Field Notes

The Owings Gallery is pleased to present Field Notes, an exhibition of wildlife paintings drawn from the gallery’s collection, on view this spring at 100 East Palace Avenue. Bringing together artists who share a sustained engagement with the landscapes and animals of the American West, the exhibition reflects a longstanding tradition of close observation and deep familiarity with the natural world.

At the center of the exhibition is a historic work by Albert Bierstadt, one of the preeminent American Western landscape painters, and a print by Frank Weston Benson, alongside prints by Carl Rungius and two major paintings by the contemporary Utah wildlife artist Dave Wade, whose work was shaped by decades spent studying and painting the wildlife of the Rocky Mountain West. Wade’s paintings are presented alongside works by other contemporary artists including Tony Abeyta, Michael Coleman, and Dan Ostermiller. Spanning more than a century of American art, the exhibition traces a lineage of artists who approached wildlife not simply as subject matter, but as the result of time spent in the field observing animals within their native landscapes.

Field Notes alludes to the sketchbooks and notebooks artists and naturalists carried with them outdoors, the first record of what they saw before a work in paint or print began. The same spirit of patient attention and direct experience with the natural world unites the artists represented in this exhibition.

The exhibition opens on Friday, March 20th and runs through May 1st, marking the gallery’s opening exhibition of the season.