Dave Muller, Drinking Trees, 2024
Studio 540, Modoc County’s premier contemporary art gallery, is excited to announce Julie D’Amario: The Peace of Wild Places and Drawn from Nature, featuring work by Colter Jacobsen, Nicholas Karrasch, Rumi Koshino, Dave Muller, Diane Roby, and Jesse Schlesinger.
Eagleville resident Julie D’Amario is a master printer specializing in copper plate etching. For nearly twenty years she worked at Pace Editions, in New York, assisting artists such as Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and Mary Heilmann in the creation of their prints. She has also been instrumental in establishing and expanding the Jordan Schnitzer Print Residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon Coast. While her work in the print medium is widely known and celebrated, her own artistic practice, consisting mostly of painting, has rarely been shown. D’Amario’s paintings explore the landscape as seen from above. Using a palette of highly saturated colors in a spectrum of radiant hues, D’Amario captures the diverse aspects of land, sea, and clouds that comprise the surface of the earth. Over the past several decades she has been inspired by a variety of remarkable places including Botswana’s Okavango Delta, the barren coast of Newfoundland, and the dramatic geography of the Surprise Valley.
Stylistically, D’Amario’s paintings draw on sources as varied as topographical maps and ocean depth charts, Indian miniatures, and Renaissance altarpieces. Through her attention to minute details as well as universal patterns of land, water, and sky, D’Amario opens our eyes to an awareness of the transience and interconnectedness of all natural phenomena and forms.
Accompanying D’Amario’s exhibition will be a group show, Drawn from Nature, featuring works by six artists who, like D’Amario, share a fascination with the natural world. Colter Jacobsen will show a recent print made with D’Amario’s assistance in her Eagleville studio. Departing from his usually highly detailed style, Jacobsen captures the transient beauty of a single Western Salsify seedhead. If Jacobsen’s work captures a fleeting instant, Karrasch’s sketchbook documents the
landscape of Surprise Valley seen over many weeks and days. Rumi Koshino, similarly, makes art as part of a daily ritual of walks and observations. About her drawing, made during a stay in Bellingham, Washington, Koshino wrote, “These glowing flowers are a reflection of the stars in the deep blue sky in my imagination.”
San Francisco-based artist Dave Muller’s piece is part of a series of “memory paintings” that describe residual feelings after experiences in nature. His watercolor, Drinking Trees, was made after a long, foggy walk on Mt Tamalpais. The apparent spontaneity of Muller’s watercolor contrasts with Diane Roby’s graphite drawing, which began in plein air as a response to a particular landscape setting and then developed through a slow process of revision and accumulation. While recognizable elements remain, the drawing departs from pure landscape, as the process of detailed mark-making creates a morphing interplay of imagery, imagination, and illumination. Jesse Schlesinger’s deceptively simple drawing of a bird’s nest, like Roby’s landscape, is an astonishing example of close-looking, virtuosic draftsmanship, and artistic invention. After seeing it, you’ll never look at a nest quite the same again
