Bruce Everett: Pathways and Creekbeds

Bruce Everett's landscape paintings of Southern California and the Central Coast are characterized by dramatic light with raking shadows, unusual vantage points, and inspired compositions.  Everett’s reasons for painting the landscape are first and foremost out of a deep emotional need to paint what moves him. Seeing a powerful scene isn't enough - he needs to paint it to really grasp it, and in a way to be done with it. But what attracts him to a subject in the first place are the formal elements---the dynamics of the composition, the textures, the shapes, the subtlety of colors and the polarities and rhythms of light and dark. It all adds up to being "of the place"---a connection that can't be explained except by painting it. It is important to him to accurately represent what he experiences. “I don't want to contrive a landscape so much as discover it,” he writes of his work.