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New landscape paintings by Phil Gross February 6-March 2, 2015 Gala Opening: 7-9pm, Friday, February 13, 2015 Phil Gross presents a show of new works at the Artery opening February 2, 2015. The show titled, ‘North 38° Latitude’ refers to a topographic slice across the northern California landscape to include works covering the north SF bay area, Sacramento valley and high Sierra mountains. Many will recognize the bright deeply saturated warm colored landscapes of the Sacramento valley from aerial and ground perspective, a theme he continues to revisit. North 38° Latitude also presents the granite terrains of the Sierra Nevada with a cooler palette based more in the cerulean blues of the high altitudes. As a former geologist who loved scientifically studying the Sierra’s, in recent years Gross has turned that passion of the high country into art...creating works at first as a ‘Yosemite artist in Residency 2010’ and continuing since then. As he explains, “At first painting the Sierra was very difficult …I had a farm valley palette that didn’t work and anyway, how do you paint a huge mountain of white? John Singer Sargent answered that one for me with his exquisite watercolors of the Italian marble quarries. And then of course both Thiebuad and Kondos have created their own wonderful mountain worlds. At this point, I have come to love painting that white granite, knowing and incorporating how a rock weathers, the exfoliating fracture systems, the glacial erratics, the high mountain cirques, roche moutonees, all come into play.” Finally, a native of San Francisco, Gross continues honing his landscape painting skills amongst the vertical San Francisco city streets and rolling northern California coastline, thus completing this sampler across the latitude north 38 degrees. Ole
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| Published: 6/9/11 | | 
Morning Light, 22x28 Oil on Canvas 2011 | After a bit of a hiatus I am planning a new series of aerial paintings coveing scenes along the Sacramento River and Yolo county region. I am fortunate to have a couple of friends who are deeply in love with flying. Greg Lentz is retired from a career as a commercial pilot, but that has not stopped him from recreational flying almost everyday. He has always been game to take me up for a photo shoot when the winds die down and the agricultural fields are in thier full panoply of colors. We are usually taking off as the sun is either about to come up or not far from going down.
Rob Johnson flew jet fighters in Vietnam. These days he is a man on a gentler mission, growing hops in Montana and flying his 1950s Bonanza whenever he can. We have traced the Sacramento River from the Delta up to Red Bluff together. | | Thanks to the digital camera age, i may shoot 300-400 images during a single two hour flight. What catches my eye? I am looking for long shadows, a mixture of geometry and color in the ag-fields, the way the river and roads cut through the country-side, the glass like reflections on bodies of water and a sense of fertility, abundance and grandiose.
Then I get back in my studio and change it all around till it works...I hope. | .jpg)
Six Cypress, 30x40 Oil on Canvas, 2011 |
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