Painters, Sculptors Discover Art in Nature

At the foot of the Topa-Topa Mountains this week, a few dozen painters discovered what it’s like to step into their canvasses.

Accustomed to working indoors, the artists left the artificial light of their studios to stroll into the sunlit meadows, hills and streams that became the subjects of their drawings.

Seated before his easel on a hill dotted with poplars, Mark Sherman waited for the shadows to return to the face of the model he began sketching the day before so that he could resume his painting.

“The light changes so very fast you have be very confident in what you see,” said Sherman, a creative director for a Los Angeles hair and skin company.

During a five-day workshop, Sherman, 50 other artists and three instructors waded into the creeks and climbed into the hills of their 276-acre classroom to pitch their easels or sculpt clay.

The “classroom” was the grounds of the International Center for Earth Concerns, a nonprofit foundation whose aim is to instill in painters, writers, musicians and students an appreciation of nature.

“If you sensitize people to the beauty and fragility of the earth, they tend to develop a greater awareness that it needs to be protected,” said John A. Hoyt, the center’s president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, which provides the new foundation with much of its funding.

On Thursday morning, one instructor, Colorado painter Len Chmiel, had his students pitch their easels on a hillock at the foot of the Topa-Topa Mountains.

Looking up from her canvas toward a granite cliff, Annie Hall lowered her Jackie O-sized sunglasses and contrasted the pink color of the rock with the purples, grays and blues in her painting.

“I guess I’m a little rebellious,” said Hall, who lives in Reno. “I see colors that others may not see.”

But seeing color, no matter the hue, in the light and shadows of the great outdoors was precisely the point of Chmiel’s class.

Instructors Chmiel and Palos Verdes Estates painter Daniel Pinkham both encouraged their students to adopt the “plein-air” tradition of 19th-century artists such as Monet and Van Gogh who worked outdoors.

A few boulders away from Hall, Ojai artist Dan Laso dabbed a brush of crimson onto his canvas.

“I’m usually very methodical when I paint in my studio,” Laso said. “The workshop is teaching me to make quick decisions and work fast.”

Chmiel explains that artists working outdoors must work quickly, since they have little time to capture a scene before the light changes.

Some of those attending the workshop have been painting outdoors for years. Susan Levin, a Pacific Palisades artist, said working in nature versus in her studio affects her as much as it does her painting.

“It’s as if you take on the quiet of the hills and the rocks.”