keep the viewer interested,” Adamson said. “They’re not always copying just what they see necessarily. They are creating their own poetic statement.”
To demonstrate the evolution of the fully rendered color paintings, the students’ studies were shown next to their final piece of work on the walls of the Eccles Gallery.
Notan studies
Adamson also explained that some of his students used the Notan technique to create their landscape paintings.
“Notan” is a Japanese word meaning “black and white.” In a Notan study, the artist takes an existing painting and makes it more in their own style by first outlining the original work in black and white.
“In the old days, when an artist wanted to learn to paint, they could always copy the master[s] or go to galleries and copy a painting,” Adamson said. “[With] Notan studies, we’re learning how to break down the landscape in its most basic form: shape. For example, [the artist] may use black shapes to [mimic] the shape of a tree.”
The Notan studies of Lynn T. Bright, a SLCC student artist whose landscape painting was displayed during the exhibit, were originally a master copy of a John F. Carlson piece.
“[Bright] did his own [Notan] designs to make [his piece] more interesting,” Adamson said.
Students’ Notan or traditional “en plein air” studies were hung next to most final paintings in the gallery. Each final piece was also framed and accompanied by a card that displayed the painting’s title, the artist’s name, and either a sale price or the acronym “NFS,” meaning “not for sale.”
Kenny Bustamante, an SLCC alumnus and a current University of Utah student, visited the exhibit during its run. He said he enjoyed the artwork and was particularly intrigued by a Beverly Roth painting titled “Country Living.”
“I can see myself running through this landscape with my dog,” Bustamante said.
While viewing a Marlo Duggins painting titled “Garden Wheeler Farm,” Bustamante compared the piece to Van Gogh, emphasizing the movement and imagery it evokes.
“It has the movement flow of a Van Gogh,” said Bustamante. “The way it is designed, you can see [the] summer wind is flowing through. You can see the foliage moving with the light breeze.”
Landscape Painting (ART 1580) will be taught at South City Campus in fall 2024, and at Taylorsville Redwood Campus next spring.
