Marty Coulter made a special trip to Carthage for the ninth annual Maple Leaf Plein Air Paint Out on Wednesday and Thursday.
Coulter, an artist for the past 50 years from Washington, Mo., said he was planning to enter another plein air painting event over the weekend in Tulsa when a friend suggested he look into Carthage’s competition.
It fit into his schedule so he left home early to enter both art competitions.
Coulter was facing the west side of the Square, painting Ed Hardesty as Hardesty stood on a lift, touching up the white trim on the windows of the second floor of the block of buildings that include Mother Road Coffee, the Village Square Boutique and Annie’s.
Coulter said some people might see the man on the lift as something blocking a picture of handsome buildings, but he saw the scene and was inspired.
“I looked at the scene and the title of the painting came to me first,” he said. “It’s called ‘Window Dressing.’ I was listening to a retrospective of John Denver recently and he talked about how you never know when the inspiration for a song would hit you. It’s the same with any artist.”
Cherry Babcock, owner of Cherry’s Custom Art Emporium on the Square, and sponsor of the Maple Leaf Plein Air Paint Out since it started nine years ago, said 14 artists signed up to participate on Wednesday and more might come in to paint on Thursday.
Babcock said some artists were local, and others, like Coulter, came from out of town to paint Carthage’s classic scenes.
The artists fanned out across town with canvases, paints and easels.
Carthage Artist Helen Kunze could be found on a sidewalk on Main Street painting the front of a home Wednesday afternoon.
Kunze was working on her second painting for the Paint Out.
Earlier in the day, she set up in front of her Yoga4U studio on East Third Street to paint the sign over the front of the Grace Lanes bowling alley.
She said the morning light hitting the sign set off some of the colors in the sign.
Other artists, including Jason Sacran, from Magazine, Ark., waited until dark to hit locations such as the brightly lit Maple Leaf Carnival.
Sacran, the 2017 winner of the event, said the dark holds special challenges to painters and other artists.
The winners of the 2018 Maple Leaf Plein Air Paint Out were announced on Thursday by Carthage Council on the Arts President Robert Denning.
Sacran repeated as champion and also took third place. Local artist April Davis took second place. Larry DeGraff, Ozark, took the judge’s choice award as determined by judge and Maple Leaf Grand Marshall Sandy Higgins. Dan McWilliams took the honorable mention award.
About Plein Air Painting
Plein air painting is about leaving the four walls of your studio behind and experiencing painting and drawing in the landscape. The practice goes back for centuries but was truly made into an art form by the French Impressionists. Their desire to paint light and its changing, ephemeral qualities, coupled with the creation of transportable paint tubes and the box easel — the precursor to the plein air easels of today — allowed artists the freedom to paint “en plein air,” which is the French expression for “in the open air.”
Source: www.artistsnetwork.com
