Coors Western Art Show | Gil Dellinger

By Bonnie Gangelhoff

Nine Degrees and Falling, acrylic, 18 x 24.

Museum curator, art professor, and award-winning painter—Gil Dellinger can easily lay claim to all three professions. As a landscape painter he is known for his ability to capture the grandeur and majesty of America, creating compelling views of the rocky Pacific coast, bucolic farm scenes, and arid southwestern deserts. Dellinger has won numerous awards and participated in more than 400 solo and group shows during his career.

Recently he has added a new twist to his body of pastel, acrylic, and oil landscapes. “I am still committed to the idea that beauty is a personification of hope and that something exists beyond us,” Dellinger says. “But, at the same time, I am doing more paintings that are a slice of life and have figures in them,” he explains. For example, in MORNING BALING, SMOKE AND DUST he offers a lush, evocative depiction of a farmer driving his tractor through golden hay fields.

Dellinger has an array of paintings in the Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, including BACK TO THE BARN and NINE DEGREES AND FALLING, incorporating figures and horses into the landscape. “I think people can relate to that type of an image, and it becomes more than just another landscape,” Dellinger says. “The spiritual qualities I try to put in landscape works are just as evident with people [and horses] portrayed in the landscape.”

The California-based painter is a retired professor of art from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, and he is a member of prestigious artists’ organizations, including the Pastel Society of America, the Plein-Air Painters of America, and the California Art Club. He is represented by Knowlton Gallery, Lodi, CA; Roger’s Gardens, Corona Del Mar, CA; Carmel Fine Art, Carmel, CA; Vertical Peaks Fine Art, Jackson, WY; and Rich Timmons Fine Art, Doylestown, PA; www.gildellinger.com.

Featured in January 2012.