“I can’t remember a time when the landscape didn’t fascinate me or bring me a sense of peace and calm in the midst of whatever was going on around me. I’ve been fortunate to live in such beautiful places, from the coast of Maine as a child, to the beaches and intracoastal marshes of north Florida, to the mountains of the Carolinas. The landscape is what grounds me and inspires me. When I think back to memorable times in my life, I often remember places: a field of queen anne’s lace over boulders strewn by long ago glaciers, fog-covered islands surrounded by the cold waters of the Atlantic, sunsets over golden marshes, the ‘smoke’ rising on the morning air in the Great Smoky Mountains...the impressions of my life come in scenes.”

Lyn is a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America and the Pastel Painters of Maine, she is a member of the Southeastern Pastel Society, the American Impressionists Society, Landscape Artists International, and Plein Air Florida. She shows her works in galleries in Florida and Maine. She is a workshop instructor, and travels often to paint. One of her greatest honors was to be chosen as a National Park Service Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park. Lyn’s home and studio are in the nation’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida.

www.lynasselta.com

“En Plein Air” is a French term meaning “in the open air.” Since the mid-19th Century and the advent of portable painting supplies like the paint tube and “box” easels, artists have taken to the outdoors.

The plein air movement brought artists out of their studios and into the natural light. It birthed a new type of artist who recorded the everyday scenes of life in the colors and light that nature provided and offered artists a new way to approach their painting process. The 19th century English landscape painter, John Constable, noted that “artists should forget formulas and trust their own vision in finding truth in nature.” The stiff formality and romanticism of the studio gave way to this entirely new concept resulting in such movements as the Barbizon School and the Impressionists.

In Europe, painters you might recognize such as Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir, took to the outdoors using colors and brush strokes that captured sparkling natural light. Here in America, artists’ colonies began to spring up, particularly on the East and West coasts and in the Southwest, where artists like William Merritt Chase, Edmund Tarbell, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Edgar Payne, William Wendt and many others expanded on the plein air tradition.