Capturing a Moment: Claudia Dippolito Brookes '66

Release date: April 23, 2008 |

Following in the footsteps of visionaries such as Claude Monet and Henri Matisse, Claudia Dippolito Bookes '66 took to the great outdoors last summer, paint brush in hand. While doing so, she won second place in the second annual Havre de Grace Plein Air painting competition in August 2007.

En plein air is the French expression for "in the open air," and the artists who participated in the competition came from all over Maryland to the historic city to spend four days outdoors painting scenes of waterfront homes and vistas.

As a Goucher student, Brookes chose to major in English, not art. With the help of Goucher counselors, she landed a job as a copyeditor at Williams & Wilkins, a Towson medical publishing company. But after more than 30 years in the publishing field, she decided to try her hand at art--and soon was selling her work.

"I retired from publishing in 1998 and, with my new-found time, decided to choose one of my talents to pursue. Within a year, I was showing and selling my artwork, and since then my career has grown to all-encompassing, 12-hour days," the artist says.

Given her background in publishing, perhaps it's no wonder that Brookes sees connections between language and painting. "I consider watercolor my 'native language,'" she says. "To me, watercolor is like a Romance language. It is fluid, spontaneous, and playful. Painting in oil is like speaking German. You push the paint; it doesn't move on its own." (Her winning painting for the event in Havre de Grace, "Lock House Light," was an oil on canvas.)

Plein air painting, or working in the natural light of the outdoors (rather than in a studio), became popular in Europe in the mid-1880s. French impressionist painters such as Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir frequently revisitied their subjects, painting the same outdoor scenes again and again, attempting to capture the essence of a particular moment through depictions of light and shadow.

Plein air painting, Brookes says, is invigorating and fulfilling, but can be challenging. "A perfect painting day would be sunny, dry, warm, with perhaps a light, cooling breeze, low humidity, and no bugs, with appealing subject matter right where you are able to park your car," she says.

"Since these conditions rarely exist together, you will see plein air painters backpacking their gear long distances, dealing with winds that threaten to (and do) blow over their gear and canvases, torrents of bugs, and intermittent rain and weather conditions."

But the battle to overcome these difficulties is part of the excitment of painting, the artist says. And it was in the struggle to create that she found her artistic voice. By spending hours outdoors, Brookes learned to paint the transient elements first--whether shadows or light. "I believe that the painting is finished when the subject is recognizable to the viewer, and I have capture the lighting conditions," she says.

"I am not unique in having spent hundreds of hours in targeted classes and workshops, learning from excellent instructors," she says. But, she added, "being 'self-taught' implies struggling on our own to learn our craft."

Now by teaching art classes, she hopes to inspire other to paint--and to pass the plein air tradition to the next generation of artists.

Visit Claudia's website, www.claudiabrookes.com, to learn more.