“I consider myself an outdoor artist,” said Michelle Held, who will be among the faculty members of the 12th Annual Plein Air Convention and Expo (PACE), May 19-23, 2025. The exclusive locations chosen this year are the city of Reno, also known as “The Biggest Little City in the World,” and nearby, the pristine Lake Tahoe, known as the largest alpine lake in North America.
Born and raised in Maryland, Michelle is a self-taught artist who, after working various creative jobs as a single mother of two, invested her resources in a course in “faux finishing,” which later gave her great satisfaction. A local magazine published her first work, which became her starting point.
The artist has been a historical restorer for 35 years and creates murals by studying Michelangelo’s frescoes and the paintings of the old Renaissance masters. Her journey into plein air painting began ten years ago in Sarasota, where she later moved and became part of a group of local artists, including Mary Erickson and Morgan Samuel Price, who inspired her to paint outdoors.
A couple of pivotal events then changed her professional life and led to her having a 100% income from her art.
The first was her participation in the Plein Air Easton Festival (Maryland), where her paintings were highly collectible. The second was the Covid pandemic, which changed many people’s lives, including hers – in this case, for the better – as she realized her dream of becoming an art teacher thanks to online lessons that later allowed her to travel all over the world. “Teaching not only improves others, but also improves what you know. It is elevating,” says the artist.
In addition to being an artist, she is a juror for prestigious exhibitions and organizes workshops that combine art and local culture. Winner of prestigious awards and recognitions such as the PleinAir Salon (Best Western category, August 2023) and the Sedona Plein Air Festival (2nd in Show and Collectors Choice, 2024), she is currently represented by three major galleries.
Embracing plein air painting has given her a vital energy that has allowed her to improve everything she was trying to do inside the studio, allowing her greater freedom of expression with her dramatic sense of light and shadow. “I think the thing I’ve learned most from plein air is reflected light. You can’t see reflected light in a photo,” the artist said.
Even though she practices en plein air, she prefers to call herself an “outdoor artist” rather than a “plein air painter,” because she claims that being an “outdoor artist” somehow gives her permission to be creative and to escape from the idea of looking at things simply as they appear. On the other hand, she tries to absorb information with feeling, as a poet would, relating things and looking for emotional connections that derive from the way she looks at them, not for how they appear but for how they make her feel.
For Michelle, being an open-air artist means recording information with emotions and feelings, like a poet: “I think that novice plein air painters are like journalists: they go out, they see a tree and they try to make it look like six branches, while a poet goes out and moves it.”
Michelle’s work ranges from landscapes to still lifes, although animals – especially birds – are her favorite subjects. Her renditions have the peculiarity of being extremely realistic, not only in the representation of the details that distinguish one species from another, but also in the range of sensations that the artist conveys to the viewer, who can also perceive their habitat.
In her paintings, it is possible to perceive the silence of the place or the warmth of the sun; the balance of a bird soaring in the sky and the movement of the air in its flight or in its breaking when it touches the water.
But her mantra is “to indicate, not to illustrate” because, as she herself says, “you can breathe realism in my work, but it is only indicated realism because I believe that this allows the eye and the mind of the viewer to complete the painting instead of just passively observing it.”
“I start each painting with a heart on my canvas, underneath with love,” says the artist, who, from a compositional point of view, sits down before beginning each one to absorb the landscape and its rhythmic patterns, trying to use all her senses to capture the essence and the sensations that the place offers her.
The process begins with a series of gouache studies. Once the composition is defined, Michelle begins to paint in oil with a grisaille underpainting that immediately establishes her scale of values. She likes to leave the colors in the underpainting because they gradually emerge as the painting progresses, giving the composition a special vibration.
In her paintings, the realism created by the high definition of detail is sometimes combined with a decision to make the painting more abstract, by creating soft edges that give a sense of place, or by playing with the temperature of the color.
She likes to add a few more colors to her palette, such as Indian yellow, quinacridone pink, and a pale violet that she says, “sings on the canvas.”
She works from dark to light, focusing first on the focal point and then letting everything else become a bit impressionistic.
According to the artist, “focal point” is also the key to realism, of which she says: “I have noticed, especially when working with students, that the more they try to make the painting realistic, the less realistic it becomes. If you leave some edges loose, soft, and unrefined, the eye will fill in the empty spaces and focus on the focal point.”
Michelle Held will be a great resource for any attendee who would like her personal suggestion or advice during the next edition of PACE. She says, “PACE is the place to be, to meet beautiful people who share a vibrant community, and I can honestly say that everyone who has come back from this stellar event has incredibly improved their paintings.”
Learn more and register today at PleinAirConvention.com.
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