Thir­ty-sev­en mem­bers of the Art So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ASTT) trad­ed tra­di­tion­al stu­dio set­tings for the open air on Sep­tem­ber 5, im­mers­ing them­selves in the nat­ur­al sur­round­ings of Tuck­er Val­ley, Ch­aguara­mas.

The artists gath­ered at U Pick Farms to par­tic­i­pate in the In­ter­na­tion­al Plein Air Painters World­wide Paint Out, join­ing artists from coun­tries in­clud­ing St Lu­cia, Brazil, the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, France and Aus­tralia.

The event brought to­geth­er artists at dif­fer­ent stages of their cre­ative jour­neys, from be­gin­ners to sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als, among them Do­minic Telfer and Bev­er­ley Fitzwilliam Har­ries, who par­tic­i­pat­ed along­side her Art Rebels col­lec­tive.

With the lush scenery of Tuck­er Val­ley as their sub­ject, par­tic­i­pants worked across a range of medi­ums, in­clud­ing oils, acrylics, wa­ter­colours, gouache and oil pas­tels.

ASTT pres­i­dent Pe­ter Shep­pard took an un­con­ven­tion­al ap­proach to the ex­er­cise, at­tach­ing bam­boo twigs to his brush­es and cre­at­ing his works from a dis­tance.

The out­door set­ting pro­vid­ed artists with the op­por­tu­ni­ty to work di­rect­ly from na­ture while re­spond­ing to the chang­ing con­di­tions around them.

Plein air paint­ing, which in­volves cre­at­ing art­work out­doors in nat­ur­al light, orig­i­nat­ed in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry and was lat­er pop­u­larised by French Im­pres­sion­ists such as Claude Mon­et.

For Pene­lope Sel­l­i­er, an ASTT di­rec­tor, paint­ing out­doors of­fers artists an ex­pe­ri­ence that ex­tends be­yond sim­ply ob­serv­ing a land­scape.

“Paint­ing out­doors is a full sen­so­ry ex­pe­ri­ence,” said Sel­l­i­er. “Artists are chal­lenged by chang­ing light and weath­er, but they are re­ward­ed with a deep un­der­stand­ing of the sub­ject that comes from di­rect ob­ser­va­tion. It re­quires spon­tane­ity and trust­ing the process over seek­ing per­fec­tion.”

The suc­cess of the Ch­aguara­mas ses­sion has en­cour­aged the ASTT to in­cor­po­rate reg­u­lar out­door paint­ing events in­to its an­nu­al pro­gramme.

The next plein air ses­sion is sched­uled for Oc­to­ber 3, with the lo­ca­tion to be an­nounced.

Found­ed in 1943, the Art So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go is the coun­try’s old­est vi­su­al arts in­sti­tu­tion. It is ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing the work of lo­cal artists and fos­ter­ing the growth of artis­tic ex­pres­sion in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The so­ci­ety rep­re­sents a cross-sec­tion of mem­bers from across the coun­try’s cre­ative sec­tor and hosts reg­u­lar ex­hi­bi­tions, work­shops and com­mu­ni­ty pro­grammes through­out the year.