The 7th Annual California Landscape Painters Conference

Press Release Schedule Artists Registration

Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland that there was no "there" there...The Natsoulas show demonstrates that there is indeed a "there" there, a there of flatlands that allow you to see for miles and miles without interruption; a there full of waterways where you can fish and swim and frolic; a there colored by light filtered through hot summer air and cool, foggy mornings; a there that sustains us, delights us and sometimes aggravates us with its harshness and the continuing loss of farmlands and wetlands. A there that is unrelentingly ours.
--Victoria Dalkey, 2003

California Landscape Painters, curated by John Natsoulas, represents the 7th annual exhibition of work by the Sacramento Valley School of Landscape Painters. Concurrent with and highlighting this year's show will be a one-day seminar on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 from 8 a.m. - 3 p.m.. The morning program will feature plein air painting demonstrations by eminent Sacramento Valley landscape painters: Deladier Almeida, Chella, Ray Roberts, Mike Bagdonas, Phillppe Gandiol, Marie-Therese Brown, Andrew Down and Leslie Toms. Following the demonstrations will be a lunch with the artists at the Putah Creek Lodge, UCD arboretum.

The collection of landscape paintings in the exhibition ranges from the very early works done in the 1930s by artists such as Maynard Dixon and Otis Oldfield, to landscape paintings by contemporary artists that include Gregory Kondos, Wayne Thiebaud, Patrick Dullanty, Michael Tompkins, Pat Mahony, Matt Bult, D.A. Bishop, Boyd Gavin, Gary Ernest Smith and Chella.

Those who have never been to Sacramento Valley may feel that these painters tend to romanticize the light. Luxuriously rich, palpably colored, and yet possessing a remarkable clarity, it almost needs to be experienced to be understood. But it has become an identifiable part of Sacramento Valley art. It's there, and it's real, and the insistence upon light-as-subject is the unifying motif behind the Sacramento Valley School of Landscape Painting. In almost all landscape painting the subject is light—the ways in which it plays across familiar forms, and the ways in which it can become symbolic of other levels of experience. This has always been so.

But for Sacramento Valley landscape painters, particularly in this century, the qualities of light have become a kind of obsession, and this richness and the variety of the resources from which they work have produced a body of art that recalls other great ages of landscape painting. Don Hagerty is one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the art and culture of the American West. He taught for 22 years at the University of California, Davis. In 1981 Hagerty organized the first important exhibition of the art of Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American, held at the California Academy of Sciences. Hagerty is the author of Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon (1993, 1998) and numerous other books on historic and contemporary painters of the West.