Warren Dreher is a Bay Area landscape painter whose early East Coast work evokes twentieth century American urban realism and, after a relocation to California, concentrates on the Bay Area landscape, noting throughout his work the enormous changes being wrought to this beautiful area.
“Each painting becomes a historical painting because you come back a month later and it has either changed or is gone, the landscape is constantly being altered through development as well as natural influences, like drought and wildfires. I began painting the human made structures, within the natural landscape, not as statement but as observation. My work is about time and space and where I happened to be at that moment.”
At this point in time Dreher has spent forty-four years on the West Coast and the paintings continue. He was born in Rhode Island and moved to the West Coast in 1978.
In the 1960's he began a series of architectural and landscape paintings in both pastels and oil which continue to this day. Often compared to Edward Hopper, his paintings convey quiet moments of captured light. Dreher calls them journal entries. His current works explore the unique light qualities of Northern California, in particular Contra Costa, Solano, the coastal communities and his ongoing paintings of the Central Valley and the Delta. He is currently working on a series of paintings of Southern California.
His work has been included in numerous gallery exhibitions including New York, San Francisco, Laguna Beach, the East Bay and Los Angeles. Museum exhibitions include the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California, and St. Mary’s College Museum of Art in Moraga, California.
In the early nineties he curated exhibits of contemporary and historical paintings at the Bedford Gallery in the Regional Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, California and the Lynn House Gallery in Antioch, California. Among these were: The Outdoor Studio, Vanishing Point, Along the River, East Bay Bronze, and Diablo from the Delta.
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