T.C. Steele was arguably Indiana’s most prolific landscape artist, and something says he and oil painter Lavinia Hale might spend a sunny, fall Indiana day talking instead of painting. The two have a lot in common.

Indiana’s rich tradition of Impressionist painters continues through Lavinia’s work. A member of the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association, she earned a visual arts degree from Brigham Young University. “Then I hibernated artistically while my husband and I raised our eight children,” she said. “Once they were in school, I picked up my brushes and began growing my professional art career, throwing myself into art fairs, plein air paint outs, and solo and group exhibitions.”

She joined the Greencastle Arts Council and became its secretary, then VP, then president, while her husband supported her budding career. “I count my lucky stars that he’s a skilled woodworker and creates beautiful frames,” she said.

With a professional motto of “Embrace the process,” Lavinia says she enjoys every aspect of her work, “toggling between careful observation and loose abandon,” as she describes it. Her compositions demonstrate a mastery of shape, tone, line, and texture, with a special sensitivity to color. “I use subtle temperature shifts and the interplay of warm and cool colors with special attention to greyed hues to establish color harmony and cause the color notes to sing,” she says.

“My paintings usually begin with an imprimatura, a thin coating of a hue to break the white of the linen canvas and provide visual interest through broken color in the thinly painted areas,” she said. “There is an interplay between juicy, textural strokes and thin washes, carefully rendered subjects and loose suggestions. The end result is emotive and poetic.”

Of her primary subject, she said, “Nature has so much complexity and an overload of visual information. It’s hard to not get lost in the weeds. I take time to step back, squint and try to see the scene abstractly. The remaining shapes are the most important and become the backbone of the painting.” T.C. Steele could not have said it better.

“The more I study art and nature, the more I see beauty in everyday scenes – light filtering through a forest, reflected light bouncing onto the smooth bark of a neighboring tree, a million hues dancing on the surface of a stream. I feel compelled to capture those moments and invite others to share them with me,” she said.

Plein air pieces are, by their nature, authentic, unique timestamps of a visual experience, and a direct conversation between the artist and the subject, with light and with the forefathers of Indiana’s arts movement.