Tag: Sedona Plein Air Festival

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I’ve Been Everywhere: plein air painting in the Grand Canyon

(With apologies to Hank Snow—and everyone else who sang that song)

Mather Point at dawn, oil on canvasboard, 9X12.

I’ve been painting and traveling. I faithfully blogged every stop until Thursday, when I got home too late to photograph my latest Grand Canyon paintings. That’s why you’re getting this post a day late. (They’re still lousy pictures, but the weather wasn’t cooperating; see below.)

In the past few weeks, my travels have taken me from Albany, NY, to Phoenix, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, and Sun City, AZ. Then back to Albany and on to Rochester to meet my newest grandbaby. From there, it was one more stop in Albany before heading home to Maine.

Grand Canyon at sunset, oil on canvasboard, 9X12.

Plein air painting at the Grand Canyon

This was my third time painting at the Grand Canyon after leaving Sedona. The first time, I went with my Sedona workshop student, Kamillah Ramos. Ed Buonvecchio loaned me a cold-weather sleeping bag and I slept under the stars. That shimmering night sky was transcendentally beautiful.

Since then, I’ve repeated the experience with my friend Laura Martinez-Bianco. This year, Ed joined us, and Hadley Rampton stopped on her way home to Utah. Each trip brings breathtaking sunrise views and the utter chill of high-altitude October nights. Next time, I may bring gloves and long underwear, but I’ll keep going back as long as I can.

The first time one paints the Grand Canyon en plein air, it seems absurdly difficult. The scene is so vast that it can’t be easily sorted. But it grows on you; every year I find myself more capable of slicing and dicing it into manageable bits.

Grand Canyon, late morning, 8X16, oil on archival linenboard.

My Grand Canyon paintings survived the trip surprisingly well, despite a makeshift packing job using only cardboard corners and stretch film. (I hadn’t planned on transporting wet canvases.) In fact, the only thing I lost on this trip was my electric toothbrush, and I’m pretty sure I know where that ended up.

Next week I’ll be in Boston at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with my husband—not quite as fun as painting in Sedona, but important. Thankfully, my friend Bobbi Heath is watching my pup and hosting me, so I’ll get to catch up with her between hospital visits.

(If wealth was measured in friends, I’d be a billionaire.)

Ed Buonvecchio being summoned by the Mother Ship. We were only a few hundred miles from Area 51, after all.

From Arizona sun to Maine rain

I had a lovely time in Sedona, but checked the weather forecast every day to see if our drought had broken. The National Weather Service was reporting it as ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’ across Maine and New Hampshire. By the time I flew home, it had still not rained.

People don’t associate Maine with forest fire, but it happens. The Great Fires of 1947 destroyed 200,000 acres of forest across Maine and killed 16 people.

Very welcome rain, welcoming me home.

So, I was pleased to see drizzle as I set off on my last leg across Massachusetts. It wasn’t doing much by the time I went to bed on Thursday night, but I awoke to the steady thrumming of rain on the roof. By morning, both small creeks along my Beech Hill hike had water in them. They’ve been dry for many, many weeks. Plein air painters may not like rain, but we homeowners are relieved.

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Miss Congeniality (hah!) is painting with old friends

Sycamore Shadows, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, won an honorable mention at our first ticketed paint out.

There’s something energizing about plein air events. It’s not just the fresh air or the radical change of scenery. It’s the camaraderie. I don’t do nearly as many of these as I used to, and whenever I’m at one, I wonder why I’ve cut back.

I like to compare plein air festivals to other closed circuits like rodeo or horse or dog shows. There are surprisingly few regulars, and they keep showing up, over and over. Over the years we get to know each other pretty well. Ironically, I’m painting here at the 21st Annual Sedona Plein Air Festival with Olena Babak. We’re both Mainers but we haven’t seen each other in a few years. That’s ridiculous.

View across the Verde Valley, 11X14, oil on birch panel.

‘That inverted bowl they call the sky’ is itself the introduction, so relationships are easy. We’re all here thinking about the same things. While these events are competitions, they’re overwhelmingly friendly.

I last saw one of this year’s painters a decade ago. It might have been last week, so easily did we fall back into our old joshing. Some of the artists here are my buddies; others I see only once a year. But that is irrelevant when we’re painting.

Art is a funny paradox. It’s essentially a solitary task, but it’s also a shared experience. The casual critiques, the borrowed umbrella (thank you, Krystal Brown) and the jocularity are the moments that both nourish the soul and sharpen the eye.

Crepuscular rays from Forest Road 525, 8X16, oil on linenboard.

As of this morning, I’ve finished three paintings, started a fourth, and painted one absolute dog. The pictures are poor because I keep finishing after dark, but you get the gist of it.

Why Sedona?

If you’ve never painted in Sedona, you’re missing out on a unique experience. I have the great fortune to teach here in March as well as participate in the festival. Four years of painting here intensively, twice a year, and I finally understand the light, the color and the topography. It’s not like any other place I ever paint.

Laura Martinez-Bianco painting into the sunset. As long as there’s light, we paint.

If you’re in Sedona today

Organizers have added 25 additional tickets to tonight’s paint-out at an exclusive private residence near Doe Mountain. You’re invited to watch us work. But hurry—the first tranche of tickets sold out fast. Your ticket will include wine, beer, and gourmet bites from Lighthouse Kitchen as you mingle with artists, collectors, and fellow art lovers. Festivities kick off at 4 PM.

For more information, click here.

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Curve balls!

Amazing Grace, 16X20, oil on archival canvasboard, available through Sedona Arts Center. Purely imaginary and so much fun to paint!

“Resilience” is a trendy term that means the ability to recover, adapt and keep going when things don’t go as planned. Personally, I hate the whole idea. I’d expected to need it less in my dotage, but life… doesn’t go as planned.

I’m packing to go to the 21st Annual Sedona Plein Air Festival, which is one of the maddest, gladdest events in my calendar. My plan was to drive, but my husband was grounded by his doctor just two weeks ago. Now I plan to drive to Albany, leave him with our kids and fly from there. That meant either shipping out my frames and finished paintings or carefully curating them so they fit in a third piece of luggage. I decided on the latter. That in turn meant painting a smaller, replacement work. Luckily, I had a good idea and just enough time to execute it.

I’ve flipped my frames and paintings around six ways to Sunday and come up with a system by which I can carry seven frame/canvas combinations in addition to my two finished paintings. (Fair warning: I’m bringing almost no clothes; something had to give.) That is scant for a long event, but Carl Judson from Guerrilla Painters always shows up with frames and art supplies. I figured I’d carry a few spare boards and if I needed another frame, I’d buy one from him. Except that Carl had to cancel at the last minute.

One last potential wrinkle: air traffic controllers got their last (partial) paycheck yesterday. While they’re not calling out sick yet, I remember that it took a shortage of air traffic controllers snarling air travel in the New York area to resolve the 2018 government shutdown. I’ll try to remember to keep my sketchbook in my carryon. Just in case.

Country Path, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, $1,275 includes shipping and handling in continental US, available through Sedona Arts Center.

Curve balls also bounce

Life has a way of changing plans just when we think we’ve got everything sorted. One minute, we’re ready to paint, teach, or show; the next, our old beater of a car won’t start, the weather turns, or a kid calls with a crisis.

Plein air painters have lots of practice at this—we face curve balls every time we go outdoors. The light shifts, clouds whip up or vanish, the boat at the center of our composition goes out to sea. We can fold, or we can adapt. The best painters learn to pivot, to find something new in what’s been handed to them.

That’s really what resilience looks like. It’s not about pushing through as if nothing happened; it’s about letting the unexpected become part of the process. Rain, a broken easel or a changed plan might just lead to something more expressive, more alive.

I have winnowed and repacked, until I think I’ve got it right.

The same applies outside the studio. Plans fall apart, opportunities shift, and we can either resist or reframe. The artist’s mindset—looking closely, staying flexible, and responding to what’s actually in front of us instead of what we’d conceptualized—is a surprisingly good way to handle life.

Curve balls remind us that creativity isn’t just what we do with paint, it’s how we navigate everything else, too. After all, the world doesn’t owe us stasis. Instead, it gives us movement, color, surprise and change. Learning to respond to that with a cheerful attitude is what keeps us moving.

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Monday Morning Art School: put down that selfie stick

Laura Martinez-Bianco at our campsite at Mathers Point in the Grand Canyon. Yeah, she’s tired.

Laura Martinez-Bianco, my husband and I left Sedona Arts Center at 2:05 PM Saturday, heading toward Mathers Campground at the Grand Canyon. The last time I did this was with painting student Kamillah Ramos two years ago. I had a pretty good idea that we’d arrive just as the sun threw the last light onto the rim of the canyon, and so it proved.

For the past quarter century, the world’s beauty spots have been infested by digital photographers. I first saw this in 2008 at Phillip Island in Australia, where the evening march of the fairy penguins to their nests was obscured by tourists jostling to grab the perfect shot. “It happens every time,” my Aussie cousin told me.

Our campfire and tent. Thank goodness for places with little light pollution.

The selfie stick and influencer-wannabes have made this worse. At Mathers Point, we could have tried to thread through the selfie photographers, but instead we just stood at the rim. “Pity the poor people at home who have to look at those vacation photos,” my husband commented about one particularly obnoxious man. “Hundreds of views of the same guy’s face.”

There’s more to life than your smart phone and selfie stick

Prior to 2000, people shot photos on film, which was expensive. When I visited the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in 1992, we shot three rolls of 36 exposures, or 108 images. Much more time was spent seeing than shooting.

Photography is so easy that pictures have become more about sharing on the internet than as a record for posterity. You can’t really see natural beauty through the screen of your phone, and nobody else is that interested in your vacation pictures. Yes, digital pictures are ‘free,’ but if you’re always looking at the screen of your phone, they steal the experience.

Cell phones sometimes annoy me, but they are great at identifying plants. This is an agave, or so sayeth the internet.

Your camera is making a sucker out of you

Last month, when the aurora borealis was peaking in North America, several people told me, “I saw them, but they weren’t as bright as I thought.” That’s because our expectation has been shaped by cell-phone photography. (I grew up in the Great Lakes region, and I’ve seen them many times.)

People will say, “I took that without a filter!” Unless you’re savvy enough to override the controls on your cell phone, it is, essentially, a filter. The aurora borealis looked brilliant on the internet because cell-phone (and digital) cameras automatically adjusted the exposure.

Who says I can’t cook? Oh, right, I do. (Photo by Laura Martinez-Bianco)

How modern photography has changed painting

It’s easy to oversaturate digital photography, and high chroma looks great on a video screen. That is in turn pushing modern painting into higher saturation. I like it, but it’s no more natural than my eyebrows.

Put down the camera… and the brush

“Do you want to go out at dawn to paint?” Laura asked me on Sunday morning. I had a long drive ahead of me, and, alas, we had to tear down our camp before hitting the road.

“Besides,” I told her, “My eyes and brain are tired.” Including all the events, Sedona Plein Air is nine days long, after all. Just like photography, the act of painting changes how you look at the world around you. I needed a reset.

I then drove hundreds of miles across the Kaibab Plateau and then north on US 89 between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, before finally hooking up with the interstate system. Since I was behind the wheel, I didn’t take a single photograph, but I saw dusty blue vistas that stretched forever, snow on high peaks, magnificent yellow cottonwoods, and hoodoos and hillsides scoured by the wind. It’s one of the most fantastic drives in this country, and it’s printed in my memory in a way that cell phone photos just can’t touch.

Sometimes, you have to put the phone—and the paintbrush—down and take time to just look.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

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Monday Morning Art School: collaboration

Our team: Jacqueline Chandra, me, Lydia Gatzow and Kathleen Gray Farthing.

Collaboration is not usually an exercise for plein air painters, but occasionally an arts organizer will come up with a madcap scheme where teams of four will create a painting together in a short period of time. This is something that Sedona Plein Air does; the paintings are sold at $250 and the money used to raise funds for the art center. The staff likes to throw us curve balls, like ‘paint with your mouth’ or ‘paint with a packing peanut’. That said, the difference between last year’s and this year’s paintings was amazing. It all came down to the ten minutes we were allowed for planning.

Yes, there was a value sketch. I don’t leave home without it.

Design the project

We were divided into groups and given ten minutes to design and plan our 18X24 painting. That included choosing the subject, designing the composition, and setting the order in which we would paint (which defined each participant’s tasks). Jacqueline Chanda transferred our sketch to the canvas, I did the color-blocking, Kathleen Gray Farthing built up form, and Lydia Gatzow did the finishing flourishes. We each had 15 minutes for our section.

Maintain open communication

A madcap project like this doesn’t require Zoom calls, emails, or texts, thank goodness. Communication proved very simple; although we expected each other to fetch and critique as we went, there was little need for the latter. We all did our sections with a minimum of fuss.

My final wall at Sedona Plein Air. I set out to paint ten paintings, and ten got done.

Set realistic deadlines

That wasn’t a problem here, because the organizers had already agreed that each team of four trained monkeys would produce a finished 18X24 painting in an hour. The only way for this to work was for us to focus on our established goal in the fifteen minutes we were allotted. Call that ‘achieving milestones,’ if you must. In the real world, a deadline is a great way to avoid overworking.

Respect each other’s work

In other versions of this game, I’ve been frustrated when subsequent artists spent their fifteen minutes redoing earlier ideas instead of refining them. Some revision is necessary, because in the heat of the moment, one doesn’t always do it right. But wholesale reworking of another’s ideas is terribly disrespectful, not to mention a waste of time.

I had a great week, and painting within the peace park was among its highlights.

Document the process

Whoops, I didn’t do that. Wish I had.

Celebrate achievements

For us this just involved a lot of whooping and hollering, but more measured recognition is necessary in every real collaboration. We recognized each other as hardworking peers, so there was no buried conflict to be exposed. There’s nothing like one artist with a towering ego to sour a collaboration.

Resolve conflicts amicably

We didn’t have any conflicts, but if we had, we’d have just talked them out on the spot. It’s possible for people to become terribly ego-invested in a cooperative project, with one or more people secretly believing they’re the driving force and their partners are just useful idiots. Nip that thinking in the bud.

Promote the heck out of your collaboration.

That’s what I’m doing right here, folks! (The painting is already sold, but there’s always next year.)

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

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Monday Morning Art School: searching for meaning in Sedona

Winter Lambing, 36×48, oil on linen, $6231 framed includes shipping in continental US.

I’m in Sedona, AZ, painting in the 19th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival. I’ve written many times about how the question of meaning bedevils me. This place, with its crystals, vortexes, ley lines, and spiritualism ought to be chock full of meaning, but it’s not. That stuff is too glib and superficial for me.

For artists tucked into a corner of the Sedona landscape, it can be relentless. Casey Cheuvront was painting on a rocky promontory when a woman stopped in front of her to give her clients a spiel about the magnetic energy of the rocks. Another guide talked about how we were in a direct line between Cathedral Rock and Airport Mesa, which apparently confers special powers. Meanwhile, I was discussing reincarnation and non-attachment with a lovely gentleman from Princeton, NJ.

Midnight at the Wood Lot, oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Starting with an overarching concept like Sedona’s famous spirituality can easily veer into the sophomoric. That doesn’t mean that art can’t use symbols, metaphor, and allegory to convey deep layers of meaning. It’s just best to avoid the trite.

To me, one of the most important reasons to paint en plein air is to celebrate God’s creation. That has an emotional resonance with me; I am constantly struck anew by the variety and beauty of this world. Can I translate that in my paintings in a way that evokes an emotional response? Only if I paint something that also resonates with my viewers’ experiences and perspectives. Just as I am left cold by new age spirituality, others may be unable to engage with my deep feelings about the created world.

Lonely cabin, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Ultimately, all we have is our own personal perspective. Our experiences, beliefs, and values add depth and authenticity to our creative expressions. That doesn’t mean I need to be overt about my ideas. They color my perception, and those who think the way I do will, hopefully, find my work relatable.

Of course, none of this works without paying attention to the formal elements of design. All meaning rests on technical skill. You may feel something deeply but be unable to communicate that to your viewer because you don’t have a cohesive visual language.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Yesterday, Hadley Rampton and I demoed together at the Sedona Arts Center. It was an interesting way to do it, because our styles are very different, and the audience asked pertinent questions. When I finished, I asked the people watching what I should name my painting.

“How does it make you feel?” a man asked me.

“Oh, larky, I think, because I had a lot of fun painting it.”

“That’s not what it conveys to me at all,” he said. “To me, it’s pensive.”

Sometimes, what you think you’re painting is not at all what comes through. Other times, there is ambiguity or multiple tracks of meaning within the same painting. Viewers derive their own associations, and they may in fact be what you were thinking subconsciously all along. Although I’m having fun at this event, I have some serious matters clouding my immediate horizon.

The opposite of subtlety is intentional storytelling, where you’re crafting a narrative that’s explicit and easily comprehensible. Since a painting is essentially a snapshot that captures a moment in time, you must work to tell the before and after. Narrative painting can convey complex ideas, sometimes better than words can.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot: