ERIK SANDGREN
Erik Sandgren - Land and Sea
April, 2018
Press: NORTHWEST LANDSCAPES BY ERIK SANDGREN FILL THE WALLS AT THE KARIN CLARKE GALLERY by Randi Bjornstad
KLCC Interview
Karin Clarke Gallery 760 Willamette St. Eugene, OR. 97401 541.684.7963 kclarkegallery@mindspring.com
Erik Sandgren is a practicing and widely exhibiting artist as well as professor of Fine Arts and Humanities courses at Grays Harbor College. He has been the primary visual art faculty there since 1989: tenured since 1992.
His educational background is a BFA from Yale College (1975) and an MFA in painting and Printmaking from Cornell University (1977). His father was a professor of painting at Oregon State University: He grew up in a household saturated with visual art and visiting artists. His father’s most influential teacher at the University of Oregon had been David McCosh who had studied with the American Regionalist painter Grant Wood. This represents one of the two main strands of his background and education as a painter. The other complementary strand has been my ongoing connection with a milieu of east coast painters initiated during his undergraduate studies at Yale College with Bernard Chaet. Irwin Hauer, and Gretna Campbell.
He was awarded a Fulbright Teaching Exchange posting to England and have received two sabbatical leaves from GHC for European travel to paint and extend my background in the history of art and architecture. He has twice been artist in residence with the Alfred and Trafford Klots Program in Rochefort-en-Terre, Brittany administered by the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is a member of Print Arts Northwest, and has served six years as a board member of the Washington State Technical and Community College Humanities Association.
Past work, available by request.
To greet the spring, Karin Clarke Gallery is pleased to welcome noted Northwest artist Erik Sandgren for a large exhibit of his landscape paintings.
Erik Sandgren was born in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1952, the son of prominent painter and OSU teacher Nelson Sandgren. Erik studied painting and printmaking at Yale (BA.1975) and Cornell (MFA, 1977). In 1989, he moved to Washington to serve as a one-man art department at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen.
This year, Erik relocated to Portland, Oregon. To celebrate this transition, we are mounting an impressive show of nearly 40 paintings, mostly watercolors and acrylics on panel, all landscapes and seascapes of the Northwest.
Erik’s work has appeared in many solo, two-person, group, and juried shows, and his work is held in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Franklin Furnace Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the China National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou.
He has created a number of public art projects, including a 4,000 square foot mural of Oregon landscapes, completed with his father, at the Eugene/Springfield Airport in 1989. In 2011, he painted a 75 foot mural for the Port of Grays Harbor’s Commission Room, commemorating 100 years of marine commerce and accentuating the natural riches of the vital estuary as the context for this productive harbor. More recently, Erik served as the lead artist on the Nirvana Mural Project in Aberdeen.
Erik is currently a Board Member of Print Arts Northwest.
Please come and meet Erik at his Artist Reception, First Friday, April 6th, from 5:30-7:30 pm. At 7 p.m., Erik will speak as a featured stop on the ArtWalk Guided Tour.
