The natural world serves as inspiration for Dion Zwirner's large-scale oil and mixed media works on paper. Highly abstracted, evocative studies of water, earth, sky and plant forms appear alternately ethereal and grounded. Zwirner works in a range of mediums: gouache, graphite, watercolor, acrylic and oil.
Her intimate pieces are rich in color and marked with paint's fluid quality, accentuating her playful engagement with wet mediums. Larger works in oil capture the artist's interest in gesture and evoke collections of remembered landscapes. The scale of these pieces carries a marked physicality; drips and pools of paint respond to gravity and reconnect the painting to the land.
Zwirner began her career in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Originally from Seattle she returned to the Pacific Northwest over 20 years ago. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including exhibitions in the United States, China, England and Italy. Notable awards and grants include the Ragdale Foundation Residency, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the Mesa Art Center Purchase Award. Her work is included in private and public collections - the Museum of Northwest Art Permanent Collection, the Tacoma Art Museum Permanent Northwest Collection, the Bainbridge Museum of Art and numerous others nationally.
Shigeki Tomura was born in 1951 in Hachinohe, Japan. He participated in the Kokuga Association exhibitions 1973-1975. He is devoted to printmaking, drypoint and etching, in particular. Although Tomura makes beautiful drawings and watercolors, the line quality possible with the intaglio processes provides him the perfect means of expression. His fine cupping contour lines define fragile leaf forms and shadow patterns against walls. The attention to each bare branch, blade of grass or bough delicately defines his love of these landscape details. The creamy chine colle sheet contains his natural world.
Tomura has won numerous prizes beginning in 1985 when one of them led to an exhibition at The Tetsugoro Memorial Museum. His modest scale prints earned him awards at Small Graphic Forms in Lodz, Poland and the Grand Prix at the 2nd Bratislava Ex Libris Triennial in 1998.
The artist continues to exhibit his drawings, watercolors, and intaglio works internationally in Russia, the UK, Germany and the United States. This current selection is drawn from more than three decades of the artist's work.
**Please note, if you purchase Tomura's work online, we will arrange shipment after the show ends on March 30th.
