Catherine Cope

Pictured, Catherine Cope shows off her painting, Robert's Garden, created during the 2020 Pike Road Plein Air Paint Out.

Pictured, Catherine Cope shows off her painting, Robert's Garden, created during the 2020 Pike Road Plein Air Paint Out.

My name is Catherine Cope and I’ve lived in Pike Road longer than Pike Road, Alabama has been it’s own entity. I have never not wanted to make art, so I make pieces of time for it. When I retired from administrative management, I attended AUM’s Fine Arts department for 2 years and have taken more educational painting workshops than I can now count. That was over twenty years ago, and I’m still grabbing time opportunities. This weekend exercise was an excellent opportunity to hear so many of those instructors voices while I painted Plein Air.

I’ve never entered an official Plein Air painting event before, though I’ve participated in a number of landscape workshops—but you didn’t have to finish those if you got stumped or just plain tired! There is no county I’d rather paint the countryside than Montgomery County, and one never comes short of picturesque scenes in the Pike Road community.

My preferred art, for as long as I can remember, is pencil or charcoal, figurative or portrait. Yet landscape painting is my biggest motivator, every single day I walk out my door, every drive along Hwy 110, Pike Road, or Wallahatche Road — or look up at the sky, Lord, yes, the sky our in Pike Road is always a panorama of beauty! I stop, take a cell phone photo and vow to paint it — someday. Oils claim me as a foreigner with which I am determined to communicate! Puddles of oil paints combined with their colors, values, and composition elements are a lifetime challenge.