Light & Ground
Landscape Painters Douglas Russell, Sandy Ryan & Clint Brown 
Benton County Museum presents "Light & Ground", an exhibition of oil paintings and pastel, created in the field and in the studio by Oregon painters Douglas Russell, Sandra Ryan and Clint Brown. The exhibition will be open from December 2 - February 4, 2011 at the Benton County Museum in Philomath, Oregon. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, December 2nd, from 5:00-7:00pm.
Oil paintings by
Douglas Russell
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Douglas Russell is the gallery director and curator at the Oregon State University Department of Art, where over the last 30 years he has juried and installed hundreds of exhibits, both in the LaSells Stewart Center (from 1982-1996) and in Fairbanks Gallery (1992-present). "Landscape for me is not just beautiful scenery, but has a clear connection to the value I place on man's relationship to natural places. My two earliest joys I can remember as a child are feeling the wind on my face, and the excitement of making art. To this day I find that sense of being in the right place when I am in the woods, in the mountains, on rivers or lakes, in the orderly chaos of nature, and when I am making my art" says Russell. |
"Lost Lake"
Sandy Ryan
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Sandra Ryan's recent artist statement shares the following: "I grew up in small Montana towns in those spaces between people and place. The landscape and sky was vast, much larger than the little towns and my childhood memories are filled with the beauty of that land and sky. Now here in this lovely Willamette Valley I wander the rural roads, painting in the fields and on the river banks. It "grounds" me, tying me to this place I now call home. As the seasons change I revisit familiar places like old friends, delighting in small differences that can only be observed with attention and time. Many of the paintings are of the same place, just farther down the road, or looking back instead of forward." |
"Punchbowl Falls"
Clint Brown
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Clint Brown reflects on painting in the open air: "I think of plein-air painting as something equivalent to meditation. When painting out in nature, it is easy to become totally lost in one's work, completely losing track of time. Although, in the end, a painting is something quite different from nature, it is, for me, both an aesthetic object and an object of devotion." |
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