Contact The Artist

www.bruceeverett.net

1325 Bumblebee Lane
Templeton, CA  93465
805-434-9833
cfineart@pacbell.net

Commission Details
Commissions are negotiable.  E-mail for details.
My studio is available for client visits by appointment.

Bruce Everett’s landscapes in oil are characterized by bold and often dark compositional forms, dramatic effects of light, and a sense of solitude.  The combination of both smooth and expressive brushwork within a single painting creates a visual intensity and truthfulness to the subject.  In larger works of up to 8 x 11 feet, viewers often feel their presence within the scene.  Many of his studio paintings are done from photos he has taken while flying his ultralight airplane, giving the scenes an unusual viewpoint (see "Santa Clara River" and "The Hills of Creston" below).  In addition to his larger more technically involved studio pieces, Everett often does smaller more immediate plein air paintings to study and capture the transitory effects of light and weather, and to experience a location more directly.

A Brief History:

Bruce was born in Los Angeles but raised in the Midwest just north of Chicago.  Although showing artistic ability at an early age, he didn’t really start painting until college, after which he entered graduate school at the University of Iowa as an abstract expressionist.  While believing in and enjoying abstraction, he was soon drawn to the visual world around him:  the spare Iowa landscape, interiors of his residence and the figure.  By the time he earned his M.A. in 1967, he had become a pretty solid (self-taught) realist.  He was then accepted into the M.F.A. program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and graduated in 1968.  Since most of his chosen subject matter at this juncture was transitory and/or magnified, he began taking photos as references for his large oil paintings.  Coincidentally about this time Photo Realism was becoming a viable, though controversial movement.  He was hired to teach for a year at the University of Washington in Seattle.  He then moved to the Los Angeles area to begin teaching at California State University at Northridge in 1970 (retired in 2005).

He had his first serious one-man show in New York in 1972 at the OK Harris Gallery.  The six photo-real oil paintings he showed were large (6 feet), magnified, precise renderings of single ordinary objects, such as a foil gum wrapper, a glass doorknob, a chrome towel bar…  Although the show produced a demand for more of the same, he was increasingly drawn to the natural world, and by the late 1970s he had become a landscape painter.  In the early 1980s he introduced the more sensual and emotional element of painterly brushwork, which he had first enjoyed as an abstract painter, into his photo referenced landscapes.  Eventually he also taught himself, through observation of nature and the study of past masters of plein air painting, to paint on location.