Mid-Shore Arts Plein Air Easton and ESLC Pair Up to Promote Land Conservation

Plein Air Easton introduced a new collaboration during its just-concluded 20th anniversary festival with the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy. This invitational for past and current PAE artists was intended to connect art to the cause of – guess what? – land conservation.

Eighteen artists participated in the exhibit that ran through the end of the Plein Air fest on July 20. The show and sale at ESLC headquarters on Washington Street was mounted, in part, by way of a grant by Bruce Wiltsie, who has partnered with the Avalon Foundation since the start of Plein Air Easton. He has just been inducted into the PAE Hall of Fame for, as the event program stated, “years of support for the many ways that art can underscore the vital importance of conservation of our land and the beauty that surrounds us.”

The participating artists were Jill Basham, Tim Beall, Zufar Bikbov, Hiu Lai Chong, Lisa Egeli, Martin Geiger, Stephen Griffin, Joe Gyurcsak, Charlie Hunter, Debra Huse, Russell Jewell, Mick McAndrews, Charles Newman, Daniel Robbins, Mark Shasha, John Brandon Sills, Mary Veiga and Stewart White.

Some of the paintings are along the lines of what you may have viewed (or purchased) at the festival, including Debra Huse’s lavish brushstroke-textured “Historic Beauty” of trees bending over river’s edge and pointing toward a puff-clouded sky. But several others reminded me personally of the farm I was raised on in the ’50s and ’60s on Dutchman’s Lane, virtually next door to where I live now in Easton Club East. One-hundred acres of that farm are being developed into a Four Seasons 55-and-up community. (Full disclosure: My parents sold the farm in the ’70s.)

I remember a time when much of the waterfront acreage in Talbot County was tilled as farmland harvested for corn, wheat, rye and soybeans. Most of that land is now occupied by grand waterview estates, many like the ones hosting the annual “Meet the Artists” party which opens Plein Air Easton. I have no quarrel with that as those former agricultural fields with a view – maybe even a beach – were not much more accessible to trespassers than these myriad private waterfront properties, now best seen by boat or by rare – but often generous – invitation.

The paintings that resonated most with me depicted farm scenes that are still integral to Talbot County’s rural character. John Brandon Sills’ “Sunset, Yorktown Farm” for one, arrays a planted field in the fading evening light. Another, from the same 500-acre Talbot County farm, features a large harvesting combine like the one I was not allowed to operate as a boy but occasionally perched upon when my father was done or when it was parked in a shed – just like the one in Russell Jewell’s “Deep Breath & Swallows.” Can’t figure the title to that one, priced at $1,900. Other paintings in the show fetched up to $3,000.

Proceeds from the sale go to the artists and to Plein Air Easton, care of the Avalon Foundation. ESLC plans to use the paintings or copies of them as future educational tools.