A Plein Air Painting Picnic

{ Photographs by Plurabelle Calligraphy }

Here in Los Angeles we are in the thick of picnic season – the weather is breezy and warm, but not yet too hot. This is great news for me since packing picnics is one of my favorite activities ever. When I used to live in Paris, I would picnic on the grass at least twice a week in the spring and summer, and then sketch or write in the shade for hours. But for one reason or another, I haven’t continued the practice in L.A. Last Sunday, however, with my good friend Katie, I revived my Plein Air Painting Picnic tradition at a park in Santa Monica.

Sunday’s farmer’s market yielded some wonderful picnic ingredients: melt-in-your mouth speck, aged gouda, and perfectly ripe cherries, nectarines, and avocados. Those finds, combined with the fact that I’ve been on a baking kick lately (and recently baked, with great success, my first batches of homemade donuts and baguettes), made for an amazing lunch. We popped some prosecco to celebrate a few recent cheers-worthy events in our lives, and passed five lovely hours on the grass.

My lettering design – “I am the impression that will change” – is a quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is one of my all-time favorite books, which I’ve reread once or twice a year for the past eight years. My life is in a period of transition, which made the quotation feel especially appropriate to paint en plein air – the practice popularized by the impressionists themselves.

{ L’ombrelle verte by Berthe Morisot – one of my favorite impressionist paintings }