The Nature of Landscape
Extended to June 5, 2009
Opening Reception: February 12, 2009: 6:30 to 8:30PM
Open to the public
Artists: Gina Werfel, Sandy Walker, Terry St. John, Hearne Pardee, Laura Harden & Lon Clark
View Selected Works
The exhibition "The Nature of Landscape" at the San Francisco Studio School Gallery presents six Bay Area painters deeply involved with the issues of contemporary landscape painting. The exhibition substantiates the continued relevance of painting in today's highly conceptual art world environment, as well as confronting the long history of landscape as subject. Each artist explores the faculty of perception in relation to the changing facets of nature. All are engaged in some means of working from observation while establishing an individual line between representation and abstraction. Societal and aesthetic statements resonate through the balance of natural landscape and evidences of the encroachment of built environments. The variety and vibrancy of approaches to the subject retain a unity of involvement through their dedication to the visual in painting and painterly qualities. As a part of this exhibition landscape becomes a provocative form for a contemporary view of painting and confirms the Bay Area as a vital center for painting today.
Kenneth Baker, SF Chronicle
"The title of this small show may exaggerate its scope, but fine and very diverse works by Laura Harden, Hearne Pardee, Sandy Walker and others give it impressive depth."
Review by R.W. Miller, Artbusiness.com
"Numerous sorts of ideas and perspectives are displayed at this unusual presentation of landscape paintings. We are not transported to idyllic outdoor settings; instead there is food for thought. The works here take on new modern perspectives, rather than historic views of the hills, mountains, seas, and plains. There are GIS images, reddish wine-dark storms, modernist views of the sky, suburban sprawl, and pure abstractions. Several broad stroked paintings clearly remind of the outdoors, but most pieces need to be thought through. One might figure that the abstract paintings are of green fields or canopy, brown earth, and blue sea or sky. The assembled paintings do not exist as a substitute for the sublime experience of outdoors, but they do get one to examine what landscape painting can be in this modern world."
