Thursday, September 22, 2011

Island Encounters...Wildling Art Museum

Painting by Carl Oscar Borg
Today is the reception and opening for the Island Encounters exhibit at the Wildling Art Museum in Los Olivos, CA. The exhibit will run from Sept 21, 2011 to Jan 8, 2012. I was fortunate enough to have one of my paintings make it into this show. The show is filled with paintings, photographs and sculpture depicting scenes of any and all of the Channel Islands.
I'm happy to be in this show because my work will hang with some wonderful artists including Carl Oscar Borg, Elmer Wachtel and Lockwood de Forest. The show also includes work by some very fine contemporary artists too. The museum staff and their volunteers have made some wonderful creative adjustments to the main floor hall where the show will be held. I'm looking forward to seeing the exhibit later this afternoon. Do try and make it to the Island Encounters exhibit if you are in the area between Sep 21, 2011 and Jan 8th 2012

UPDATE......
           Just arrived back from the Island Encounters opening reception. Wow! I was only aware of a few of the artists that had work hanging in this show before going to it and felt privileged to have my painting in there with them. I was astonished to find works by Elmer Wachtel and DeWitt Parshall. Also were works by contemporary artists Matt Smith, 2 from Kevin Macpherson, Joseph Paquet, David Gallup, Whitney Abbott and many more. What a line up of talented artists.

Elmer and Marian Wachtel both had paintings overlooking Avalon harbor on Catalina Island. The museum put up a current image of the harbor where you could see the area they had painted back then and how it has changed over time. There were recognizable geographical elements that were in their paintings that remain today making it easy to reference what they were seeing and almost the location to where they were painting from...very cool. Parshall had a great subdued painting of a rocky shoreline with some birds flying in the foreground that was awesome. You could see how Parshall had painted thin, almost translucent at the edges of the rock formations too give the viewer this almost blurred edge...I wondered why he had painted the edge that way when I was right up on the small (about 12x16 I think) painting but when I looked again from about 10 feet away the effect was awesome....we painters of today think we are smart, ha! The Matt Smith piece was a small 8x10/9x12? painting with of course the killer rock work he does so well. I wish I had taken my camera but no dice...left it at home tonight but due to the crowd inside I would have never gotten a good shot and so I just enjoyed myself and studied too. Like I said...if you are close to Los Olivos, CA. this is a great exhibit to see....and drool.            

4 comments:

Marian Fortunati said...

I knew that there were some great artists going to have work in the show, but didn't know about all of those!
Congratulations on being included!!! WOW!!

I would LOVE to try to get by to see it.

Ron Guthrie said...

Hi Marian,
I knew they were going to have Wachtel and Borg but I too didn't have any idea about the others. I was amazed so many paintings by great painters would be loaned to the museum for this show...very cool! Stacey has some major pull! haha.

William Wofford, Jr. said...

Ron, Congratulations on being included in the Island Encounters show, as well as your Sept. gallery show!

Ron Guthrie said...

Thanks William for the nice comments. It's been a very lucky Fall so far and that's a good thing because Summer was much slower. I used that time to paint like a maniac and that added inventory has helped a lot. I appreciate it.