A Painters Journey

After returning from our exploratory trip to Curacao in May I've been busy with shows, paint-outs and of course, Plein Air Easton.

Plein Air Easton happened in the middle of a record breaking heat wave...one day the heat index was 119!! I think we are well prepared for Curacao. Checking the weather on my I-phone, Curacao has been consistently cooler than it has been in Easton. Who would have expected that?

While we have been baking in the mid-Atlantic, the artists of Curacao have been hard at work planning this big event. On August 13 they will have a "make your own easel workshop" where participants will assemble an easel designed by Ernesto Petronia, an island plein air painter . Recognizing that the island art supply store did not have his easel that would fit his need for painting outdoors, he designed and built his own !                                                                      

Ernesto is in the white shirt and Hellen is pointing towards the easel.

Hellen reports: " that is Mr. Ernesto Petronia, the artist/easel building instructor. Everything I asked him to do, he found a way to do: by now the easel is refined and it folds up, making it easy to carry and put in the car. The bar to hold the easel can be adjusted to be used by a kid and grown ups too.
He added a part to hold the canvas, so it does not blow away and the easel can be used inside and outside, as they will weight it down with a bag of sand if windy when outdoors. 
It is incredible! Now we have 2 workshops for making 50 easels and must close all workshops now, otherwise we would have more.
But the most important thing is that it is bringing people together like crazy: Kooyman, a hardware store is supplying the material, the youth at the correctional school are building the easels for the elementary school kids to use. Ernesto is donating his time to guide the workshop. These easels will be donated to CCC so that if a kid stops art class, the easel will be available for another kid.
I will send you a photo of the easels when ready because,true to Curacao style, we are painting them in different colors."

Another really creative thing they have done is to organize a Capture Curacao contest where the public can vote on favorite places where the artists can go to paint. The winning location is  is where the artists will be painting on Tuesday during the festival.

Alexander Issings, in the plaid shirt, is the talented webmaster.

I encourage all of you take some time to visit www.pleinaircuracao.com, see all the events they have planned, peruse the paintings of the professional artists who will be part of this event, and " friend" them on Facebook.  Hellen reports that last week there were over 100,000 hits on the website!

 Stay tuned.