Now Showing: The Paintings of Don Shields

As part of the Vargas Gallery, the Mission College Art Department presents "The Paintings of Don Shields."

See the virtual gallery here.

An opening reception will take place on February 9 from 3 to 4 p.m.

From the Artist:

I grew up in Texas. As a young art student, I spent a good deal of time in Italy studying the masters, especially the Venetian painters like Titian and Carapaccio whose wonderful use of color and abstract form are still with me today. I drove tractor trailers coast to coast for several years and financed a six-month stay in Venice by hauling oil field equipment from Houston to Canada and Alaska on the old AlCan gravel highway. Those landscapes of the open road have greatly impacted my painting.  The light in Northern California is very close to the quality of light I experienced living in Italy.
 
Following graduate school, I was fortunate to receive a Rome Prize in painting. It allowed a year-long stay in Rome at the American Academy. Then a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, awarded by jurors Dore Ashton, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Hughes, and Robert Motherwell, enabled me to work in New York for several years. I painted large, imaginary landscapes inhabited with figures, creatures, and exotic vegetation, saturated with strong color, like "Pig Turtle Swamp Stomp" and "Fat Boy in Lederhosen."
 
When I begin a painting, I never have a clear idea of what I'm going to paint. There is always a bit of a surprise of the resulting forms in the paintings. There is an interaction of the parts of a painting and the color as the work develops over time. The issue of an unexpected composition and light within the painting is something I seek as I'm working. A sense of abstract means at work in the painting is quite important. An area could be a pig or a dog, but it is also made up of pieces of paint.