Lorraine Skelskey-Chapin is a painter and art instructor in Southbury, Connecticut. She works in oil and acrylic, most often outdoors and in front of the thing she is painting, and she keeps going back to the same handful of places: the beaches at the outer end of Cape Cod, the Connecticut shoreline, the falls and back roads of the western hills, and her own garden beds. In 2025 her work took an Award of Merit at Paint the Town, the Lyme Art Association's juried plein air competition in Old Lyme, judged that year by Eileen Eder. She is an Associate Artist of the Lyme Art Association, and she is represented in Connecticut galleries in Mystic and elsewhere in the state.
That Associate title is worth explaining, because it is not a membership anyone can simply pay for. The Lyme Art Association grants it only to a painter who has been a member for at least two years and who has had work accepted into three of its juried exhibitions. Three acceptances means three separate calls for entry, each with its own jury making its own choices, all arriving at the same answer about the same painter. It is a slow credential earned one accepted canvas at a time, which is exactly what makes it worth stating.
How she works
Almost everything here started outdoors. Painting en plein air, which simply means painting on location rather than from a photograph in a warm room, sets the terms of the work before the first brushstroke. Light on a dune moves. A shadow that was cool blue at nine o'clock has gone warm and short by eleven, the tide takes the wet sand the sky was reflecting in, and the cloud that gave the whole scene its shape sails off toward Truro. A painter working on location is not composing a scene at leisure. She is deciding, quickly, which twenty minutes of a morning the painting is going to be about, and then committing to it.
That is why the work looks the way it does. Color goes down in decisive, unfussy strokes because there is no time for a fourth pass. Edges stay soft where the eye would not have stopped anyway. Weather is not a backdrop in these paintings, it is half the subject, and so is temperature: you can generally tell whether a canvas was painted in a March wind or a still August afternoon. She uses oil and acrylic both, and picks between them the way any working painter does, by what the day and the surface ask for.
Working this way also means carrying the studio out to the spot. Anyone who paints on location does it with a small box easel, a limited palette, a handful of brushes, and panels sized to come home still wet in a carrier, plus something heavy enough to keep the whole arrangement upright when the wind comes off the water. The kit stays small because every part of it has to be walked in. That constraint tends to show up in the paintings themselves as an economy of means, fewer colors mixed harder, fewer marks asked to carry more.
Her own account of what she is after is short and she has not changed it: “My mission is to reflect the spirituality and beauty found in nature, capturing the light on the dunes, the sparkle on the ocean, and colors that burst in the Spring.”
Read more about the practice itself onwhat plein air painting is, or look at the full catalogue of paintings, which currently runs to 112 works.
What she paints
The deepest lane is the Outer Cape. Head of the Meadow Beach and Race Point in Truro and Provincetown, Herring Cove, Chatham Lighthouse Beach, Lieutenant Island in Wellfleet, and the Provincetown dunes appear again and again across years, painted in different seasons and different weather rather than repeated from one good day. Those are gathered in the Cape Cod collection.
Closer to home, the subjects are the Connecticut shoreline and the hills: the water at Kent Falls, the rocks at Hammonasset, Meigs Point, marshes and fields and the odd inn on a back road. Those sit with the wider New England work in thelandscapes. Then there are the things she paints when she is not standing on a beach. The garden paintings are poppies, peonies and hosta, a good many of them from her own beds. Theanimal paintings are the single largest cluster in the catalogue, chickens and rabbits and cows and sheep, and they lead directly into thepet portraits people ask her for. Thestill life work is apples, peaches, cherries, clams and shells, painted from the object rather than from a screen.
Not all of it is easel-sized. She painted the mural at Burlington Veterinary Hospital in Connecticut, and she takescommissions for particular places and particular animals.
Exhibitions and galleries
Her work is carried byThe Finer Line Galleryin Mystic and byStudio Hillin Connecticut, and it goes out to juried shows, most recently to Paint the Town at the Lyme Art Association.
She was one of the artists featured when the Fine Line Art Gallery in Woodbury marked its 25th anniversary with a show of the painters it had shown over that quarter century, an occasion theConnecticut Post coveredat the time. Local press has followed her since: reporting on a fall gathering of artists in Newtown, CT Insider described her plainly as an artist who resides and teaches art in Southbury, which is still the shortest accurate summary of her week.
Memberships
Lyme Art Association. The artist-run association in the shoreline village of Old Lyme that grew out of the art colony there, with a gallery of its own and a calendar of juried exhibitions that painters across New England enter. She holds Associate Artist status there, on the terms described above, and won an Award of Merit at its 2025 Paint the Town competition.
Society of Creative Arts of Newtown. A Connecticut arts organization that runs exhibitions, gatherings and events for its member artists in and around Newtown, one town over from her studio.
Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society. The state association of painters who work outdoors on location, which organizes paint-outs and shows built around work made in the field. It is the natural home for the way she paints.
Teaching
She teaches from her Southbury studio and at The Stable Studios in Heritage Village, in oil and acrylic, for beginners through to painters who have been at it for decades. Classes are small, and people tend to stay for years rather than for a term.
- Wednesday morning. Wednesdays, 9am to 12pm. Up to 12 painters.
- Wednesday afternoon. Wednesdays, 1:30pm to 4pm. Up to 12 painters.
- Wednesday evening. Wednesdays, 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Class size on request.
- One-to-one, on your schedule. Scheduled around you. One to one.
- Outdoors, when the weather allows. Runs periodically, weather permitting.
Full details, including where each one meets and what to bring, are on theclasses page. There are also notes forone-to-one lessons, forpainters in the Heritage Village community, and for the outdoor sessions, plus materials lists foroil and acrylic.
Getting in touch
If you want to ask about a painting, about a commission, or about joining a class, the quickest thing is to say so directly. Inquiries about availability, sizes and current class openings all go to the same place.