John Natsoulas Gallery

Exhibition Dates: May 30 - August 11, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 16, 7-9pm
Conference: Saturday, July 21, 2007 Visit the 5th Annual Sacramento Valley Landscape Conference website for more info and registration.

Sacramento Valley Landscape Exhibition represents the 5th 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, July 21st at Bear Flag Farm in Winters. The morning program will feature plein air painting demonstrations by several eminent Sacramento Valley landscape painters: Gregory Kondos, Chella, Deladier Almeida, Philippe Gandiol, and Marie-Térèse Brown. Following the demonstrations will be a 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 to landscape paintings by contemporary artists that include Gregory Kondos, Patrick Dullanty, Michael Tompkins, Pat Mahony, Matt Bult, D.A. Bishop, Boyd Gavin, Chella, plus many more.

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.