ARTS + CULTURE
A Breath of Plein Air A renowned regional arts event flourishes in the Columbia Gorge landscape story by JANET COOK | photos by DAVID BURBACH
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ven for the non-Francophiles among us, painting “en plein air” is just what it seems: painting outdoors, in view of the landscape being painted. If you were tasked with picking an ideal place for the pursuit, the Columbia River Gorge, with its endless supply of accessible, beautiful landscapes worthy of painting, would certainly be in the running. That’s exactly what Hood River artist Cathleen Rehfeld thought years ago when she discovered plein air painting. A landscape painter who works in oil, she’d become enamored of plein air during visits to her husband’s hometown of Lyme, Conn., known as the birthplace of American Impressionism and steeped in plein air painting.
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SUMMER 2021 II THE GORGE MAGAZINE
“My husband had grown up looking at people outside painting with their easels,” she said. When the couple moved to the Gorge in the early 1990s, he asked her why she wasn’t painting outside. “No one was really doing it,” Rehfeld said. Her neighbor was Eric Jacobsen, a renowned plein air painter who also hailed from Lyme, and Rehfeld made her first plein air forays in the Gorge with him and his wife. For years, Rehfeld made the rounds to wellknown plein air shows in Connecticut and Vermont, in Carmel and Catalina Island in California. Plein air events usually revolve around a “paintout,” where artists paint en plein air for up to several days, then turn in their work for judging. “I kept thinking, all of these places are really beautiful but none are as beautiful as where we live in the Gorge,” she said.
