Art show celebrates treasured West County painters with deep local roots.
Sonoma County landscapes, filtered through the minds of four West County artists, will be on display in Occidental for the next two months, when the Occidental Center for the Arts hosts an exhibit featuring the art of four “old friends and painters”—Tony King, Jack Stuppin, Bill Wheeler and Adam Wolpert—from Nov. 9 through Jan. 5.
The show will kick off with an artist’s reception on Saturday, Nov. 9, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the OCA gallery, located at 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. in Occidental.
All four artists live within a few miles of the OCA and although they have different styles and approaches to painting outdoors, they all share a deep love and respect for Sonoma County and for a practice that has engaged many years of their lives.
“We not only see paintings: it’s a relationship with place,” Wolpert said. “We all have a love for this place. It’s hard to live here without painting landscapes.”
Adam Wolpert
Wolpert co-founded the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in 1994, where he still lives and works. He studied in Florence, Italy and holds a Master of Fine Arts from UC San Diego. He has had major gallery representation since 1988, including many solo exhibitions and group shows. His last local exhibitions were at the Sonoma County Museum of Art and Quicksilver Mine Co.
Tony King
“We’ve been to a lot of places,” King said. “But what we do is go out into nature and have a conversation.”
After studying at Stanford in the 1960s, King moved to New York to begin his career as an abstract painter, but by 1982 landscapes had become a major theme in his work. He returned to California in 1992, moving to the hills around Freestone. His work has been exhibited by major museums and collections.
Jack Stuppin
Stuppin has been a professional artist for more than 25 years and as a child of the Depression, addressed it like a job, painting 10 to 20 hours a week. His landscapes tend to be abstractions, because he attempts to set his work apart from other artists.
“It’s hard to do landscapes in a way that
hasn’t been done be-fore,” he said.
Born in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1933, Stuppin is a graduate of Columbia College, N.Y. and studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited nationally in many solo and group shows and his paintings are held in many public collections around the country.
Bill Wheeler
Wheeler is a celebrated painter who has lived, painted and exhibited in the Bay Area for decades. He studied at Yale University and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also holds a major place in local lore as the owner of the infamous Wheeler Ranch, which was one of a number of Sonoma County experiments in communal living in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Historic Event
Although the artists have displayed their work in many venues, either alone or together in groups of two or three, this will be the first time the group, known as “The Sonoma Four,” have been together in one venue.
“All of us have had shows in
reasonably respectable galleries,” Stuppin said.
The Sonoma Four originally included King, Stuppin, Wheeler and William Morehouse, who died in 1993 —incidentally, the year Wolpert moved to Occidental, and who, for all intents and purposes, would have been a member of “The Sonoma Five.”
A professor of art at Sonoma State University for more than a quarter-century, Morehouse was a major artist with a long and illustrious career in the pantheon of 20th century greats.
In 1947, at the age of 18, he entered the California School of Fine Arts (now the California Fine Arts Institute) and took up landscape in the 1980s, becoming an anchor member of The Sonoma Four, who practiced “open air” painting together beginning in 1987.
Stuppin joined in because “Wheeler badgered me into painting this landscape and Morehouse was painting with anybody who was interested,” Stuppin said.
By 1990, they had produced a significant body of work and even took the show on the road at one time.
“We once did a cross-country trip,” Wheeler said. “Packed up a van and took a month-long trip. We spent eight hours a day driving, eight hours painting and eight hours arguing about where we were going to eat.”
Although these days they are not painting together as much as they used to—business is keeping Stuppin from painting— King, Wheeler and Wolpert are still active participants in the OCA.
Wolpert is on the OCA advisory committee, which is how this show came together, and he also served on the Board of Directors of the OCA with Doris Murphy when the OCA was little more than a dream.
“Doris Murphy envisioned the entire thing,” Wheeler said. “She told me: ‘Bill, when we get this thing built, we want you to have paintings here.’”
Murphy lived to be 101 years old—dying in 2011, the year after the OCA opened—and was a local supporter of the arts. Around 1995, when she was 85, she and the late Kit Neustadter, founder and director of the Redwood Arts Council, decided that Occidental needed a good venue for performers. In 1998, they created the non-profit and the project began in earnest.
Through the auspices of hard-working volunteers and community donations and support, the OCA opened its doors in April 2010, about 15 years after its initial inception.
“The OCA is community supported and almost 100 percent volunteer,” Board Member Leeann Lidz said. “We always need support of any kind—we have memberships that support us and we always need volunteers—but just coming out and seeing the performances and art helps.”
According to Lidz, the OCA does about six shows a year for two months each, with three to four open to the public. Local artists from Cloverdale to Petaluma to the coast participate in the shows, with a lot of artists coming from the Sebastopol-Occidental area, such as the Pointless Sisters, a local quilting group that “doesn’t follow the rules.”
“I feel so lucky to live in a community with this resource,” Lidz said. “It’s a phenomenal place.”
The OCA has a “wish list”: they want to build a lobby, but they also need resources to support classrooms and education programs.
So the public is invited to trek to Occidental and have a glass of wine with the artists on Saturday, Nov. 9, to enjoy the work of The Sonoma Four in the heart of the landscapes they love. The show is called “Paintings: Works of Tony King, Jack Stuppin, Bill Wheeler and Adam Wolpert.”
For more information, call 874-9392 or go to www.occidentalcenterfor-thearts.org.
