"Painting on the Outside"
Submitted by Carson Now Reader on Sun, 01/29/2017 - 12:54pm
Event Date:
February 7, 2017 (All day) On Tuesday, February 7, the Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] will present a talk by artist Phyllis Shafer. Her illustrated talk, "Painting on the Outside", is part of CCAI’s ongoing Nevada Neighbors series and will take place at 7pm at the Community Development building [the Brick], 108 E Proctor St, Carson City. There will be an informal reception for Shafer preceding the event at 6pm. The presentation and reception are free, and the public is cordially invited.
Artist Phyllis Shafer lives and works in the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin region. Although Shafer’s formative years as an artist were spent in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, over the past two decades she has worked primarily in the American West to develop a style of landscape painting that is uniquely her own.
Nature, in its various manifestations, has always provided the raw material for Shafer’s artistic investigations. Over the years she has explored a variety of styles and media - always with the natural environment as the focal point. She commented, “As I have matured personally, my artistic sensibilities have similarly matured and evolved into an ever-deepening realization of my own private vision.”
Shafer paints outside directly from the natural environment. This allows her to study her subjects in their rawest incarnation and to better perceive and record the particular idiosyncrasies and beauty of the natural form. As a plein air landscape painter, she searches for compositional arrangements that lend themselves to narrative possibilities. She is especially interested in the pantheistic quality of high altitude vistas juxtaposed to the intimate microcosm of the flora and fauna.
Shafer completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, in 1980. From 1981 to 1985 Shafer lived and worked as an artist in New York’s East Village before moving to the West Coast. She completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988.
Shafer moved to the small, northern California coastal community of Bolinas in 1991 and became active in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community. She worked as an adjunct instructor at Academy of Art College (now University), San Francisco; San Francisco State University; and Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill; before accepting a position as full-time instructor at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe in 1994. She is currently Department Co-Chair and Gallery Director at Lake Tahoe Community College and is represented by Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada.
In February 2014, the Nevada Museum of Art staged a mid-career retrospective of Shafer’s work titled, “I Only Went out for a Walk…” That exhibition, which featured approximately 100 paintings, ranged from work produced in the 1980s to the present. NMA published a book on her art titled Phyllis Shafer. In October 2016, Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada, presented Nature Divine, a solo exhibition of Shafer’s paintings and prints. See more of her art online at www.phyllisshafer.com/
As part of her Nevada Neighbors activities, Shafer will give her talk to art students and faculty at Douglas High School and at Sierra Nevada College. She spoke to art students at Carson High School in early December.
The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community planning and building for the area's diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online projects.
The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] is funded in part the Nevada Arts Council and National Endowment for the Arts, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, City of Carson City, Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation, U.S. Bank Foundation, and John and Grace Nauman Foundation.
For additional information, please visit CCAI’s website at arts-initiative.org.
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