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

A Sense of Perspective

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, just after World War II, 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 and 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 on Smith Hill.  Sometime in my youth I received a gift of a box of chalk pastels and then, naturally, discovered the work of Edgar Degas, an ever present influence even today. Rooftops were my world so the other obvious influence on my paintings was Edward Hopper.  This continued when I attended graduate school at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. 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. At that time I was doing studio work of images gathered from photos and sketches and also plein-air work of Cape Cod and Providence. Most of my studios were on upper floors of tenement buildings 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.) 
 

In 1978 I decided to make the move to California.  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, where I worked at that time, 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 early 20th century American painting, except perhaps for some of the work from the "Ashcan" group in New York.

I was living in Concord and 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 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. At this time another 19th century painter, Claude Monet, became the newest influence on my work.

Somewhere between Monet, Degas, Hopper, Bischoff and the rest (and my own two eyes) was everything I would ever need to know about light.

Thousands of paintings and pastels later, I can reflect on images of the California Delta and other surrounding waterways which have permeated my work and feel the influence of all my heroes;  the quick strokes, the immediacy of color and above all, the description of light.  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.  

It's all a continuing and endless concern with time and light and space in which I view the paintings as journal entries, marking my days, my time, on the planet.

Although I did exhibit with a group of plein-air painters known as "The Outsiders" for a few 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.  About the same time I left the gallery scene behind and created this site, my virtual gallery.  Also much better. 

Warren Dreher, California 2009
 

"From Lower Summit, Mt. Diablo" Oil on Canvas  16x20  2009

 "Near Here" Oil on Canvas 18x24 2002 

"Looking West"  Pastel on Paper 19x25 1978 

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