This month the Oliver Art Gallery features a western theme. Check it out.
Steve Staresina photos
Western-themed art is a genre of paintings, sculptures, television and radio programs and fiction and non-fiction writing. The subjects are stories from the latter part of the nineteenth century featuring old to modern American cowboys, native Indians and life in the west. Horses, cattle and other animals used during these times are portrayed as subjects in western art.
The Oliver Art Gallery will be featuring this theme during May, plus it will also display the art of its one horse logger artist Rod Gould. Most of the gallery’s twenty two artists will have painted their style of western art and have it there for the public to view in May. Since there are some abstract artists in the gallery, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Rod Gould lives in Greenwood B.C. and has spent most of his life as a logger. He has logged the mountains in the Greenwood area with his own horses and recorded his career with his paintings of his horses and the surrounding mountains.
The love and attraction of western art was promoted by well-known artists, Charles Russell and Fred Remington who put the glory and romance of the west on canvas. Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody took real cowboys and Indians to perform around the world glorifying the American west. Hollywood made movies, with singing cowboys like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter which romanticized the life at the time into western art. Books by Zane Grey featured the interaction of new Americans with cattle drives, and the cowboys and their horses.
New lands like Canada and Australia also had cowboys in the nineteenth century and today the western love and romance is displayed in the Greatest Outdoor Show on earth, known as the Calgary Stampede. Cowboys come from all over the world to compete in the skills that come from the cowboy life.
Drop into the Oliver Gallery this month and enjoy the paintings of Western Art.
The gallery is at 6046 Main Street in Oliver and is open Tuesday – Saturday from 11:00am to 4:00pm.
June is coming soon and the gallery will be featuring Water Scenes as the theme and the feature artist of the month will be Jane Scheffler from Osoyoos. Jane is a retired local Veterinarian, and her art has been the Oliver Art Gallery’s best seller. She has a large following and it is growing fairly steadily.
See you at the gallery.
Sandra Albo
Steve Staresina
Special to the Chronicle
