Plein air painting means painting outdoors, on location, from the subject in front of you. The term is French, en plein air, in the open air. The painter carries the easel to the scene and usually finishes the picture in a single sitting.
That last part separates it from every other way of making a landscape. You are standing in the weather with the thing itself, and it will not hold still. The light moves, the tide goes out, a cloud parks over the one hill you cared about. What you get down before that happens is the painting.
Where the term plein air painting comes from
Painters have always made outdoor sketches, but for most of European history the finished landscape was assembled indoors from them. That changed in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, when a group of painters settled near the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest and began treating what they saw out there as the subject rather than as raw material. Corot, Rousseau, Millet and Daubigny are the names that survived.
A piece of hardware made the rest possible. Before 1841 paint was kept in pig bladders, which leaked and travelled badly. That year an American painter named John Goffe Rand patented the collapsible metal tube. Within a generation the Impressionists were working mostly in front of the subject, and by their first group exhibition in 1874 the outdoor picture, loose and fast and full of light, was the argument.
Americans brought it home and built colonies around it: Old Lyme here in Connecticut, Cos Cob, Gloucester, Provincetown, and later a long tradition on the California coast.
Plein air techniques the moving light forces on you
The honest answer is the clock. Shadows swing and shorten as the sun climbs, so a shadow you painted early is in the wrong place and the wrong color by noon. You get two or three hours before the scene you started is gone, and that constraint shapes everything about how plein air work looks.
It forces speed, and speed forces decisions. You cannot render a marsh blade by blade, so you learn to state a mass, get its value and temperature right, and move on. It forces a limited palette, because fewer colors mix faster and stay more harmonious in daylight. And it forces you to leave things out. Half of learning to paint on location is learning what to refuse: the parked car, the third tree, the cloud that has nothing to do with your composition.
Then there is everything the studio does not have. Wind that tips an easel or sandblasts a wet panel. Greenhead flies on the marsh in August. Glare that lies to you about your own values, which is why painters angle the panel out of direct sun. Cold hands in October, and the walk back to the car holding a wet canvas by its edges.
How plein air painting differs from studio work and photographs
All three are legitimate. They are good at different things.
Studio painting gives you time, control and a steady light. You can build a large canvas over weeks, let it dry, come back. Almost every big landscape you have admired in a gallery was finished indoors. What the studio cannot give you is the information, which is why the studio painter works from studies, memory or reference.
Working from a photograph is convenient, and plenty of good work gets made that way, including most commissions. But a camera compresses. It crushes shadows to black, blows out a sky, flattens warm light against cool, and hands you a composition already decided by a lens. Painters who use photographs well are correcting them from experience gained outdoors.
Plein air gives you the truest color and light you will get, under a deadline. The trade is size and finish. Many painters run all three together: study on location, shoot reference for detail, then build the large piece in the studio with the outdoor panel propped beside it as the color authority.
Plein air supplies you actually need to start
Less than the catalogs suggest. Something to hold a panel at eye level (a French easel, a light tripod easel, or a pochade box on a camera tripod). A few small panels, 8x10 or so. Paint in a limited palette, a few brushes, a palette knife, paper towels, a bag to carry it in. Water, a hat, sunscreen and bug spray, all of which matter more than the third brush you were about to buy.
For brands and quantities, the lists Lorraine gives her students are here: oil painting materials and acrylic painting materials. Buy the small version of everything first.
Plein air painting in Connecticut and on Cape Cod
Connecticut has a real claim on this. The colony that formed around Florence Griswold's boarding house in Old Lyme became a center of American Impressionism, and those painters went outside for the light on the Lieutenant River and the marshes behind it. The Lyme Art Association grew out of that colony and still runs juried exhibitions in Old Lyme, among them Paint the Town, a juried plein air competition. Lorraine took an Award of Merit there in 2025 and is an Associate Artist of the Association. She also paints with the Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society.
Inland there are Kent Falls and the hill towns, and on the shore Hammonasset and Meigs Point are close enough to Southbury for a morning. Then there is the Outer Cape, which has drawn painters since Charles Hawthorne opened his school in Provincetown in 1899, for a reason anyone who has stood on those dunes understands: light off the water on three sides, reflecting up from pale sand. Lorraine goes back to the same places year after year, Head of the Meadow and Race Point, Herring Cove, Chatham Lighthouse Beach, Lieutenant Island in Wellfleet. See what that looks like in the Cape Cod paintings and the landscapes.
Where to learn plein air painting in Southbury, Connecticut
Lorraine teaches painting in Southbury and takes students out on location. Runs periodically, weather permitting, which is the only honest way to schedule it. Details are on the plein air classes page, and the studio classes, where most people should begin, are under classes. If you are not sure which one fits, say what you have painted so far and Lorraine will tell you straight.
Plein air painting questions, answered
- Do I need to know how to draw before I paint outdoors?
- It helps, but not in the way people expect. You are not drawing detail out there. You are judging one shape against another and one value against another. If you can look at a field and see that the near grass is lighter and warmer than the far grass, you have the skill that matters most.
- How long does a plein air painting take?
- Two to three hours, because that is how long the light holds. Painters working small often finish in ninety minutes. Go past one sitting and you are putting two different times of day on one canvas, which shows up in the shadows.
- What size canvas should I take outside?
- Small. Around 8x10 or 9x12 for a first outing. A big canvas eats your two hours of good light, catches wind like a sail, and gives you room to fuss. Painters who work large outdoors are gathering studies and building the big picture in the studio.
- Oil or acrylic for painting outdoors?
- Both work. Oil stays open long enough to keep adjusting a passage, forgiving when the light is moving, but you carry solvent and a wet panel home. Acrylic dries fast, a nuisance in July heat and a gift when you want to work over something. Lorraine paints and teaches both.
- What do you do about wind, bugs and bad weather?
- Weight the easel by hanging your bag from it. Turn the panel out of the worst of the wind. Long sleeves near marsh and dune. Watch the sky, and accept that some days you drive out, look at it, and drive home. Painting outdoors includes deciding not to.
- Can a beginner start with plein air painting?
- Most people do better starting indoors. The outdoor sessions are pitched at painters with some mileage, because outside you solve light, weather and composition at once. A few months in a studio class first means the outdoor day is about seeing rather than wrestling with your materials.
More about Lorraine Skelskey-Chapin is on the about page, and her full catalogue is under paintings.