Two Plein Air Painters Make a Life on Vaughn Bay

Artists Kurt Solmssen and his wife Rebecca Schofield moved to Vaughn in 1988, to his grandparents’ summer beach cottage where he had spent summers with his brothers, to build their careers and raise a family.

“We have a good life out here,” Solmssen said.

Their two daughters are grown and settled into careers and families of their own. Their granddaughters come to enjoy the family home. Solmssen is a successful painter, featured in numerous shows and with work in museums and private collections around the country. Schofield, despite not promoting her work, has also found a market for her paintings.

The couple met at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a school with hands-on courses focused on traditional skills.

“It’s the oldest art school in the country,” Schofield said. “It was a great deal for poor art students, but it didn’t offer a degree.” She and Solmssen took advantage of an arrangement with the University of Pennsylvania to take the academic courses that led to a Bachelor of Fine Arts for each of them.

Solmssen was influenced by Fairfield Porter, a figurative painter when abstract expressionism was at the forefront, and how he captured the quality of light. The Bay Area painters, with their use of blocks of color, also influenced his development.

After completing their degrees, the couple lived and painted for six months on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, then returned briefly to Philadelphia. The Vaughn location beckoned, in part because life would be much more affordable than on the East Coast. The cottage had been a rental for 15 years with the original windows and no insulation. “When the wind blew it would blow out the candles,” Schofield said. Solmssen built a studio.

They are plein air painters, working with oils outdoors in natural light at Key Peninsula locations. “We like to work from life,” Solmssen said, “looking into the house, out from the kitchen, out in the boat.” His paintings range in size from just over a square foot to filling a large wall.

Solmssen’s yellow rowboat has been featured in many of his paintings. It was built of cedar and oak in 1935 in Tacoma, rowed by his grandfather and painted cadmium yellow after it was lost in the fog. During World War II it had its own permit to row into the Port of Tacoma that declared “One occupant; no ammunition.” The boat now sits on a raft in the bay during summer months, and still rows well, according to Solmssen.

“I think of my paintings as being semi-narrative,” Solmssen said. “It’s not like a narrative painting. It doesn’t have an obvious story, but it is about where we live and the people we know. Both of us are from that school of painting where you get that feeling of the paint and color and how they work together to get a feeling that is more than a rendering.”

“You catch the essence of the place,” Schofield added. Her paintings primarily focus on the flowers she grows in her garden.

“When you are a plein air painter you have a window of time when the light is the same or similar each time of day,” Schofield said.

“If you want to catch the light, it’s only going to be like that for 10 minutes. And the nature of light, including the direction it comes from, changes with each season.”

“On a busy day I could work on three paintings, doing early morning, afternoon, and then evening as the sun is coming down,” Solmssen said. “The winter days are much shorter with just five or six hours of daylight.”

They will sometimes take a photograph to capture light at a particular time, but, Schofield said, photographs can be problematic.

“It’s printed ink and doesn’t capture all of that color of life. Even with paint, it is hard to capture because it is pigment and not light. What you see is reflected light.”

Until recently, in addition to his painting, Solmssen had what he calls his seasonal job. As a student he worked in the Pennsylvania Academy museum’s sculpture conservation laboratory and for 37 years he spent each spring maintaining outdoor sculptures on the East Coast. He cleaned and waxed bronze sculptures, often suspended in a bucket truck 20 or 30 feet in the air.

That led to maintenance and restoration work on pieces at Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s estates. “I couldn’t talk about it when he was alive,” Solmssen said. “It was really fun. He had all these beautiful places, like in Zion. I would fly there, stay in a hotel, get whatever materials I needed from the hardware store and drive to the estate and get to work.” Some of the work, including the restoration of totem poles, required research that Solmssen found satisfying.

Schofield painted during the early years, but raising their two daughters took her in other directions as well. During college, she drafted for the biochemistry and physics departments, and although drafting was largely done by hand at the time, she got early exposure to computers. When their daughters were small, she took courses in computer design and did some website work. Later, when the girls were in grade school, she got a teaching certificate and worked as a substitute teacher which gave her the flexibility the family needed. “I built my life around my children and their schedules,” Schofield said.

After four shows in five years, including a retrospective at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2021, Solmssen doesn’t have immediate plans for another show. “I am enjoying just painting,” he said. But, he said, “We are off the beaten path so having those shows and galleries is important. I try to get my paintings out into the world to be seen.”

For more information, go to www.kurtsolmssen.net and www.rebeccaschofield.com.