Alex
Dzigurski

For twenty-seven consecutive years I have carried my paintbox into the Eastern Sierra — to the alkali flats south of Bishop, to the aspen groves along Bishop Creek, to the long granite wall of the Sierra crest in every season the light will allow. Roughly one hundred and eighty days a year I work on location, in oils, on small panels and mid-format canvases, building each composition from direct observation. Nothing is invented in the studio from a photograph.

The larger canvases return with me to a fourteen-hundred-square-foot converted barn in Bishop, where the on-site study is resolved over forty to eighty additional hours. The intent is not to copy a place but to render the temperature of a particular hour — the way the air thins over granite in November, the green that climbs the north face of Mount Tom at first light, the color a storm leaves in the sage for the ten minutes after it passes.

I was trained in this lineage. I apprenticed to Jean LeGassick in the Owens Valley in 1991, then studied under Dan McCleary and Paul Marcus at the University of Southern California. My father painted these mountains before I did. The work you are looking at is the continuation of a very specific, very old California discipline — and it is made at the speed of looking.

— A. Dzigurski, Bishop, California