Landing Gallery presents “MAINE PLEIN AIR PAINTERS”

Landing Gallery, 409 Main St. in Rockland is pleased to announce the opening of “MAINE PLEIN AIR PAINTERS”, an exhibition of new paintings by Monique Lazard, Tom Curry and Björn Runquist opening on Friday, September 1 through October 15. The Artists’ Opening Reception will be held on Friday, September 1 from 5-8 PM.

Monique’s landscape paintings have sense of movement and are filled with a gestural energy. She is a life long artist and has been painting since she was 10. “I always have a sketch book with me to record my observations. During my teens I began taking back packing trips to the Sierras, which helped foster my love of nature. Wherever I am, I find the local landscape to be an inspiring and fascinating subject for my painting.” Monique’s studies began as an undergraduate at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, she received her BA from the California College of Art and pursued graduate studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She also studied with artists Nelson Shanks at Studio Incamminati, Stuart Shills and Alex Kanevsky at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

For the past 18 years, Tom has painted the landscape around his home in Maine. “As a plein air painter, I immerse myself in landscape to explore the relationships between stillness and flux. What we call a “place” is a paradox – it is not fixed but always changing: the light shifts from moment to moment, water is never still, clouds come and go. I paint the interplay of light, island, sky and water as a metaphor and meditation on place and time, the dance between what we perceive as eternal and ephemeral.” Tom Curry has a MS from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and attended the Graduate Program at Yale University. His work is in the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum and the Wheaton College Museum.

Björn Runquist has been painting in the mid coast area from Port Clyde to the Camden area, for thirty years. Björn is one of Maine’s most accomplished and collected Plein Air Painters, his paintings are in many major, private and public, collections including the Farnsworth Art Museum. “My subjects vary: the Working Waterfront and in particular this year, Piers, have become my subject of choice.” The Pier’s structural complexity allows for an interplay of color and light that creates a visual energy. It’s a visually interesting combination of solid and transparent areas that are very challenging and gratifying to paint. “There are things that I return to and there are things I paint only once. But, at the core is the ever-present force of light as the source of all that we see, indeed, at the source of life itself – the source of each day’s new beginning.”

Please join us Friday, September 1 from 5 – 8 pm for an artist’s reception with Monique Lazard, Tom Curry and Björn Runquist. Hours: Tue – Sat 11– 5, Sun 12 – 5 & closed on Mon. For more information please call 207 239-1223 or visit www.LandingArt.com