Preview the newest issue of PleinAir Magazine with the Editor’s Letter:
Go Outside. Paint Something.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a phrase I came across in The New York Times: ultraprocessed time.
Dr. John La Puma, an internist and author, uses it to describe the hours we spend staring at our phones. “Ultraprocessed time is to your attention what ultraprocessed food is to your metabolism,” he says. “It’s instant gratification, and it’s designed to be addictive.” According to a 2026 YouGov survey, most of us spend five or more hours a day on our devices. A shocking four in 10 adults say they’re online almost constantly.
I read that and thought immediately of you — and of what you’re actually doing when you pick up your gear and head outside.
Plein air painting is, among other things, one of the most complete antidotes to ultraprocessed time I can imagine. It demands your full attention. It rewards slowness. It requires you to look — really look — at something in front of you for a sustained period of time. You can’t scroll through a landscape. You have to stand in it.
The same Times piece cited a landmark study of nearly 20,000 people, where those who spent at least 120 minutes in nature each week reported significantly higher levels of health and well-being. That’s roughly the time it takes to complete a small plein air painting or detailed study — one session, one subject, two hours of looking at the world device-free, outdoors, present. The painters in this issue know exactly what that feels like.
Kyle Ma — one of the most compelling young painters working today — describes going on Google Earth before a painting session to study the terrain, predict where the light will fall, and plan exactly where he wants to be when the sun hits the landscape. He’s 25 years old, holds a geology degree, and paints with a precision and presence that makes you wonder how long he’s actually been doing this. His story is a masterclass in what it means to truly see the world in front of you — and then translate it into paint.
Lori McNee’s story begins with a wolf. One quiet evening, she walked to her car and found herself a few feet away from a wild predator — and what happened next, the stillness and the mutual regard, reshaped the way she sees every animal she paints. Her essay in this issue is about learning, over years of plein air practice and still life discipline, to paint animals not as subjects placed against a backdrop, but as living beings that belong fully to their environment.
Walt Gonske has been setting up his “paintmobile” on the back roads of northern New Mexico for more than 50 years — and he still doesn’t know, when he opens the door and swings his palette into position, what the painting will be. That willingness to not know, to stand in front of a subject and let it surprise you, is at the heart of his story.
And then there are the 10 painters who went to India with Harsh Agrawal and came home changed. Aaron Schuerr said it simply: “I’ve never experienced anything like India. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully process the wonder of it all.” That’s what happens when you put a painter in a place that refuses to be anything but fully, overwhelmingly present. No screens. No filters. Just the light, the color, the chaos, and a brush in your hand.
Because you read PleinAir Magazine, you probably already know the magic of that experience. The particular quality of attention that comes when you’re standing in front of a subject with a paintbrush in your hand and the light changing — the way everything else falls away. The way an hour or two outdoors can reset something in you that those hours of scrolling had quietly broken.
We spend a lot of pages in this magazine talking about technique, composition, color, and materials. All of that matters. But underneath all of it is something simpler: the act of going outside, slowing down, and looking at the world as it actually is. That’s what the painters in these pages do, day after day. And if the research is right, it’s doing them — and you — a great deal of good.
PleinAir Magazine August/September 2026 Contents
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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Plein Air Today