FROM FURNITURE TO PAINTINGS AT THE ROGUE GALLERY & ART CENTER

Opening Reception: Friday, December 3, 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Exhibit Dates: December 3 – December 24, 2010

(Medford, OR) – November 10, 2010 – It’s all about the expression of form and space when it comes to the artwork featured in the Rogue Gallery & Art Center’s newest exhibition. On display will be fine art furniture and vessels by Siskiyou Woodcraft Guild members Don DeDobbeleer, Julian Hamer, Dan Tilden, and Alec Williamson, along with the abstract expressionist paintings by Medford artist Arthur Roskofsky. “Elegant Forms/Expressionistic Space” opens December 3, 2010 at the Rogue Gallery & Art Center with a free celebratory Opening Reception from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Guests will also have the opportunity to shop the “Spirit in Hand” Holiday Art Boutique, featuring one-of-a-kind hand-made craft items, such as ceramics, wood, glass, wearables, jewelry, and book arts, which continues through Christmas Eve.

Roskofsky’s oil paintings, with their vibrant curvilinear shapes set amidst airy backgrounds, echo the wood inlays, fine edges, and elegant forms of the handcrafted furniture and vessels. This visual interplay highlights the dynamic relationships between three-dimensional forms and two-dimensional space.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

DON DeDOBBELEER

As a High School woodshop student, Don DeDobbeleer developed a love for the endless variety of figure, texture, and grain variations found in fine hardwoods. Learning to bring together the natural beauty of woods and fine design has been a lifelong passion for him. After 25 years spent as a firefighter for the city of San Jose, he apprenticed with a Guild Master for a full year. He was already an accomplished furniture maker, but was lacking design skills. “I never realized design was a learned science, not just a gifted eye. Typically, I spend nearly a third of the time for a given project on design considerations, full scale drawings and wood selection.” He has won Best of Show in Portland for his Demi-lune table, and received various awards and accolades at the American Craft Association in San Francisco, Best of the West Show in Portland, and the Ceramics Showcase/Fine Arts Show in Portland. He has been the featured artist in Wood Worker West Magazine, and is also featured in Todays Leading Woodworkers, a book by Tina Shinner. His work has been shown for almost thirty years at Gallery M in Half Moon Bay, California.

JULIAN HAMER

Julian Hamer is a lifelong furniture designer trained in both England and Austria. Beginning in 1968 in the rural Tyrolean Alps, he had the opportunity to learn from old world artisans who taught him the unwritten code according to which beautiful houses are built with pride to endure through centuries. Hamer then returned to England to study with shipwrights during the restoration of a three masted schooner. He studied sculpture at Emerson College in England, and afterwards went on to a sister college in New Zealand where he learned to teach fine art including clay modeling and woodwork.

For five years he worked as a theater properties artisan at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Of this experience he says, “Generally when we usually think of stage props we imagine fake and flimsy items that only have to last through a couple of shows. This is not the case at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where the season lasts for nine months with eleven shows in repertory. The furniture we made in the prop shop had to be even better constructed than usual and stronger so that it could be moved about and stored after each show. The versatility I developed while working with theater and with theater designers was phenomenal. I probably made fifty different styles of chairs and settees as well as ornate beds, tables and elaborate chandeliers. As a regular woodworker I would never have had all that technical exposure and the enormous variety and range of projects to work on.”

DAN TILDEN
Dan Tilden is known for his native wood turned vases. Artist’s biographical information not available at this time.

 

 

 

 

ALEC WILLIAMSON

“I began woodworking on a dare from my bride. We needed a coffee table and I bragged that I could make one better than that which we could buy in a store and for less money. She challenged me to do so. What I made was a real piece of junk, but I had fun and continued woodworking. That was 40 years ago.” Born and raised in Hawaii, Williamson’s work has been influenced by Pacific and Asian styles and designs. He utilizes traditional woodworking techniques and joinery in all his pieces and strives to achieve a simple grace and elegance of design that praises the incomparable beauty of nature’s woods. Each piece has a warmth and character which compliments today’s lifestyle and will become tomorrow’s heirloom. Each is handmade and is therefore unique and will last for lifetimes to come

ARTHUR ROSKOFSKY

Arthur Roskofsky studied with John Ferren at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York from 1948-1952. “My work is inevitably disposed to those Abstract Expressionist years in New York,” he says, “but oriental art which was much discussed then, remains an important part of my approach today.” Other interests, as in children’s art and the psychology of form and space as characterized by graphology, have become instrumental to his perceptions of space. “My intention is to render space as volume, as the forms of space. It is inherent in virtually any contained space. An example includes the apparent binocularization of an object when peering through a tunneled fist.” Roskofsky served as a member of the art selection committee for the Oregon Arts Commission from 1996-1997. His work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions from New York to California to Oregon beginning in 1950.

Mark your calendars for another festive Rogue Gallery & Art Center (RGAC) Opening Reception—Friday, December 3 from 5:00 to 7:00pm. Elegant Forms/Expressionistic Space continues through December 24, 2010. For more information, contact RGAC at 541-772-8118 or visit www.roguegallery.org.

The Rogue Gallery & Art Center is the Rogue Valley’s premier non-profit community art center, founded in 1960 to promote and support the arts in the Rogue Valley. The Gallery offers local artists an opportunity to display their work, and because of its non-profit status can display a wide range of artistic styles and mediums not seen in commercial galleries. Aspiring artists, both children and adults, take classes from local artists and are exposed to a wide variety of artistic mediums. RGAC is located in Medford at 40 South Bartlett Street. The hours of operation are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.