To celebrate the close of the 101st Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition at the Autry National Center, the California Art Club (CAC) brought nearly 100 painters and sculptors together on April 22, 2012 to create artwork outdoors in Griffith Park in Los Angles.

More than six hundred people attending the 1st Annual PleinAir Convention & Expo were so impressed with the presentations made during the four-day event in Las Vegas that they spontaneously rose to their feet while applauding several of the speakers. Most of those participants felt that the event far exceeded their expectations and that the presentations were so informative and inspiring that they were life-changing experiences.

The crystalizing experience that convinced California artist Linda Gunn to become a professional artist occurred when one of her paintings won a magazine’s painting competition.  “The painting was published in the magazine and used as a cover photo and that gave me confidence in my abilities,” she says.

Ray Roberts and Charles Muench, along with former tattoo artist Sergio Sanchez, received top awards in the California Art Club’s 101st Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition on view in Los Angeles until April 22, 2012. Renowned landscape painter Ray Roberts, whose Gold Medal painting is on the cover of the April/May issue of PleinAir magazine, and sculptor Lynn Christopher received Gold Medals for “Best of Show” honors on Saturday, March 31.

Paintings and sculpture selected for the California Art Club’s (CAC) 101st Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition will be on view from April 1 - 22, 2012 at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. Works by 124 painters and 22 sculptors will be considered for the awards and will be available for sale.

The presentation Thomas Jefferson Kitts makes in Red Rock National Conservation Area during the 1st PleinAir Convention & Expo will cover a remarkably wide range of materials and techniques. That’s because the Oregon artist is amazingly knowledgeable and has won major awards in plein air competition, and because he teaches comprehensive workshops on both outdoor painting and studio practices.

Audiences were spellbound by Eric Rhoad’s dynamic presentations in California last weekend. Rhoads, publisher of both PleinAir and Fine Art Connoisseur magazines, moderated panels during the California Art Club’s (CAC) Winter Symposium in San Francisco and the Los Angeles Art Show: Historic and Traditional convention. He will offer the same kinds of informative and motivating presentations during the 1st Annual PleinAir Convention & Expo in Las Vegas from April 12-15, 2012. 

The California Art Club will host a two-day symposium at the Ft. Mason Conference Center in San Francisco, California on January 21-22, 2012 featuring lectures, panel discussions and painting demonstrations. PleinAir magazine publisher B. Eric Rhoads will be among the featured speakers.

California plein air painter Ray Roberts has been showered with top awards in art competitions in recent years, including the First Place prize in the May/June bi-monthly competition in the 1st Annual PleinAir Salon competition, the Gold Medal in the California Art Club (CAC) annual competition, the coveted Artists’ Choice Award in the CAC competition. On August 27, Roberts won the Best of Show award at the Maynard Dixon Country event in Mt. Carmel, Utah.

What better way for the publisher of PleinAir magazine, B. Eric Rhoads, to celebrate his birthday than to join some of the top artists in the country when they are drawing and painting from life. Among those artists were Richard Schmid, Jeremy Lipking, Nancy Guzik, Mark Schwartz, Michelle Dunaway, Dan Pinkham, Aaron Westerberg, Tony Pro, Vadim Zanginian, Joseph Todorovitch, Ignat Ignatov, and Kristin Thies who all met in Alexey Steele’s California studio.