The easels are down and the paintings are up. The Plein Air Pop-Up show at Masterworks opened to a big crowd at the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks on Friday evening.

En plein air artists work directly from nature and typically the aim is to finish a landscape piece in a single session. Think Monet, Van Gogh, and Renoir — painters of the outdoors in the outdoors. The en plein air movement is growing in popularity with large conventions held around the world.

Our committed local group meets every Sunday and have nine members represented in this show. Often invited to paint from Island homes, they have access to unusual views.

At the whim of changing light and weather, both amateur and professional artists mix in a mutually supportive way. The group’s lynchpin Rhona Emmerson exhibits six oil paintings for this pop-up show. You might expect a vitality and immediacy to these paintings. They have it. Pictures full of seasonally heavy seas and skies that are a refreshing change to paintings of summer.

Steven Masters’s watercolours continue to inform our understanding of the landscape. He sees the unusual. In Onnee Tracks, Bailey’s Bay, the artist’s ground-level view, rather than leaving the viewer detached, instead lends a nobility of form to Bermuda’s vernacular architecture.

The artist plays with perspective, describing a decrepit building as it returns to nature. The outhouse rises like some huge writhing headstone emerging from the shadowy earth. It is juxtaposed with the zesty yellow of a distant house that shares a similar jaunty line. Masters extracts meaning from landscape, using the contrasting tools of light and shade, size and shape. He depicts the old and new as a metaphor for nature’s cycle.

Where his watercolours excite, Rainy Day, painted in oil, disappoints. The sea promises so much in its execution but expectation is left suspended, like the sea, above a broad band of deep pink sand.

Pink sand is a feature of Chris Marson’s oil painting, Horseshoe Bay in Winter. Whatever the season, our coral pink sand has an intrinsic brightness but here the painting’s hue and tone are strained. His appealing small gouache painting, Solstice Sunrise is a gem: a diagonal band of pale blue sky refutes the darkness with the reassuring glow of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse in the distance.

Chris Marson is a key mentor to the en plein air group. In this exhibit he hits the high notes. His work holds your attention in exemplary watercolours grouped at the end of the gallery. Laying washes deftly in Winter Islands, Baileys Bay, he creates a dramatic dropping sky and keenly observes light.

Charles Knights exhibits several effective watercolours. Of particular note is Blockade Alley, St George’s. The eye is led up the lane and stopped midpoint by a swathe of sunlight and directed across to banana leaves captured in a sophisticated passage of painting. He uses accents of red-browns here. The effect of this accomplished study would be amplified with a few more of these warmer tones. There is an overall sense of harmony in his pieces achieved through a limited palette. He injects more colour to the dynamic square composition Corkscrew Hill, Devonshire that is beautifully framed.

Lee K Petty possesses lyrical brushwork and her colours are fresh in her six oil paintings. In January Seas at Warwick Long Bay, you can almost hear the slapping of the breakers on the beach and rocks. The addition of a linen mat to her oil paintings might be useful. She speaks too eloquently for the frames to muffle her voice.

Grahame Rendell is an amateur member of the group. He has relished the stage Masterworks offers and is a worthy inclusion as his oil, Mid Ocean Beach Glimpse shows. Michele Smith’s brooding cloudscape, Sunset at King’s Point is the most successful picture of her trio of oils. She creates the rich textures and colours using paint thickly to capture the changing light and sky of winter. Watercolourists Marlene Jantzen and Jill Raine contribute well to the show.

This exhibition has an earthy, robust feel with artists who clearly enjoy the process of en plein air painting. If you like landscape painting, there is plenty to enjoy and think about. Plus, the prices are competitive and there’s time to visit before it closes on February 25. Stay and enjoy Masterworks main exhibition Mythology, Mayhem, Mystery & Marketing.