Luminous, gorgeously realized landscape paintings made en plein air by
members of the California Art Club over the past 100 years. This volume
showcases 200 works by California Art Club artists who have focused on
the evocative seascapes, charming seaside towns, and beach communities
from San Diego to San Francisco, demonstrating a breathtaking range of
natural settings suffused with atmosphere, drama, and light. Since the
dawn of the twentieth century, California has been home to artists from
all over America and Europe who aspired to depict the state's compelling
natural landscapes on canvas. In 1909, these artists founded the
California Art Club, which stands today as one of the most esteemed
painting societies in the United States. This volume, which follows
Skira Rizzoli's luminous California Light: A Century of Landscapes,
presents more of the club's distinctive and lush plein air painting, an
impressionistic style in which painters work outdoors in order to
capture the ephemeral moment when the natural lighting of a landscape
elevates an already beautiful scene into something sublime.
As observed by W.H. Auden, "Thousands have lived without love, not one
without water." We as a species are drawn to the sea--artists perhaps
even more so than others, as beautifully evidenced in this book.
