SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — The great outdoors is on display at the Pierro Gallery until Saturday, Oct. 13, in an exhibit titled “Pleasure and Terror en Plein Air.” The 16 different artists featured in the exhibit gathered their materials and spent time working outside, sometimes incorporating exterior elements into their pieces. Alongside artist Greg Leshe, Director of Cultural Affairs Sandy Martiny co-curated the show, which opened Sept. 13.
“We were starting to think about how being outside makes us feel,” Martiny said in an interview with the News-Record at the exhibit opening. “For me, it feels peaceful and relaxing. I get a lot of pleasure from painting outside. But a lot of people are terrified of being outside.”
In curating the exhibit, Leshe said he considered Thomas Cole, a 19th-century American painter who was known for his landscape paintings. Much of Cole’s work depicted the outdoors and incorporated historical events.
“He was talking about the supernatural elements and depicting the American landscape with a wilderness perception,” Leshe said in an interview with the News-Record at the event. “Working outside can be both beautiful and terrible at the same time.”
Martiny said the show partly exhibits how easy it now is to work outside. Before oil paints were sold in tubes in 1841, painters could only work in a studio because they had to grind each pigment by hand and mix it with oil; paint tubes eliminated that work.
“Artists could go out and paint remotely, out of the studio,” Martiny said. “Now all of this work was either done completely outside or started outside and finished in a studio.”
William Hudders has two paintings hanging in the show that incorporate both the outdoors and indoors. The paintings show vases of flowers sitting on a windowsill with a backdrop of the outside. Hudders told the News-Record that there were challenges to working outside.
“It’s looking out from in,” Hudders said at the event. “I took everything outside and used those elements. The light is definitely different, and the elements interact with the environment unpredictably sometimes. There’s a different physicality that happens.”
Asha Ganpat’s work was on display on a screen in a corner of the gallery. Her five short videos were shown on a loop, depicting outdoor scenes meant to be relaxing, matching Martiny’s idea of the outdoors being soothing.
“They’re all things that are hypnotic and soothing,” Ganpat said about the videos that show running water and flowers in a breeze in an interview with the News-Record at the event. Taken on a road trip across the United States and Canada, Ganpat said she looks for individual moments to film. The videos were taken on an iPhone camera, but Ganpat also takes still photos and paints.
“Videos give you a sense of how the environment moves and changes,” she said. “I really want to record and claim that space. I only use the sound that’s happening in it, but if I don’t like it I just leave it silent.”
Pasquale Cuppari, another artist featured in the exhibit, prefers to work outside. His two paintings — made entirely outside while he sat in his garden — incorporate the sun’s effect by using bright yellow paint and glitter on canvas.
“I have to be outside,” Cuppari said in an interview with the News-Record at the event. “I grew up on a farm in Italy, so I started out doing landscapes. Then I came to the U.S. and it seemed like a different world and I had the freedom of expression to use the environment.”
The yellow paint that Cuppari used in his paintings represents the heat of the sun he felt while working on them.
“I’m enamored with the light and I like feeling the heat of the sun and what it does to us,” he said.
Joanne Leone also took the theme of working outside literally. She brought a large piece of canvas outside and placed it on grass, and painted around whatever happened to fall onto the canvas. The result uses color to represent the insects, leaves and other outside elements that Leone worked around.
“It got rained on and everything,” Leone said in an interview with the News-Record at the event. “I let whatever dropped on it be and worked with that. Insects crawled around on it and I painted around them and embellished where they were.”
This was the first time that Leone had worked outside, and the experience has led to her working outside of the studio more often.
“This had the natural organisms and stuff,” she said. “It’s an immediate response to being outside.”
Joe Lugara is another artist new to working outside. A self-described “indoor person,” Lugara has several drawings on display at the gallery, which he did while sitting on benches outside.
“They were easy to carry around, and it got me out of my studio,” he said of his drawings in an interview with the News-Record at the event. “If I was under a tree there would be leaves and I let them fall on the canvas. With these, I’m looking for natural elements.”
Like many of the exhibit’s other artists, Lugara said using the sun’s natural light changed his work.
“What you start with is radically different than what you finish with,” he said. “So I’ve learned to use what’s there.”
Gwyneth Leech takes a different approach to working outside. While she still uses the sunlight and outdoor elements that the other artists are, she paints outside to document the construction of buildings. Based in Manhattan, Leech sets up her canvas on the streets of New York City and paints as construction workers work.
“I park myself on a street or on the High Line and document buildings as they grow and evolve,” she said in an interview with the News-Record at the event. “I love to be outside and watch the light around it change. I also never know who I’m going to meet, so it’s fun.”
While painting the construction sites, Leech has met construction workers and architects who have given her access to the buildings and she has received commissions for pieces from some, as well. On the New York streets, Leech said that the business of the city makes her art unpredictable at times.
“There’s that unknown about what’s going to happen,” she said. “I keep it outside to keep that quality of energy and light. It’s a lot of adrenaline.”
Other artists featured in “Pleasure and Terror en Plein Air” includc Nancy Agati, Donna Conklin King, Leslie Goldman, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Laura Lou Levy, Yvette Lucas, Maria Lupo, Anne Percoco, Ellie Irons and Anker West.
The Pierro Gallery is located at 5 Mead St. in South Orange. For information, visit http://southorange.org/266/Pierro-Gallery.
Photos by Amanda Valentovic
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