Join Joel Sheesley for plein air painting at Farnsworth House in Plano

Joel Sheesley, Farnsworth House’s 2020-21 artist in residence, will lead a morning plein air workshop from 8 to 11 a.m. July 17 at Farnsworth House.

The workshop will include a short instructional orientation to plein air painting, a 2 1/2-hour painting session on the Farnsworth grounds, a critique session and a guided tour of the Farnsworth landscape exhibition “Less (and) More: Modernism Greets the River Landscape.” Participants will be responsible for providing painting media and materials of their choice, including easels and related paraphernalia. Cost for the program is $60 a person. Tickets for this program may be purchased online at farnsworthhouse.org.

Throughout the past year, artist Joel Sheesley painted the Farnsworth House and surrounding landscape en plein air, deftly capturing the juxtaposition of Modernist architecture with the natural world. The work he created is featured in, “Less (and) More: Modernism Greets the River Landscape,” an exhibition of Fox River landscape paintings that gives viewers a greater sense of the land and environment in which the Farnsworth House is situated. The exhibition may be seen with the purchase of a guided tour ticket, and is supported, in part, by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Sheesley is a painter whose current work addresses the local northeastern Illinois landscape. In 2017, he began a three-year project under the auspices of The Conservation Foundation to paint landscapes of the Fox River Valley. This work was exhibited at Aurora University’s Schingoethe Center and published in “A Fox River Testimony,” a book featuring more than 70 of his paintings of the Fox River. Sheesley is a professor emeritus of Wheaton College, where he taught painting for 42 years. His work has been exhibited widely, and in 2020, he was inducted into the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame.