Mountains and Waters Without End, an exhibit celebrating western landscape, opens Friday, April 8th at Carl Cherry Center for the Arts. Comprised of approximately 20 paintings, the exhibit will include recent work by Margaret Rinkovsky and Jan Wagstaff. A reception for the artists will be held Friday, April 8th from 5 to 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Organized to explore various time periods, styles, and themes in landscape painting, Mountains and Rivers Without End investigates the relationship between abstraction and landscape painting, the effects of photography on landscapes and the examination of the materiality in painting. The exhibit brings together two artists who have been working with landscape and may lack conventional aesthetic hooks of expression, narrative, and beauty. However, these paintings are powerful aesthetic statements that reflect the complex and ambiguous relationship between humans and the environment—a relationship of particular importance here in the West.
The exhibit can be seen Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 4 p.m. through May 14, 2022.
Pictured: “Along the River” – Jan Wagstaff
Meet the Artists:
Margaret Rinkovsky
Margaret Rinkovsky is a painter currently living in Santa Cruz, California. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from UCLA. She also holds a Masters of Arts degree in Printmaking and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting, also from UCLA. Ms. Rinkovsky is the recipient of the prestigious SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was a nominee to the American Academy of Arts in New York, and received the Distinguished Artist Award from the Santa Cruz Art League.
Margaret Rinkovsky’s paintings and drawings are referential to landscapes. For this artist nature serves as the stimulus for her oeuvre, not as a literal reflection but as a private and personal interpretive experience. Her work seems to synthesize the “material and spiritual” in nature—where meaning resides in and is communicated by the formal visual elements of painting.” George W. Neubert, Associate Director, SFMMA
Jan Wagstaff
Over the past four decades Jan Wagstaff’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries world-wide and acquired for private and public collections around the globe. Her artwork has garnered extensive reviews, and she has been awarded numerous Artist-in-Residence opportunities, grants, fellowships and prizes. Wagstaff’s imagery derives primarily from nature, which she renders in oil on canvas. She is especially drawn to marshland grasses, aspen canopies, birds in flight, waterways and reflections. Says Jan, “As I observe the natural world, I am ever conscious of how I am experiencing it – how all of my senses play a part in my perception. My work is about seasons, sounds, texture, movement and shapes. It is about blending colors, subtleties of light and dark, and things near and far. About seeing and celebrating the ordinary such that it becomes extraordinary. My paintings are visual entertainment but even more, I hope they encourage viewers to recall places that hold special meaning to them.”
