From the beaches of Charleston, South Carolina to a balmy sidewalk in front of an old Baltimore brewery in the 105-degree summer heat, Baltimore artist Crystal Moll has traveled far and wide for her work creating plein air paintings.

But on this Wednesday night, Moll is mingling with local artists, friends, and family at Sobo Cafe just around the corner from her gallery in Federal Hill. She’s not just there for dinner, though. Every two months, Moll rotates her work displayed throughout the space.

“We kind of packed the house, had some hors d’oeuvres, had some wine, and stayed for dinner,” Moll recalls later, mentioning some spectators who came from as far as Annapolis. “Since I wasn’t hosting it, I was able to just talk to people and enjoy the event.”

If you were to have told the 58-year-old artist in high school that she’d be a gallery owner and a painter full-time, she probably wouldn’t believe you. In fact, the Virginia Beach native barely touched a paint brush before college, with the exception of her father’s Saturday-morning painting sessions.

“I actually come from an artistic family,” Moll says. “When we were kids, my father would have art class on Saturday mornings. So that was the beginning.”

Moll stumbled upon the gallery business, and the neighborhood, accidentally. When a French-inspired cafe on South Charles Street closed 10 years ago, the landlord asked Moll to hang her paintings in the front window. She was inspired, so she told herself that she’d hang a few and give it until the end of the month.

This year, the gallery celebrates its 10th anniversary, but like any successful business, longevity doesn’t come without sacrifice. For Moll, her greatest challenge is finding time to do what she loves: paint.

Today, the mother of two cats doesn’t regret quitting the advertising business to paint full-time, but she does acknowledge that there are daily obstacles she has to overcome. We sat down with the artist to talk about her trajectory, the challenges of owning a gallery, and finding beauty on Baltimore’s streets:

What makes a good landscape painting? What do you look for when you’re scouting one?

I typically paint what I call “urban landscapes,” because I’m usually in the city. What strikes me usually has to do with a lot of light and color. It’s usually the effect of light on the surface that makes it a warm color, and then shadows become purpley colors. So, it doesn’t really matter what I paint, but that’s actually what makes me excited about the things that I choose to paint. I used to paint a lot of still life and interior work and then I started dragging all of my equipment out onto the streets because I had moved to Baltimore and people painted their houses great colors. I was like, “Instead of spending all this time setting up a still life, I could just find it.”

So, what exactly is plein air painting?
Plein air is actually just painting on location. It’s a French term that means “out in the open,” and hundreds of years ago, artists adopted it as their term. So, even though in general it could be doing almost anything outdoors, really plein air painting means you’re painting and being influenced by what it is that you are perceiving. Across the country, there are plein air events all over the place. One of the biggest is in Easton, Maryland, and they pull artists from all over the world to participate. We do a plein air show here at the gallery every summer. So that’s usually about 30 different artists, who all paint on location.

You once described yourself as more of a slow plein air painter. How long does it take you to finish a piece?
I am very slow. In fact, that’s why I don’t do a lot of plein air events because a lot of artists will do a painting in a couple of hours and they’ll knock your socks off. When I first started painting on location, I told myself, instead of sitting in a studio and working on a painting, I’m just going to go sit outside and work. In a studio, you might go back to a painting day after day until you’ve finished. So that’s what I do. I go back day after day and I go back at the same time.

What’s the most important thing that you learned while studying at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia?

Well the biggest thing was that I learned to see color with light on it. In a very simple Painting 101 class, [one of my professors asked us] to paint eggs using just black, white, and yellow ochre. But I kept thinking, “what was the yellow ochre for?”

Then, there was a girl in the class who brought in her pieces and the yellow was where the light was hitting it—I saw the warmth of that. After that class, I walked around for probably three days with everything in front of me changing color. Literally, as if I had taken a drug. People’s faces were yellow where the light was, and greens and purples, I mean, it was wild. Then it calmed down, but that actually was a major light bulb being turned on. I probably could have left school after that class, but I stayed for the next three years.

Why did you move to Baltimore?
Because I married [my husband] Bob. He lived here, and I lived there, and he didn’t love Philadelphia like I did. The only way he could get me down here was to marry me.

What was the inspiration behind opening the gallery 10 years ago?
The gallery was sort of an accident. There was a wonderful gift store in this space called “Le Petit Cochon,” but the recession killed a lot of businesses. In December of 2009, the people who had the shop closed it. Wayne Brockie, who is my landlord here, called me up and said, “Would you put a painting in the front window? I just don’t want it empty for the holidays.”

He owns these three buildings connected. So, I met him, and I said I’ve always thought about a gallery, but how do you run it and still do your artwork? And how do you pay for it? So, I said, “Why don’t I put up a lot of art? I won’t pay you any rent. I’ll give you a percentage of sales, we’ll try this till the end of January and we’ll see where we go from there.”

How do you manage your time, then, and still make sure you’re able to paint?
It’s pretty tough. I don’t paint as much as I used to, and part of that’s okay because then when I do paint, I’m so excited about it. In the last two years we’ve been trying to change things a little bit so I can eventually get back to painting more. Part of that is actually having a few exhibitions with a lot of different artists. So, we’re doing smaller shows and letting them run a little longer. It’s a major balancing act, and now I’m personally trying to take more time off with my husband and trying to have a little bit of life outside of the gallery, too.

What would you say is the hardest thing about running a gallery?
Probably the hardest thing is just tapping into the buyers. The point of this is to sell artwork, it’s not just to show it. When I started painting full time, my husband and I made the decision, because I was running my own advertising business, that I was going to quit that, and I was going to paint. I love to paint, but also the bottom line is, it’s for a living.

“I wander around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars…” —Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

As the great Wyeth did with his easel in the Pennsylvania town of Chadds Ford, local landscape artist Lissa Abrams does in her hometown of Baltimore.

Abrams is one of those people—there’s at least one in every family—who drives through the old and often greatly changed neighborhoods where her ancestors once broke bread, helped a friend with a problem, raised kids, and told stories.

Sometimes it’s a sad stroll—the houses boarded up or gone completely—but other journeys bring a smile through the mist of years gone by.

“My parents used to drive around, too,” says Abrams, whose mother Rosalie Silber Abrams (1916-2009), grew up in a successful Baltimore bakery family and became the first female majority leader of the Maryland State Senate.

Abrams’ late father, William, grew up on a block of Linden Avenue (now torn down) near Druid Hill Park before the family moved to Dorchester Road in Forest Park. His parents belonged to the Bais Hamedrash Hagodol Congregation at Baltimore and Chester Streets in East Baltimore, a synagogue which is now also gone.

These memories were going through Abrams’ mind last year when she attended a funeral at Wayland Baptist church on Garrison Boulevard in Forest Park. Noticing the Stars of David on the building, she remembered it as the original Beth Tfiloh synagogue, which was built in 1927.

She decided that such places—of which there are many in Baltimore, where the Jewish community goes back to the early-and-mid-19th century—needed to be preserved in oil even if the brick and mortar had fallen.

And now, they are. Some 55 paintings of eight synagogues by about a dozen-and-a-half artists, both Jewish and Gentile, are now on view in an exhibit at the Hoffberger Gallery of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation on Park Heights Avenue. A reception for the exhibit—in which synagogues both defunct and still in operation are depicted—will be held on Sunday, September 15th at Baltimore Hebrew, and the paintings will be on display through October 28.

“I like painting moments in time,” says Abrams, treasurer of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association, several members of which are in the exhibit. “I love painting things that are old, that might be gone in a couple of years.”

Abrams has learned that, in Baltimore—where history long precedes the founding of the nation—”now you see it, now you don’t” can happen to just about anything at any time.

“A lot of these are big, beautiful buildings that take a lot of maintenance,” she says. “I’m sure they’ll be around for a while, but eventually…you never know.”

“Oheb Shalom, Study of Form and Faith” —Stewart White

“Gone” Ahavas Achim—Lissa Abrams

The synagogues—or shuls—portrayed in the exhibit include B’nai Israel on Lloyd Street near Corned Beef Row, still vibrant in the one-time epicenter of Jewish Baltimore; Shaarei Tfiloh, also in operation, in Druid Hill Park (where the Jewish community migrated after first settling in East Baltimore); and the former Eutaw Place Temple of the Oheb Shalom congregation in Bolton Hill, designed by Joseph Evans Sperry, best known as the architect of the Bromo Seltzer Tower.

Another painting of note is a sad and beautiful corner building (boarded up and scarred) of pale orange brick—once home to Congregation Ahava Achim at 427 Pulaski Street—in southwest Baltimore, an area known during the Great Depression as “Little Jerusalem.”

“I’m honest [in depicting] all the work I do, but when you’re painting a religious building there’s an extra feeling of, ‘I better get this right,’” says Crystal Moll, perhaps Baltimore’s best known plein air artist who contributed a canvas of the old Eutaw Place Temple, modeled after the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy and now a Masonic Lodge.

“I’ve always wanted to paint that building,” says Moll, who did a 16 inch-by-16 inch detail of the grand building’s domes and also has a painting of Shaarei Tfiloh in the show. Each visit to Eutaw Place, she said, took a few hours and she set up her easel there about six times before completing the work.

“You always have great conversations when you’re sitting on the sidewalk painting,” Moll says. “People come up and say that they’re an artist too, pull out their phone and show you pictures of their work.”

Which is all well and good. You can’t really haul around framed canvases all the time to share your art with friends and strangers. But long after digital images have been deleted or lost in some cyber crash, oil on canvas—like the faith represented in the “Baltimore’s Bygone Synagogues” show will endure.

“It’s about making sure all the colors work together,” says Abrams. “I’m not too mystical—with me, what you see is pretty much what you get. It’s all about capturing the light…”

Along with a couple of centuries of faith, migration, and history in the Queen City of the Patapsco River.