July 26 – October 4, 2013

The Riverside Art Museum is proud to continue a new program highlighting artist-members who have received awards in previous Members’ Exhibitions with a mini-exhibition by painter Jeff Owens. As a locally-based artist and longtime teacher, Owens has spent most of his life exploring art in many different forms, from his early interest in cartooning and role as art director of his high school yearbook to his more serious landscape paintings. Owens studied at the University of Redlands where he earned his teaching credentials in Social Science and Art and has been awarded membership to prestigious art collectives such as Watercolor West and the National Watercolor Society. He has held several regional solo exhibitions, has had work published in magazines such as Watercolor USA and Art in America, and has work in the collections of the San Bernardino County Museum, Sam Maloof Collection, and University of Redlands, amongst others.

Artist’s Statement: 

From photorealism to abstraction, low art to high art, I go where the excitement of a visual idea takes me.

All of my work is derived from real places, people, and objects. I almost always allow these images to float around in the dark recesses of my mind and ferment with a good mixture of my own imagination and creativity. The result is a visual construction that in its birth was based on experienced reality, imagination, and creative thought.

One of the great satisfactions I get out of this whole process is pushing myself in new directions. Directions that create challenges that force me to seek new ways of thinking about the art I am creating. This can be very exhilarating and, at times, very frustrating.

I suppose that the bottom line in my art-making is that in my own personal pursuit of creation I am forcing myself to think about how I perceive and interpret the reality of the world around me and that my doing so will lead observers of my creations to re-evaluate and question their own realization of this existence we all share.