Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.

SIDNEY — “Life is too short to spend it doing things you’re not enthralled with.”

So says artist Joseph McGurl, of Cataumet, Massachusetts. Landscapes enthrall McGurl, so landscapes are what he paints. They’ve been his subjects for some 30 years.

“(Painting) landscapes helps me explore an affinity with luminous painters,” he said. McGurl is one of a genre of artists known as the new American luminists.

“The original luminists were painters who painted in the 19th century, painters like Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane, who were influenced by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson,” McGurl said. They were known for their “use of pervasive light,” according to Wikipedia.

“The paintings have a crystal sense of light,” McGurl said. “The idea is that nature gives you a sense of the sublime and divine, and you can sort of experience God through nature. That manifests itself in the way the paintings look. They have a sort of stillness and light that’s symbolic of the divine.”

His own works present a sweeping grandeur, the earth as cathedral. They give a viewer the opportunity to share in the peace of a holy place.

“I want the viewer to be the subject,” McGurl said. That’s why most of his paintings don’t have figures in them. If a person is pictured, or an animal, the artwork becomes a painting about the person or animal. It becomes a picture of a person walking down a path, he noted.

“Without a figure, it’s you walking down the path,” he said. But it’s not just topography that he puts into his paintings. He tries to capture what it feels like emotionally, spiritually, to be in a particular place and to share with viewers that feeling of being.

“The technique is a result of the philosophy,” McGurl said. “(The paintings are) always a challenge because I’m always trying something a little different instead of repainting the last painting.”

He works en plein air, outside on location, and also in his studio.

“I am attracted to the purity and also the challenge of sitting in a field with only my paints and my wits, trying to record the entire experience,” he writes on his website, josephmcgurl.com.

For philosophical reasons, he doesn’t use photos for his studio work. “This method gives (me) the freedom to create paintings based on (my) imagination, memory and observation. Although the objects depicted in the paintings are elements of the landscape and have a deep personal meaning to (me), of equal importance is an exploration of light, form, space, and color interpreted through paint,” he wrote.

“My art is concerned with the relationship between reality as humans can experience it and the ultimate reality that permeates time and space. The plein air sketch forms the basis of my art-making, because it is a way for me to interpret what I am experiencing visually and emotionally. Working this way has required a significant amount of time meditating upon, observing and desperately struggling to interpret nature in paint,” the website says.

While he spends two to four hours on location, in the studio there are no time limits.

“Often times I paint late into the night because things are going good — or they’re not and I’m frustrated and want to fix it. I know I can’t sleep until I do,” he said.

Oil is his medium of choice, “because I can work with texture. I can scratch into the paint and add things like sand,” he said. In the works that he completes en plein air, he sketches in paint. More complex compositions start with pencil or charcoal. McGurl likes to work with themes because they allow him to explore a subject more deeply than a single picture. And he works on as many as eight paintings at a time.

“Often, I’m stuck and I put that painting aside, (work on others) and come back later,” he said.

McGurl’s first teacher was his father, James, a noted New England muralist. A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, Joseph also studied in Europe.

A painting that had a big impact on him when he was developing as an artist is “Twilight in the Wilderness,” by Frederic Church. That’s what he would own if he could have anything at all.

“It was painted beautifully and it had that beautiful, sublime quality,” McGurl said. “It was painted on the eve of the Civil War. The red fireworks in the sky are foretelling the coming storm.”

His own work is in the permanent collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Cahoon Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and several other small museums, as well the collections of Forbes and other corporate and private collectors. It is available through several galleries, listed on his website.

“I’ve represented his work for 30 years,” said Robert Wilson, director of Palm Avenue Fine Arts in Sarasota, Florida. “His painting was at an extremely high level 30 years ago. I remember telling collectors, ‘You need to collect him.’ They’re pretty pleased today. Their paintings are worth 10 times what they paid for them.”

Wilson calls McGurl’s use of light extraordinary and also praises his strong composition, design, color harmony and the consistent, overall quality of the work.

“He puts it all together. It’s an absolute masterpiece. Joe is going to be one of the most important painters of our time,” Wilson said.

When he’s not painting, McGurl enjoys sailing, skiing and running.

“They get me back into nature,” he laughed. “Almost everything I do gets me back to my painting.”

Although he seldom puts man-made items into a landscape, McGurl may create a painting with an Airstream trailer in it for the upcoming Jackson Center show. Participating was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“They’re such cool campers,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve got to lighten up and have fun. Alumapalooza — how can you say, ‘No,’ to that?”