Art in Nature Alliance’s plein-air exhibition

The Art in Nature Alliance (AINA), a partnership of the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, Plein-Air Painters of America (PAPA) and the San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy, will hold their 2015 plein-air exhibition and sale in San Diego County.

“Legacy of the Land” will feature more than 120 paintings by the Plein-Air Painters of America.

The exhibition by 20 PAPA members will be held at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido from Sunday, March 22, to Sunday, May 3. Admission is $8; museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday to Sunday. Tickets can be purchased online at artcenter.org/museum.

Twenty PAPA members will be painting for several days prior to a ticketed gala March 21, beginning with a talk by Jean Stern, Executive Director of The Irvine Museum, at 5 p.m. Their “wet-paintings,” along with studio works created from earlier visits, will document a variety of coastal, rural and urban scenes along the 55-mile San Dieguito River Valley watershed.

The exhibition will be complemented by an exhibition of early California painters who documented the area prior to World War II. In all, there will be 60 paintings representing the work of more than 30 painters from the first half of the 1900s. Tickets for this gala event are available at ArtinNatureAlliance.org.

Loans are coming from the Irvine Museum, Laguna Beach Art Museum, the Bowers Museum, Jonathan Art Club and Foundation, Pageant of the Masters / Festival of the Arts organization, Gardena High School, the San Diego Museum of Art, the city of Phoenix and the San Diego History Center. Other repeat institutional lenders include the University Club, Kinsella Library and San Diego County.

They also have the support of private collectors, five of whom are again lending paintings.

Additionally, there will be about 75 artworks painted en plein air by high school students from the surrounding school districts on display at the museum’s Student Gallery Wall.

There will also be related events during the run of the exhibition which include a talk by Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods” (2005) and “The Nature Principle” (2011). The talk is titled “The Importance of the Human-nature Connection” on March 29.

Source: DiscoverSD