[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]
Location: 521 First Street - Davis, CA 95616 Contact: Nancy Resler – 530.756.3938 – nancy(at)natsoulas.com Website: www.natsoulas.com Gallery Hours: Wed-Th: 11am-5pm, Fri: 11am-10pm, Sat-Sun: 12pm-5pm
Exhibition: May 28 – July 3 Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 7-9pm
The 6th Annual California Landscape exhibition, May 28 to July 3, will feature many pioneers of the Sacramento Valley School of Landscape Painters. A one-day seminar scheduled for Saturday, June 21st, will feature plein air painting demonstrations by eminent landscape painters: Gregory Kondos, Chella, Deladier Almeida,, Philippe Gandiol, and Marie Thérese-Brown. Following the demonstrations, the conferees will enjoy an al fresco lunch with the artists.
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, Dwarka Bonner, Gary Ernest Smith and Chella.
The California landscape festival and conference also features five different shows on landscape paintings of California. Although the painters of the Sacramento Valley dominate this exhibition, numerous artworks has been inspired by the wineries of Napa, the Pacific Ocean, or the sumptuous mountains inland, symbolizing the beautiful variety of the state. The importance has been magnified by the encroachment of cities and the slow disappearance of the landscape, making it important that we celebrate its beauty.
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. The qualities of light have become an 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.
