Royal Nebeker

Royal Nebeker is a highly regarded Oregon narrative painter and teacher. During his academic tenure, he was the Director of the Art Institute on the Oregon Coast, sponsored by the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Clatsop Community College where he served as Art Department Chair for many years. His contribution to the arts in Oregon continues with his current appointment to the Oregon Arts Commission. Born in San Francisco in 1945 to a Norwegian mother and Danish/Swiss father, Nebeker has always been fascinated with Norwegian art and culture. He studied in California at the Claremont College and Otis Art Institute, earned an MFA degree from Brigham Young University in 1970 and completed a post graduate degree, equivalent to an MFA from the National School of Fine Arts in Oslo, Norway in 1972.

Throughout his career, Nebeker has focused on the human figure. His work is strongly influenced by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, the German Expressionists, and by the Vienna Secessionist artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and others. Although his early teachers in the United States and Norway encouraged him to embrace the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, he has remained first and foremost a figurative and narrative artist. A prolific painter and printmaker, he has been featured in countless solo and group exhibitions over the past four decades and is included in public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. As an artist, Nebeker creates highly personal narratives that are based on dreams and memories, often embellished with words and notations that help tell the story and drive his narrative. Some of his works are based on personal events in the artist’s life, while other works are based on literature. Through powerful, evocative, and enigmatic imagery, Nebeker paints what art historian Stephan C. McGough has called a reflective journey of his life, exploring such universal themes as hope, fear, joy, anguish, sexuality, spirituality, power, vulnerability, and the dynamics of personal relationships.