En Plein Air

Celebrating 15 years of drawing Louisiana’s landscape painters to Abita Springs

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Each April, for fifteen years this spring, landscape artists from across Louisiana and beyond pack their cars with canvases and head to the Northshore charmer of Abita Springs. For the En Plein Air Festival’s fifteenth anniversary, around twenty-five artists will present close to seventy-five landscapes they’ve already painted from life while immersed in nature in Abita Springs and surrounding St. Tammany Parish. The works—all newly painted in the last year, some still bearing wet paint—will be displayed and sold at the Abita Springs Trailhead Museum, making up the annual exhibition overseen by Abita-based architect and art collector Ron Blitch.

“I look forward every year to this show. I wait each spring for the first hints of lime green leaves. I know I need to start painting right away then, as these fresh colors last only a week." —Carol Hallock

Among the more than two dozen artists contributing their paintings of the Northshore’s most pastoral vignettes are talented veterans including Louis Morales, Mary Monk, Auseklis Ozols, Claude Ellender, Phil Sandusky, Diego Larguia, Peg Usner, John Preble, Julia Rubin, Alan Flattmann, Hal Wilke, David Blackwell, Sabrina Evans Schmidt, Andrew Liles, Joshua Duncan, and Nancy Charpentier. Prolific Louisiana landscape painter Carol Hallock has been returning to Abita Springs for close to a decade for the event, and anticipates it with excitement each Spring.

“I look forward every year to this show. I wait each spring for the first hints of lime green leaves. I know I need to start painting right away then, as these fresh colors last only a week,” Hallock explained. “Next up are the gorgeous azealeas to paint.” St. Tammany’s many scenic waterways are also included among the painters’ favorite subjects.

The plein air process of painting directly from life, according to Hallock, takes on an entirely different dynamic than painting from a photograph, giving the exhibition a depth and organic spirit that reflects the artist’s eye.

“A plein air painting is painted outside from life. It can say so much more than a painting from a photo,” Hallock said. “Photos have sharp lines that flatten the scene, but in real life these lines are not sharp, but actually much softer. The softer lines are much more realistic and the painting will ‘talk’ more as we paint what we see rather than what a photo sees.”

The Abita En Plein Air exhibit will open at the Abita Springs Trailhead Museum with an artist reception April 12 from 6 pm–9 pm, and will remain on display Saturday, April 13 from 10 am–4 pm and Sunday, April 14 from 10 am–2 pm. Paintings will be available for purchase, with thirty percent of proceeds going to support the Trailhead Museum.