Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Everett: Beyond All That Changes, the gallery’s fifth exhibition of landscape paintings by the California painter. The exhibition features Everett’s most recent series of paintings and continues through November 8th.

Bruce Everett is part of the Photorealism movement that emerged out of Pop in the early 1970s. While many of his compatriots focused on gritty urban scenes, Everett was painting microcosms, like a box of thumbtacks or a foil gum wrapper, but at the monumental scale of nine feet wide. Ivan Karp showed Everett’s work at OK Harris (New York) in the early 1970s. Everett’s large scale object paintings were not dissimilar from landscapes and when Everett moved West, he was immediately drawn to the wildly epic landscapes he was surrounded by. His early landscape work but based on photographs taken from the ultralight he flew over the hills of Southern California - capturing dramatic raking light over craggy creeks and ridges.

There is an austere seriousness, and a recognition of an essential, profound intelligence in our natural environment in these paintings. Roads appear frequently, but never as a conscious symbol or metaphor. They help to define the contours of the landscape, and also serve to make the viewer feel present, and see through the artist’s eyes. They also make a statement about the presence of humanity in an otherwise uninhabited scene.

What attracts Everett to a subject in the first place are the formal elements - the dynamics of the composition, the textures, the shapes, the subtlety of colors and the polarities and rhythms of light and dark. In a single painting, Everett often combines both loose, painterly brushwork and a studied precise handling, which directs the attention from the background to the foreground, and back again. “I don't want to contrive a landscape so much as discover it,” he writes of his work. Formal understandings aside, Everett’s paintings are intended to give the viewer a breath of the sublime - to transport us for a moment into that state of wonder and awe.

Bruce Everett (b. 1942) was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Midwest just north of Chicago. He received his Masters from the University of Iowa and his MFA in Painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He taught briefly at the University of Washington, Seattle and then became a Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge where he taught from 1970 until he retired in 2005. Everett’s career as a painter spans more than fifty years and includes numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Los Angeles and New York, as well as throughout California, Washington, Oregon, Connecticut, and Texas. He is also included in numerous books, exhibition catalogs, and publications on Photorealism and landscape painting and his paintings appear extensively in public, private, and corporate collections.  He lives and works in Templeton, California.