M.J. Anderson, a sculptor with studios in Nehalem, Oregon, and Carrara, Italy, states that she carves “what it feels like to be human, to convey the unspoken emotions of our being here, to create an image of the intangible”.

Her work conveys a palpable experience of presence and perhaps the struggle of the spirit yearning for transcendence of the body. There is an archetypal quality to these works that is reminiscent of classical sculpture.

Her works vary from intimate, personal sculptures of the female torso, to a recently commissioned, life-size marble relief sculpture for the Church of the Resurrection in Solon, OH.

M.J. is an accomplished artist with an extensive history of exhibits, awards and commissions. She teaches sculpture workshops at Oregon Stone Sculptors Symposium, Northwest Stone Sculptors Summer Symposium, as well as at Haystack and Sitka workshops and Portland State University. She regularly travels to Italy to select marble and to rough out sculptures that are later completed at her coastal Oregon studio. She will be back from such a visit just prior to our November show.

Stephan Ferreira is a young Portland artist that exhibited in our community a little over a year ago at Indigo Gallery in his show entitled “Torsos”. His fresh perspective on the figure prompted us to invite him back to Hood River.

We were delighted to find that he had found new pathways of exploration of the figure in his oil paintings. Stephan states “I have been trying to depict the figure’s relationship to me, or merely how it feels in a space” …. “These paintings explore an idea of ‘distracted space’ and a way of communicating nothing extraordinary, but my tendency to focus quickly, gesturally and for short but multiple periods of time.”

Stephan introduces us to the human form as sentience. Anticipate being drawn into Stephan’s sense of the moment and “distracted space,” as his large canvases evoke the immediacy of the artist’s process with energetic compositions and a very contemporary color palette.

An oil painter, Todd Smith, moved to the Gorge after an art career that included evolutions as a car designer for Ford Motor Company, as professor of Industrial Design at Arizona State University, and as a freelance architectural illustrator.

At the Scottsdale Art School, Todd began to pursue his talents as a fine artist and was captivated by figure painting and portraiture. In this show, you will see Todd’s paintings focus on light and shadow as they play across the human form, evoking a soft sensuality.

Todd states: “This series of oil studies explores the effects of cast shadows falling on the human form. At times these shadows obscure the form much like military camouflage is intended to obscure the soldier’s form. At other times shadows accentuate and explain forms by wrapping around them. I also find interest in what shadows say about the environment surrounding the figure: how far away the object casting shadows is, what angle the shadows are in relation to the body, what might be in the environment reflecting light into the shadows”