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		The Nature Conservancy in Virginia Virginia Home Contact Places We Protect News Room Field Trips and Events Volunteer Ways of Giving

Get Involved   You can learn more and explore new places when you join the Conservancy's online community and build your own personalized nature page. The Artists Specific works for the show have not yet been selected for the exhibit. Paintings for the exhibit will be selected by professional jury. Click here to see a list of artists and the landscape they chose to paint. View a slide show of some of the artists' paintings! The Landscapes   Maryland/DC Preserves Nassawango Creek Nanticoke River Watershed Dorchester Pond Potomac Gorge Nanjemoy Creek Chesapeake Bay (VA & MD) Allegany Forests Cranesville Swamp Choptank Wetlands Virginia Preserves Virginia Coast Reserve Warm Springs Mountain Cumberland Marsh Clinch River Piney Grove Blackwater River Great Dismal Swamp (Note: today this is a national wildlife refuge) North Landing River Bottom Creek Gorge Voorhees Fortune’s Cove New Point Comfort

Around Washington, D.C., it’s the political landscape, not the natural one that usually gets the spotlight. But a unique partnership between The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest international conservation group, and the Washington Society of Landscape Painters (WSLP), one of the nation’s oldest arts organizations, captures on canvas conservation efforts taking place around D.C. and throughout Maryland and Virginia.

A juried exhibit created under this partnership features paintings of the lands and waters protected through the efforts of The Nature Conservancy and its nearly one million members. To create this special exhibit, we invited the area’s most talented landscape painters to give us their impression of some of the environmentally significant areas that are close to where all Washingtonians live, work and play.

Plein Air Painters

The exhibit features works by such notable landscape painters as Richard Whiteley, WSLP’s past president, and Bethanne Cople, who studied fine arts locally at the George Washington University and was featured in 2006 in Southwest Art as “An Artist to Watch.” Paintings by both artists have been shown at galleries around the country.

WSLP members, like Cople and Whiteley, are “plein air” painters — preferring to work outdoors and to paint what they see. En plein air, translated from the French as “in the open air,” emerged as a style from 19th century Europe and influenced the painting of impressionists such as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir.

“Nature gives us an infinite variety of moods and contrasts, changing with the seasons, the weather and time of day from dawn to dusk,” Whiteley said. “I strive to capture the contrasts in light and dark, cool and warm, in an impressionistic style, and to create pictures that people can recognize as places they may have visited or seen but presented in a more poetic light.”

Cople adds that by working out in nature, she’s able “to see the subtleties of color in the landscape as light and atmosphere create exciting scenes. I strive to capture the beauty of the moment, my impression of the landscape.”

The Exhibit

November 13, 2008 to January 4, 2009
 
The Athenauem
201 Prince Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
 

 

 

 

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Bethanne Kinsella Cople (Virginia Coast Reserve); Photo © Mark Godfrey/TNC (Artist Nancy Tankersley, a member of the WSLP, works on a quick plein air oil study of the landscape in The Nature Conservancy's King's Creek/Choptank Wetlands preserve).