Preview the newest issue of PleinAir Magazine with the Editor’s Letter:
Notes From the Back Roads
I spent the better part of a week this summer driving the back roads between Door County’s small towns, taking in the paint-outs and special events of PenArt’s Plein Air Festival. Fish Creek to Egg Harbor. Sister Bay to Bailey’s Harbor. Sturgeon Bay back up to Fish Creek, and around again. Somewhere around the third or fourth trip along the loop, I stopped thinking of those drives as transitions between the real event and started thinking of them as the whole point.
The roads themselves are unassuming — two lanes, low shoulders, more county highway markers than street signs. But they cut straight through cherry orchards heavy with fruit, past fields of corn and soybeans laid out in long rows, past barns that have clearly stood through more winters than anyone currently living on the property. None of it announces itself. There’s no single vista that stops traffic. What there is, instead, is mile after mile of exactly the kind of quiet, working landscape that doesn’t photograph as well as it paints — light moving slowly across a field, an orchard row catching the late afternoon sun at an angle that changes everything about it in the space of 20 minutes.
I thought a lot, on those drives, about the piece we’re running this issue on the roots of Midwestern landscape painting. It traces a tradition — painters in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Wisconsin, working a generation or two apart, each arriving at their own conclusion that this kind of landscape deserves serious attention. Driving those Door County back roads, watching 30-some juried artists set up easels along small town streets and shorelines all week, I understood that argument in a way I don’t think I fully had before. They weren’t painting Door County because a guidebook told them to. They were painting it because they’d spent the week actually looking at it — and a landscape that already draws visitors for its quiet beauty reveals a different kind of richness once you slow down enough to really see it. That’s the inheritance this issue’s history piece is tracing, and I got to watch it play out in real time, judging paintings born from exactly that instinct.
It’s a theme that runs through more of this issue than I expected when I first put the lineup together. Our feature on gouache follows a related thread — a medium built for painters who need to work fast and decide quickly, out in the field, with the light already moving. If you’ve been curious about the material but haven’t picked up a tube, this is the piece that will finally talk you into it.
We’re also introducing five young painters in this issue’s “Five to Watch,” artists who’ve already caught the attention of galleries, jurors, and event organizers — the kind of talent worth following now, before their prices catch up to their reputations. It’s a story we run every year, and this crop might be the strongest yet.
Elsewhere, Plein Air Today Editor Cherie Dawn Haas sat down with Kelley Mogilka and Mason Williams — an artist couple who’ve built both a marriage and a shared creative practice out of two very different painting styles running, as they put it, in “parallel play.” It’s one of the more candid conversations we’ve published about what it really takes to support another artist’s vision without losing your own.
And if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to move from a small plein air study to a genuinely large canvas without losing your nerve, don’t miss Scott Hamill’s piece on painting big in the California redwoods — a practical, step-by-step account of scaling up a composition that started at 6 x 11 inches and ended, one very determined afternoon later, at 24 x 48.
All of it, in one way or another, comes back to the same idea I kept circling on those Door County back roads: the best subjects are usually the ones already in front of you. You just have to stop the car.
PleinAir Magazine October/November 2026 Contents
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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Plein Air Today