Fort Pierce is a city in and the county seat of St. Lucie County, Florida, United States. The city is part of the Treasure Coast region of Atlantic Coast Florida. It is also known as the Sunrise City. Per the 2020 census, the population was 47,297.
Albert Ernest "A. E." Backus, also known as Bean or Beanie Backus, was an American artist famous for his vivid Florida landscape paintings.
The Sunrise Theatre is a historic theater in Fort Pierce, Florida. It is located at 117 South 2nd Street.
The Highwaymen, also referred to as the Florida Highwaymen, are a group of 26 African American landscape artists in Florida. Two of the original artists, Harold Newton, and Alfred Hair, received training from Alfred “Beanie” Backus. It is believed they may have created a body of work of over 200,000 paintings. They challenged many racial and cultural barriers. Mostly from the Fort Pierce area, they painted landscapes and made a living selling them door-to-door to businesses and individuals throughout Florida from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. They also sold their work from the trunks of their cars along the eastern coastal roads.
Theodore Nikolai Lukits was a Romanian American portrait and landscape painter. His initial fame came from his portraits of glamorous actresses of the silent film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and pastel landscapes have received greater attention.
The A. E. Backus Museum & Gallery is located at 500 North Indian River Drive, Fort Pierce, Florida. This museum houses artwork by A. E. Backus and other Florida artists. The museum contains the largest public collection of paintings by Backus, a preeminent Florida landscape painter.
Judith Margolis is an Israel-based American artist working visually in paintings, drawings, artist's books and multi-media collages. In her art and writing she "explores tensions between consciousness, feminism, and religious ritual tradition".
Arny Karl was one of the key artists in the early stages of the California Plein-Air Revival, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday and Peter Seitz Adams, Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.
Peter Seitz Adams is an American artist. His body of work focuses on landscapes and seascapes created en plein air in oil or pastel as well as enigmatic figure and still-life paintings. He is noted for his colorful, high-key palette and broad brushwork. Adams has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including throughout California, the Western United States, and on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Vermont, and New York. Adams is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and has served on its board of directors in Pasadena, California from 1993 to 2018. He is also a writer on subjects relating to historic artists for the California Art Club Newsletter, as well as for a number of the organization's exhibition catalogs.
The terms California Impressionism and California Plein-Air Painting describe the large movement of 20th century artists who worked out of doors, directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the turn of the 20th century. Considered to be a regional variation on American Impressionism, the California Impressionists are a subset of the California Plein-Air School.
Tim Solliday is an American painter. He studied with the California Impressionist portrait and landscape painter Theodore Lukits (1897–1992) in the 1970s and began working professionally in the early 1980s. Solliday is described as a painter with a "muscular, masculine style" and has been compared to artists of the Taos Ten, especially E. Martin Hennings. He is a Signature Member of the California Art Club. He exhibits with the Laguna Plein-Air Painters Association, the Oil Painters of America and at the Maynard Dixon Invitational, which is held in Utah each year. Solliday's work has been featured in a number of American art magazines such as Southwest Art, American Artist and Art of the West. Through his plein-air work in the pastel medium and large canvasses, he has played an important role in the revival of landscape painting in Southern California.
Olivia Peguero is a Dominican and American contemporary landscape and botanical painter and sculptor. Painting most of the year in the Dominican Republic and Florida, she is known for producing all of her studies and the majority of her finished pieces en plein air. Unlike many other Dominican artists, her works are created in oil paint, using a more traditional European-style, many times depicting life as birth, existence and death within her flowers. Two common themes present in Peguero art are the conservation of old growth Dominican forests and pride in Dominican heritage.
Anna Althea Hills was an American plein air painter who specialized in impressionist landscapes of the Southern California coast.
James F. Hutchinson (1932–2023) is a prominent oil painter. He was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2011.
James West Fraser is an American artist. One of the leading artists in the representational/En Plein Air tradition, Fraser has built his career on richly painted, atmospheric vistas of cities, coasts, and landscapes.
Jacqueline "Jackie" Brice is an American painter, teacher and volunteer in Florida. She was born in Florida and started painting in 1967. She resides in Jupiter, Florida and travels widely, depicting Florida's rivers, back country, and wetlands.
Karl Dempwolf is a contemporary California Plein-Air Painter who is known for his California Landscapes. He is a Signature Member of the California Art Club, and serves in its Advisory Board of Directors.
Andrei Kushnir is an American fine art painter. He is known for his landscapes, city views, and seascapes, but also has created genre, portraits and still life works. He is a resident of Maryland, with a studio in Washington, D.C.
Susan Cox is an American painter. She is completed work in oil, acrylic, and watercolor mediums. Her work focuses on City Scenes and life and Landscapes en plein air. Her work has been showcased across Europe and the United States.
Alfred Warner Hair (1941-1970), also Freddy Hair, was an American painter from Fort Pierce, Florida who, along with Harold Newton, was instrumental in founding the Florida Highwaymen artist movement. Hair was the leader of a loose-knit group of prolific African American painters who sold their vibrantly colorful landscapes from the trunks of cars along the eastern coastal roads of South Florida. In 2004, Hair was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
