Southside Gallery to host Ole Miss student art in annual exhibition
OXFORD — The walls of Oxford’s Southside Gallery will be hung with local landscapes painted by University of Mississippi students Thursday, May 23.
Since 2010, Ole Miss art professor Philip Jackson has been teaching a high-intensity, two-week Plein Air painting class during the May intersession.
Plein Air is “a French term that translates to painting in the open air,” Jackson wrote in an email to the Daily Journal. “The first plein air painters … adopted this approach to painting en plein air for making studies they would later develop into large, more refined paintings in the studio. It would take the following generation of impressionist painters to identify these ‘studies’ as finished works of art, proving to serve as the primary way to explore ideas of optics and color and to capture the expression of a fleeting moment.”
The Ole Miss students meet all day, every day for the duration of the class.
“We lecture and critique each morning and paint on location at a different place each day,” Jackson wrote. “This process is intense–and not for the faint of heart. Students are fully immersed in a subject day after day, which allows for effective retention of information. Also, being in (environments) with shifting weather conditions forces you to look critically and respond swiftly.”
The work on-site gives the students stronger observational skills and better senses of color, Jackson said. Moreover, the students get to learn from active professional artists during the second week of the class.
“This year we invited back figurative and landscape painter, Brian Rego,” Jackon wrote. “His work is known and collected internationally.”
As the class comes to a close and the paint is still drying, the students put their work on display in the Southside Gallery.
“If you live in Oxford or have visited during the two weeks after graduation at Ole Miss, you’ve likely seen Philip and his students working at their easels around the Courthouse Square,” a Southside press release reads. “In addition to The Downtown Square, the class makes trips to Rowan Oak, Sardis Lake, Lamar Park, and Greenfield Farms. The exhibition is a painterly tour of Oxford and Lafayette County.”
Rego’s and Jackson’s work will be on display in the gallery as well, as will that of Jackson’s art department colleague Brooke Alexander.
Writing about what he enjoys about the class, Jackson said that “It feels most like what the original classroom, an atelier, used to be. Professionals and students work (alongside) each other in a combined effort to resolve ideas through the medium of paint.”
