Weathering the Landscape

Gualala Arts Center proudly presents “Weathering the Landscape,” an exhibition by Ellen Levine Dodd and Karen Olsen-Dunn, opening on Friday, May 9, from 4-6 pm. This thought-provoking exhibit runs through June 8, explores the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world through the medium of painting and printmaking. The artists, using a blend of vibrant colors, textures, and abstract forms, delve into the impact of human activities on the natural weathering processes that shape our environment. Their work reflects on the accelerated cycle of erosion and destruction due to human intervention, and invites viewers to consider the delicate balance between nature’s beauty and its vulnerability. Levine Dodd and Olsen-Dunn’s complementary styles come together to create a conversation on canvas, addressing the urgent environmental issues facing Northern California’s coastlines, fields, and forests. The exhibition is a visual journey and a poignant commentary on our collective responsibility to preserve it for future generations.

“The natural weathering of the landscape is the breakdown of rocks, soil and minerals by the effects of heat, water, ice or other agents. Although this is a normal organic process, human activity is speeding up the cycle, escalating the destructive and erosive results. This exhibit seeks to visually portray the effect on this balance of nature vs. humans.
Karen and Ellen create art that depicts the modern landscape of Northern California’s coastlines, fields and forests using mixed media in both painting and printmaking. They each work in a visually unique but complementary style that contributes to this colorful conversation that thoroughly explores and examines the balance of our relationship with the land.
Using the visual language of color, texture and abstraction the artists express and share their concerns for the current and future effects of how nature and human coexist within our rapidly evolving and crumbling coastline, as well as how climate changes will affect our ability to weather the balance between humans and the natural landscape.
Ellen and Karen are set to display of modern landscape paintings and prints that are a passionate visual display of nature’s beauty, while still philosophically responding to the discussion of environmental concerns.” Ellen Levine Dodd and Karen Oleson Dunn

About Ellen Levine Dodd

Ellen Levine Dodd grew up in a small New England beach town near Boston, Massachusetts. She has been doing artwork all her life. Starting with art lessons after school to university degrees in painting, photography, and paper making, she has had an eclectic and wide-ranging education in art, studying with many well known painters, photographers, and digital printers. Her extensive travel throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East has strongly influenced her art. Ellen has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since the 1970’s, after moving from New Mexico, where she lived after leaving art school in New England. Ellen developed, directed and curated Bradford Gallery, located in San Anselmo California, that specialized in representing and showing landscape and plein-air artists. As an independent curator she curated “Color Play 1”, “Color Play 2”, and “The Modern Landscape” at the Danville Village Theatre Art Gallery.
Currently Ellen works full time as a professional painter, photographer and printer in her studio in downtown Novato, California. She has worked in the mediums of leather, paper making, wood work, photography, printmaking, drawing and painting. Her work is boldly colored and richly textured, with multiple layers, scratched, sanded, carved into and drawn onto. Her vision is emotional, expressionistic, and positive; with brightly colored gestural brushwork, a strong sense of story and symbolism, and a passionate reference to the preservation of the landscape

About Karen Olsen-Dunn 

“Broken Imagery, a high-key palette, and lines swiped across painting panels or prints symbolize the effects of climate change that erode the landscape, warm our waters and cause catastrophic weather events. The unrealistic colors in my work appear as a new form of beauty but foreshadow an ominous future.” Karen Olsen-Dunn has a formal education in psychology, painting/drawing, and digital media with post graduate course work in printmaking. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007 and BA in Psychology from San Francisco State 1988. She has shown her work in numerous exhibitions and art fairs locally and nationally. Five of her works were purchased for the Sutter Pacific Hospital collection in San Francisco, her painting “Mendo Fences” was included in the de Young Museum Open 2023 and her Work “Erosion 5″ was selected for the cover and publicity collateral for SF Artspan 2023 Open Studios. Her professional career in the software industry developing instructional media products has influenced her process and works to her advantage in developing her layered works. She is able to refine her paintings, prints, and installations, by adding intricate patterns of organic and inorganic forms. Layers of acrylic paint collaged with archival photographic transfers are applied directly to birch panels building up multiple layers to create the final work that leaves the viewer wondering what is painted and what is digital