Metro Roundup: Plein air painting gets Trussville artist ‘closer to the truth’

Trussville artist Amy Peterson has been capturing Alabama on foot and on canvas for more than a decade.

Now, her paintings of Alabama, Birmingham and Trussville are being featured all across the state. From April 16 to May 21, her work was featured at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia for a plein air exhibition titled “Light and Air.” For that show, some 20 paintings captured subjects around Peterson’s home in Trussville’s historic Cahaba Project neighborhood, in all four seasons. Peterson instructed a plein air workshop at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art at Ivy Green, the historic birthplace of Helen Keller.

Plein air is French for “open air,” and is about leaving the four walls of a studio and experiencing painting and drawing in the landscape. This type of painting comes naturally for Peterson, who has been attracted to the outdoors and to old things and architecture since childhood. It stuck with her even as she began a pre-med course at the University of Notre Dame. She interned at a national park in Utah and digitized the slide library for the Art Department at Notre Dame, volunteered at art programs for special needs and homeless populations. She was drawn to areas in which a sense of place fosters a sense of well-being, and where art and history contribute to character and community.

“Plein air painting can feel like an athletic sport,” Peterson said. “I love the challenge. It keeps you on your toes; there is no time to overthink. At the same time, it requires that we slow down and be present. Observe. Take it in. Color excites me. Our eyes simply see light and color differently than a camera lens interprets them. Think of sunrises, twilight, sunsets, clouds backlit by moonlight, high noon shadows. Painting from life gives us the opportunity to get closer to the truth — about color, about light, and about the beauty or meaning we find in the subject before us.”

Peterson’s affinity for painting historic places was on display at the American Impressionist Society Small Works Showcase in Charleston, S.C., during the month of April. The painting in that juried national show featured Peterson’s Brentwood Avenue home porch, and the 30-year-old ginkgo tree planted by her mother-in-law, painted on Thanksgiving Day 2020, and entitled “American Holiday.”

During 2020, like most people, Peterson worked primarily from home. She taught via Zoom and she captured views from her front porch and back yard. She focused on the neighborhood’s architecture and character. A 2018 painting titled “Walk along North Mall” shows the view along North Mall, of mature trees, metal roofs and chimneys, the restored Cahaba Elementary School and more. The painting was one of 30 by the Alabama Plein Air Artists showcasing historic subject matter across Alabama as part of the state’s bicentennial celebrations.

In April, Peterson represented Alabama artists at the “Artists on Location” in Tennessee, a weeklong juried plein air event hosted by the Knoxville Museum of Art. In June, Peterson’s paintings of the Cahaba Project will be on display at the Trussville Public Library.

“I wasn’t always drawn to painting houses and buildings,” she said. “For years I found them too intimidating to paint. And some homes and buildings, I just don’t feel compelled to paint and document as it were, a place in time, on canvas. But there is something about the character of older structures with good bones and great design. These original homes in the Cahaba Project, they have pleasing proportions and an authentically charming character. They are distinctly American. This American character is in their architectural design, and it’s baked into their boards, bricks, nails and metal shingles. While I see them through an artist’s eyes, you don’t have to be an artist or an architect, or a historian, to appreciate the quality of what we have here in the Project. I hope to keep painting them, and paying homage to our local living history here, for many years to come.”

Peterson, the president of the newly formed Cahaba Homestead Heritage Foundation Inc., nonprofit organization, is represented by the Beverly McNeil Gallery in Birmingham and instructs art classes at Forstall Art Center and regional workshops.

“As an outdoor enthusiast, conservationist, and lover of old things, I value plein air painting as an opportunity to document a place in time, on canvas, immersed in the weather, the season, the uniqueness, and the living history of each location,” she said. “I also paint from photographs, but I rely greatly on my plein air experience to infuse my studio paintings with light, life and confident brush work. Painting from life remains my greatest teacher, and it’s at the heart of my approach to teaching.”