Dec 2019/ Jan 2020 - Melinda Thorsnes

Legacy, 2019

oil on canvas

30" x 40"

Oregon artist, Melinda Thorsnes’ richly colored, provocative paintings offer audacious characters that seem to jump off the picture plane pushing the viewer’s sensibilities fearlessly into familiar, yet foreign, territory. Thorsnes deals openly with the emotional discourse of human interaction. Her depictions of seemingly familiar faces and settings give way to ephemeral Fellini like moments that turn routine ‘feral’ and reality into dreamscape. Her recent work deals with the times we live in. The theme of these new paintings is the crisis and disgrace we are facing as a nation, due to divisiveness in the political arena. She expresses her observations through richly colored, narrative paintings that continue the traditions of American genre painting.

Thorsnes studied at the California College of the Arts before graduating from the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art) and has exhibited her work widely since the early 1970's. Her work is in public collections including Granite Falls Middle School, WA; City of Salem, Civic Center; Richmond High School, Seattle; Elmhurst Elementary School, Tacoma; Portland Community College; and the State of Oregon; and in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem. This will be Melinda's 5th solo show at our gallery.

S ee Melinda's full resume in PDF format here.

Melinda's Website: www.melindathorsnes.com

Posse, 2018

oil on canvas

32" x 37"