There aren’t many hazards to painting in an indoor art studio besides spilling coffee on your canvas.
Setting up an easel outside, however, could have many different outcomes, including: a moth fluttering into a freshly painted sunset, a gnat wandering across a still-wet mountain range, a sudden gust of wind plastering a leaf straight into the composition, a rogue raindrop trying to mix with oil paints, or painting at dusk and realizing your headlamp has turned the masterpiece into a brightly lit runway for every bug in the backcountry.
Nature has a funny way of making itself part of plein air painting, and for Boulder artist Lindsay Ternes, that means accepting that every work of art made outdoors may come with a little bit of, well, dead bug debris.
“It is not unusual to have dead gnats in my paintings, or a moth or two. You just kind of let nature do its thing,” Ternes said. “I’d say most of the time, I get a little sparkle or extra glitter element that ends up in the paint.”
Kicking off Sunday, 50 Colorado artists will fan out across the county to participate in . The celebration of plein air, French for “open air,” will have artists painting outdoors, on location, while the light changes, the weather makes threats, and nature occasionally treats the canvas as a landing strip.
The public can watch artists work during two public paint-outs in Boulder: from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday at Chautauqua Park, 900 Baseline Road, and from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Boulder Farmers Market, on 13th Street between Canyon Boulevard and Arapahoe Avenue. Both are free and open to the public, with no registration required, which means visitors do not need to know their Monet from their Manet before approaching someone with an easel.
“Our artists are very friendly and open to talking about their work and what they’re doing and what plein air means to them,” said Angela Rose, co-director of Open Studios. “People should not be afraid to go up and find out what the experience is like and ask questions.”
This year’s event marks a deliberate local turn for Open Studios. While past versions of the plein air event have included national calls for artists, the 2026 event was limited to Colorado artists, with priority given to Open Studios members and artists from Boulder County and the surrounding region.
Rose said the organization wanted to “pull back and pull in” this year.
“Boulder County is home to one of the highest concentrations of artists per capita in the country,” Rose said, “and this year, we wanted this event to reflect that.”
The event was capped at 50 artists, largely because of the final exhibit space, Rose said. Even then, Open Studios ended up with a waiting list.
“We had to limit it to 50, because itap based on where your final exhibit space is going to be, but 50 artists painting together is a pretty cool number,” Rose said.
Ternes is uniquely positioned to appreciate that local growth. In 2017, she helped co-found the plein air event with her friend Cindy Sepucha, who was the executive director of Open Studios at the time. Drawing on her former career as a corporate event planner, Ternes pitched the idea, and the two launched the festival’s first iteration in just a few months.
Her journey with the medium started long before that. Growing up in a family that loved backpacking and fly fishing, Ternes carried a travel watercolor set to keep herself entertained.
“My mom calls me an outside dog,” Ternes said. “I love being outside in any capacity.”
She attended the University of Denver, studying both business and art, and eventually found her way to a landscape painting school in France, in the same Provence region where painter Cézanne made his home and fellow post-impressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin both worked. Ternes kept painting on the side through various corporate jobs, and when she started participating in plein air events, she did so fully committed to the lifestyle.
“I was doing plein air events pregnant and breastfeeding, with tiny little muffins with me,” she said.
For Ternes, braving the weather, the terrain and the logistics is all in service of capturing the raw essence of a location.
“What I love about plein air painting is itap this painted response to whatap in front of you, not necessarily trying to capture the photorealism of it,” Ternes said. “At least for my work, I’m going after the feeling that I’m feeling.”
In an era when that feeling can be simulated by a machine, she finds something worth defending in the alternative.
“In the time of AI, how cool to stand in front of a painting that wasn’t just painted by a human, but a human who stood in front of this view, who stood in the rain and the snow and the wind and smelled the smells and felt the sun or the wind,” Ternes said.
Supporting that work is what , which has been operating since 1995, was built to do. Known largely for its , the nonprofitap mission, as Rose described it, is to “empower Boulder County artists to create success and to foster community connection through visual arts access, education and life-enriching experiences.”
Artists paint for the joy of it, but making a living requires connecting with buyers.
Ternes, for one, loves being found mid-painting. During the public paint-outs, passersby get a front-row seat to the creative process.
“I always love the delight of the return trip,” Ternes said, “of somebody going, ‘Oh my god, you did so much since I went by.’”
That shared community experience culminates at the end of the week, when all 50 artists will submit their freshly finished canvases for a public exhibit and sale. The opening reception will take place from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday at Park Coworking, 2040 14th St., next to the Boulder Theater, with awards announced at 6:30 p.m. The exhibit will remain on display from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, through June 30.
Because oil paints take so long to dry, these exhibits are affectionately known as “wet paint sales.” Rose pointed out that buying a piece of local art in this welcoming space can be far less intimidating than walking into a traditional gallery.
“Whether you stood there and watched this artist paint the Flatirons, or whether they were off painting somewhere where you didn’t see them … to look at art and recognize a place that you’ve seen or where you’ve been can give you a more personal connection to it,” Rose said.
A local might catch a painter working at the Farmers Market on Wednesday and see that exact, still-wet cityscape framed on a wall by Friday night, maybe with a tiny speck of nature forever caught in the paint.
“To me,” Ternes said, “itap almost like that field trip magic from our childhood, that rare chance to see how something is made.”
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