Lopez Island artist Steve Hill will be among 100 American artists going to Havana, Cuba, to participate in an historic on-site art event: Plein Air Magazine’s “Paint Cuba 2016 Publisher’s Invitational.”

This is the largest group of artists in history to get special permission to paint on the “forbidden island,” for an entire week, from February 6-13. The whole group will be staying in a large Havana hotel and making daily painting excursions all over the country.

Mainly through recent diplomatic efforts of Presidents Obama and Raoul Castro, as well as Pope Francis, both countries finally opened embassies again, on July 20, 2015.

Hill said, “When this opportunity came up in mid-December, it took my wife Judy and I less than five minutes to decide to go (spouses, patrons and collectors were also invited). I never thought I would see something like this in my lifetime, and feel extraordinarily lucky to be involved.

Cuba has been frozen in time for the past 50 years and we will all be recording and expressing that through our paintings done there, before everything changes as embargoes continue to lift and relations between the U.S. and Cuba thaw.”

As a group, they are taking gifts for Cuban artists to upgrade their art supplies in the form of odorless mineral spirits for oil painters, who have been forced to use gasoline for thinners the past 50 years – not at all good for anything on the canvas, or their health. Hill will be taking a few gift sets of pastel sticks, as that’s my preferred plein air medium.

Hill will be posting a lot of his work done in Cuba, but probably not until he returns to Lopez in mid-February.

Go to www.windsweptstudios.com for more information.

Hill’s work is on display at Crow Valley Gallery on Orcas and Windswept Fine Art Gallery on Lopez.