July 31, 2007

The Columbia Art Gallery announces its August show, “East of the Cascades,” featuring three landscape artists from Eastern Oregon: David Jensen, Catherine J. Lee and Cheryl Williams-Cosner.

The public is invited to the artists’ reception on Friday, Aug. 3, from 6-8 p.m. There will be an Art Talk with slides and discussion presented in the theater beginning with Catherine J. Lee at 7 p.m. and followed by Cheryl Williams-Cosner at 7:30. The show continues through Sept. 3.

While each artist works in three very different mediums (photography, oil painting and pastels), all three stunningly capture the unique beauty of the Eastern Oregon and Washington landscape.

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David Jensen is a photographer based for nearly 30 years in Enterprise, Ore., at the foot of the Wallowa Mountains. Considered one of Eastern Oregon’s most persistent, prolific and widely published landscape photographers, he has also been profiled by Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Oregon Art Beat.”

“I suppose all landscapes have a story to tell, but too often they don’t tell it very well from a camera’s point of view,” Jensen says in a press release. “The camera needs good light that models the land’s features to give a sense of depth. Those features need to be arranged so that the third dimension is unmistakable (for example, objects known to be of similar size that appear bigger near the camera and smaller farther away).

“Finally, for there to be a story, there has to be the fourth dimension of time, i.e., the elements in the composition have to make it obvious how the landscape came to be or at least prompt the viewer to wonder how the land got that way or where it might be going.”

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So compelling was the haunting beauty of Condon, Ore., that Catherine J. Lee relocated to the small Eastern Oregon town two years ago from Sacramento, Calif.

“Long before I moved to rural Eastern Oregon, I was already painting imaginary landscapes of vast wheat fields,” she says in the press release. “But on my very first visit to the Condon area, I was stunned by how much the landscape resonated with me and immediately knew this was the landscape I was meant to paint. I love going down remote gravel roads to just listen to the endless silence and feel the “quietness” of the land.

“My paintings portray rolling hills of wheat, shadowy canyons in late afternoon light and dramatic cloud-filled skies, all elements that convey the feel of the area even more than the look of the land.”

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Cheryl Williams-Cosner, from Weston, Ore., is regularly inspired by her work as a rancher and portrays her love of the land through her pastel paintings.

“The inspirational source of my work is light and shadow, the drama created when the two collide on a hill or the surface of a barn or against a sky,” she says in the press release. “The eastern landscape is the theater in which this magic happens.”

Cheryl’s pastels make vivid use of the brilliant cobalt blues, rich ochre and deep violets found in the unrefined beauty of Eastern Oregon and Washington.

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This show is made possible by the generous contributions of the Center’s sponsors for the quarter, Jean Harmon and Paul Randall.