The Insider:  From Coast to Coast, Forty Years of Painting

I started painting in the mid 1960's. At the time I was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. As a child I had grown up living in third and fourth floor apartments. I was fascinated at an early age by the effect of sunlight on city walls and sidewalks and spent much time as a teenager looking at art books at the local library. Rooftops were my world so naturally the first real influence on my paintings was Edward Hopper. This continued when I attended graduate school at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here also, Hopper was a major presence as his studio was in Truro, the next town over on the Cape, and many of his images included the local architectural and natural landscape of dunes and water. One of the visiting instructors at the FAWC was New York Ab-Ex painter Jack Tworkov. His encouraging feedback regarding my work convinced me to give up everything else and continue painting.

In the early seventies I saw an exhibition of work by Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn at Boston University. It had an immediate impact on my work. During that same time period James Weeks had a major exhibition at the University of Rhode Island. That put me over the edge. At that time I was doing studio work of images gathered from photos and sketches and also plein-air work of Cape Cod and my hometown of Providence. Most of my studios were on upper floors with panoramic views of the city so I could paint from life without having to go outside. (Very important during the long winter months with temperatures in the teens.) 
 

My last East coast studio was in Boston, a sixth floor walkup with views of Beacon Hill and the Charles River. My last East Coast painting was done in October 1978. I had gone up onto my roof on Beacon Hill and painted the brownstones in my neighborhood catching the last rays of sunlight. Light and its effects on buildings was still a major concern. One week later I was on my way to California, to see just what it was that had inspired Bischoff, Weeks and Diebenkorn.

In early 1989, California writer Nancy Boas had just completed a book on the Society of Six, a group of early 20th century painters who were heavily influenced by the Impressionist and Fauvist images coming (late) out of Europe. Nancy was giving a slide lecture at Civic Arts in Walnut Creek with images of their paintings. I was immediately overtaken by the work of Gay, Siegriest, Gile, Logan and the rest. Their concern for light and color, combined with a kind of quick painting we would later see from Diebenkorn, Park and Bischoff was like nothing I had ever seen in American painting during that time period. I was living in Concord but had a studio in Benicia where I spent a great deal of time still working in pastel on architectural images from the city. I immediately grabbed my all but forgotten oil paints and started driving to the waterfront in Benicia and Martinez, producing small plein-air images of the local landscape. It was a full circle return to my early images from the East Coast but with rural California as the subject matter.

 

Hundreds of paintings and pastels later, I can reflect on images of the Delta and other surrounding waterways which have permeated my work and feel the influence of Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Weeks, Gile and Siegriest: the quick strokes, the immediacy of color. I am still doing pastels and oils, both studio and plein-air, and the two mediums continue to provide uniquely different ways of describing the landscape around me.

Although I did exhibit with a group of plein-air painters known as "The Outsiders" for several years, I have left that group and returned to my studio and am now part of a one man group called "The Insider". Much better.

Warren Dreher, California 2006

Here  Oil on Canvas  18x24  2002

Church, St. Helena   Oil on Canvas  18x24  1998

Nick on Smith Hill (work in progress)  19x25 Charcoal on Paper  2007



 
Copyright 2007 Warren Dreher. Reproduction is prohibited without the artist's consent.