She also incorporates some of her faux finish samples into smaller pieces

Abundance of nature, full bursts of color, freedom and leisure, calmness and coolness of water – those were a few of the words and phrases that came to mind for curator Guna Mundheim when she went about soliciting artwork for the August exhibit now at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences. “Aspects of Summer” is a show that doesn’t test the art-tolerance of gallery goers; there’s nothing close to controversial or intellectually challenging. It’s as Mundheim conceived it: a show at which we can kick off our shoes and get comfortable in.

Five of the 13 exhibiting artists came to the artists’ talk and tour of the exhibit on Sunday, going the extra miles to be there, and Mundheim did her best to pinch-hit for the others.

First at bat was landscape artist Mary Beth Akre from Parkton, Maryland, who told a funny story about her gorgeous plein air painting, “Peach Trees, Blevins Orchard.”

“I like being outdoors and I like working big,” said the almost six-foot tall artist. “I like working even bigger than this painting; the problems with working big outdoors is the wind, and I go through all kinds of technical gyrations to solve that. The other thing is people. I like meeting people when I am out on the land, and it was particularly important while painting in Blevins Orchard. I spent the first day blocking in everything and hoping nothing would change. Sure enough, the next day I see the cloud of dust of a truck and the pickers arrived. They spent a few moments pretending to pose for me, but then I learned that they only pick the peaches that are ripe, they rotate through the orchard, and I was able to work with them. These are big peaches, the size of softballs.”

Another of her paintings, depicting a storm coming over a field, was worked on quickly on site and then finished in the studio. Akre doesn’t take photographs to aide in her work but instead works from memory. “I’m a terrible photographer. Also, working from memory taps into my emotional responses.”

For the landscape artist, “Wind and thunderstorms are bad, but otherwise, life is good,” said Akre.  

Frank DeSalvo, the husband of artist Sydney Drum, came from New York City to meet and greet the local art crowd. Drum’s mixed media of “Niagara Falls” combines oil painting with digital photography. “The hand-painted scene (on the right of the artwork) is very detailed, while the computer image, a manipulated image – the image doesn’t exist in real life – has been superimposed. It’s not just a standard photograph,” explained DeSalvo. Two smaller digital prints on canvas are also manipulated digitally.

Elizabeth Auth from Wynnewood, Pa. has a summer home in Ocean Gate, just ten minutes northwest of Barnegat Light – if we could soar like a sea gull across the bay. Some of her paintings are very familiar, scenes like “Osprey Nest on Barnegat Bay.”

“I do use photos and work in the studio,” said Auth. Referencing her painting “Pond on Grindstone Island,” she said, “I like to paint places that are un-dramatic. This is one of those ponds in the Pine Barrens that comes and goes, depending on the cranberry bogs surrounding it. Sometimes it is full of water, with lilypads; sometimes it is dry, with weeds and stumps. I use photo references and then intensify the colors. I use thin layers of translucent paint mixed with Liquin (painting medium). Liquin helps it dry quickly.”

Joe Sweeney from Ardmore, Pa. teaches plein air painting. His “Guard at Cape May” vibrates with color. “The red of the umbrella is agitating against the blue, richness of the sky, a sky that is clear and deep blue, like after a rainstorm when everything is washed from the atmosphere,” said Sweeney. “It’s a really rich blue. People in the cities don’t get to see these colors but you do because you live here. The sun looked electric to me.”

Sweeney gave up one of his secrets about painting the horizon line where ocean meets sky. “After I paint the horizon line, I go over it, back and forth, with a clean soft brush to blur it. It pushes the horizon back.” Sweeney also uses a neutral gray palette and primes his painting surface with a neutral gray, so as not to be blinded with a white canvas but also to get true colors.

A previous business of fixing furniture, preparing walls for murals and creating faux finishes prepared Kirsten Fischler for her current art medium. Her paintings on reclaimed wood, gathered from the Philadelphia streets where she lives, are unique.

“I am fascinated with materials and the physical aspect of making them,” said Fischler. “I blend the physicality of the painting with the image as I work through the process.”

She also incorporates some of her faux finish samples into smaller pieces, which one observer likened to Louise Nevelson’s constructs of wood pieces. But Fischler says she has no room in her row house to go sculptural. “I like working in relief.”

And unlike Nevelson’s monotone works, Fischler’s constructs are colorfully painted. “Studies in Seafoam II” is worked in turquoise, blues and greens with a swath of white sea foam. The work may have been inspired by Japanese woodcuts of the sea. “I worked in the Asian Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for three years, so that’s possible,” said Fischler.

“I like the concept of construction/deconstruction; taking real subject matter, then abstracting it. I like the play between what occurs naturally and what is manmade.”

For her constructs she likes to employ the Fibonacci sequence for the lengths of her wooden squares in the painting, a mathematical sequence used to create the golden spiral. (Gosh, Google it; I took art classes to get out of math!)

Mary Wallman, also of Philadelphia, has a number of drawings in oil pastel of gardens. Wallman’s work epitomizes one of the thoughts Mundheim had about high summer and the abundance of nature.

“I like to paint in high contrast. So to do that, I put a dark blue behind the pastel,” said Wallman. “I like to work outdoors and from life, but all of these are studies from photographs. Four are from my mother’s garden and one is of a garden in Philadelphia at 52nd Street and Parkside.

“It was the middle of July and very hot. I like to see what happens to colors around 7:30 p.m. in July and August. It’s then that the roads seem to be blue and the colors of flowers in gardens get brighter right before the sun goes away. You can see it for yourself.

“I think the scariest thing for an artist, and maybe the most attractive, is that you can’t ‘get it.’ You really can’t ‘get it’ – the effect you are seeing. Especially in landscape, when there is so much to see, you have to step back and take what you want from it. In gardens and in flowers, there is always something more.”

Also in this exhibit are the seaside paintings of David Ahlsted of Egg Harbor; the thick woods paintings of Johnson Hom (Mundheim said he paints these giant canvases on site, flicking the dabs of color all over, like the Impressionists); two wonderful acrylic abstracts by Patricia Ingersoll, who understands the beauty of leaving white space; four constructs of painted, crinkled paper plus a video of a trek through a wood by Winn Rae; exquisite, realistic watercolors of flowers by Delphine Poussant; and flighty drawings of flowers and happy, puffy things by Susan Ziegler, a Brooklyn artist who must have lovely dreams.

With its lighthearted stance, “Aspects of Summer” is sure to heighten the experience of the shore vacation for all who enter the Foundation. The exhibit is up through Aug. 20. 

Postscript: After the talk, landscape painter Mary Beth Akre said she had recently sold two large paintings to a new hospital in Princeton. “It’s been proven that viewing beautiful landscapes, particularly those that show deep space (a far horizon), are very calming and actually improve healing, that patients who have art or a nice view in their rooms leave the hospital a day earlier than those who are in a sterile environment.”

If that’s the case, well, perhaps that’s why people come to the shore seeking serenity. They sit on the beach, not just for the tan but also for that sea-meets-the-sky, far horizon.