Bay Area · Ongoing
The Glover Group
A circle of plein-air painters carrying forward Pam Glover's legacy — one paint-out at a time.
Who we are
The Glover Group is an informal collective of painters who trained under Pam Glover, one of Northern California's foremost plein-air instructors. After Pam passed in 2010, her students kept showing up — to paint, to critique, to share lunch in a parking lot with easels out. The group has been meeting ever since.
We paint outdoors, on location, in the tradition Pam taught us: color-forward, direct, alla prima. No studio corrections. Whatever the light is giving you that day is what goes on the canvas.
Pam Glover — the teacher
Pam was a foundational figure in the Bay Area plein-air world. She trained for four years under Lundy Siegriest — son of Louis Siegriest, an original member of the Society of Six, the Oakland-based group that in the 1920s helped invent California modernism. Pam founded The Outsiders, a plein-air group based in Orinda, and spent decades teaching the color-forward approach she'd inherited.
Her influence wasn't just technical. She taught her students how to look — how to simplify a scene into its emotional core, how to commit to a brushstroke, how to let the painting breathe. She had a way of walking up to a struggling canvas and saying exactly the one thing that unlocked it.
The lineage
The Glover Group sits at the end of a direct artistic lineage stretching back over a century:
The paint-outs
Every week, members of the Glover Group meet at a location — a park, a harbor, a vineyard, a downtown street corner — set up their easels, and paint. Two to three hours, plein air, side by side. Then we look at what everyone made.
It's a practice as much as a social ritual. The constancy of it is the point: showing up every week, regardless of the light or the weather or whether last week's painting felt good. That's how Pam ran it, and that's how we still run it.
Susan's role
Susan Kendall has been a member of the Glover Group for over thirty years — painting with Pam during her lifetime and continuing with the group after her passing. Susan now helps lead the weekly paint-outs and serves as a keeper of Pam's teaching approach for newer members.
Her work — available on this site — reflects everything she absorbed in those years of outdoor painting: the direct brushwork, the commitment to on-location light, the color palette that pulls from the California landscape rather than from a studio imagination.