True West

Landscape painting has a long tradition, and the term certainly brings to mind specific connotations of majestic vistas and grandiose panoramas. Stremmel Gallery’s newest show, Open Space, features the work of five contemporary landscape painters and allows visitors to take in the views as seen from five diverse approaches to landscape.

Upon entering the gallery, Alan Sonneman’s images capture the eye of the viewer as they take up the entire front room. At first glance, they appear to be photographs printed on canvas. However, up closer, they reveal themselves to be oil paintings, often with very specific titles from locations in the high Sierra. This is befitting his process since he uses a large format camera to capture the places and then paints them in a photorealistic manner. Subtle brush strokes can be seen in the rocky hills and skies that he portrays with incredible attention to detail and in slightly saturated color.

As you move through the hallway, you come to the work of Valerie Shesko, which couldn’t be more different than Sonneman’s approach. The pieces are clearly evocative of landscape but in an almost completely abstract way. With titles such as “Passing Storm” and “Canyon Dream” combined with bright popping colors, the paintings are very emotive and visceral. The mixed media pieces layer crude paint strokes with clear, sharp lines and shapes reminiscent of mountain ranges. The whole thing appears to be mashed under a sheet of Mylar creating a smoothed out, shiny surface with varying textures underneath.

The back end of the gallery contains slightly more traditional landscape paintings, the most traditional being the work of Reno artist Craig Mitchell. His oil paintings, some large-scale, and some small and intimate, show vignettes of scenery from wilderness areas of the West rendered in a modified impressionistic style. Because of the subject matter and style, the paintings recall artists like Maynard Dixon. The paintings are done with large brush strokes and rich, saturated hues, showing the artist’s manipulation of color.

Dale Livezey paints landscape “because that is what inspires [him].” His large oil paintings seem to be as much about light as the view that he depicts. Showing dramatic lighting—such as the afternoon glow that illuminates the texture in the desert hills in “Spring Forward”—he emphasizes the color at transitional times such as sunrise or dusk. Livezey’s brush strokes add an energy to the skies that tend to dominate his paintings. The overpowering colors—rosy pinks and deep purples—wide-open views, and non place-specific titles give the pieces emotion and transport the viewer to similar scenes invoked by memory.

James Shay creates formal paintings with a specific palette of muted tones and bold colors—ochre, magenta, purple, tan, and ivory. The landscapes appear to be layered but have no detail and are composed of shapes created using casein—a form of tempera paint—and prismacolor. Shay scrapes the surfaces of his pieces so very little texture shows. The overall effect is that the hills and trees depicted in his paintings seem to be enshrouded in mist and it gives a subtle movement to his work.

Altogether, it’s an interesting look at landscape. The different styles play together to offer contrasting points that draw out the salient parts of each artist’s work. The exhibition has a Western feel initially triggered by the title and then strengthened by the fact that the majority of the painters are drawing inspiration from places in Nevada, California and Montana—five very different depictions of landscape.