September 13, 2025 — November 7, 2025
Austin Mckinzie – Todd Carpenter– Adam Longatti – John Scane
Light, Land, Legacy
Curator
Shane Guffogg
This exhibition began with a single painting—a powerful Sierra landscape by Edgar Payne, one of California’s most celebrated plein air painters and a co-founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association. That painting inspired a larger question: how do today’s artists continue the tradition of landscape painting in a contemporary world?
To answer that, we looked not only to Payne’s legacy, but also at the ways artists throughout history have used landscape to reflect how we see the world and ourselves. In the 19th century, the French Impressionists famously took their canvases outdoors to paint en plein air, capturing fleeting moments of light and life.
This exhibition began with a single painting—a powerful Sierra landscape by Edgar Payne, one of California’s most celebrated plein air painters and a co-founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association. His work captures the light, atmosphere, and grandeur of the Sierra Nevada with bold, expressive brushwork and a deep reverence for nature. That painting inspired a larger question: how do today’s artists continue the tradition of landscape painting in a contemporary world?
To answer that, we looked not only to Payne’s legacy, but also at the ways artists throughout history have used landscape to reflect how we see the world and ourselves. In the 19th century, the French Impressionists famously took their canvases outdoors to paint en plein air, capturing fleeting moments of light and life. This shift was made possible, in part, by the invention of photography. As cameras began to document the world with mechanical precision, painters were freed to explore their own expressive interpretations.
Artworks
Artists
Stripping away color entirely to focus on light, form, and atmosphere. His black-and-white landscapes are incredibly detailed and contemplative, drawing us into a slower kind of seeing. Like Payne, Carpenter is fascinated by the way light transforms space—but he approaches it with contemporary minimalism that invites reflection.
Based in the Central Valley, paints with a quiet, meditative sensibility. His work focuses on atmosphere, memory, and subtle light—qualities that resonate deeply with Payne’s interest in capturing the enduring presence of place. Longatti’s process is slow and intentional, allowing the land to reveal itself over time.
(Springville, CA) brings energetic plein air techniques to remote wilderness locations. His expressive brushwork and immersive color palettes reflect the physicality and immediacy of working directly in nature, in the tradition of early California impressionists like Payne himself.
Working from photographic references, bridges realism and abstraction. While Payne painted from direct observation, Scane reinterprets the landscape through layers of distortion, texture, and intuition. His work speaks to the emotional and psychological dimensions of place—how the land can feel, not just how it looks
