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

A Sense of Perspective

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 tenements 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. I was fortunate in High School to have had an inspirational art teacher who pushed my drawing skills.  Sometime in my youth I received a gift of a box of Rembrandt 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.

 

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; paintings as journal entries, marking my days, my time, on the planet.

Warren Dreher, California 

Warren Dreher in his Crockett, California Studio. Photo Credit: Jamie Valladao.

"Iowa Skies"  Pastel on Paper 19x25  2026

"Sunrise Farm" Pastel on Paper 19x25 2025

"Iowa Farm" Pastel on Paper 19x25 2025

"Early Snow, Montana" Oil on Canvas 2025

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