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Full Circle - New Paintings for 2010
Loren Salazar - "Full Circle" New Paintings for 2010 - Held Over!
Loren Salazar
June 9, 2010 - July 11, 2010
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

     These new works by Loren Salazar are well worth a hold over exhibit, now available through August 8th.
Loren Salazar was born in California in 1951. He graduated with Honors in 1973 from Central Washington State University with a degree in Arts and Sciences. Salazar has painted and exhibited extensively in the western states of Washington, California, and Alaska. His work has been exhibited across the country and his published images are found internationally. Currently calling Colombia, South America home, Salazar continues to paint image locations from Italy to South America.

Even though Salazar calls Colombia home now, he has strong and long ties to the Seattle area and the Eastside in particular. Gunnar Nordstrom has been selling or exhibiting the paintings by Loren Salazar for 28 years which makes him the longest artist in representation at the Gunnar Nordstrom Gallery.

His paintings were honed and affected by the end of the turbulent 1960's. His exploration of art professionally coincided with an explosion of new music and social change. Salazar's early art paralleled a wave of new progressive rock music and a common direction brought contacts with the music industry and with rock artists. These associations resulted in numerous album covers and music industry designs. By 1977 reproductions and cards of Salazar's paintings were being distributed on an international basis by a California publisher.

His painting technique set him apart as one of the early practitioners of the air brush as a fine art tool. His mastery of that technique resulted in paintings that were included in the Seattle Art Museum's Northwest Annual Fine Arts Competition. While on display at the Museum his works were singled out by the Seattle Times for individual praise. These early works were so convincing that his paintings were at times mistaken for photography.

Salazar's photorealistic technique developed into a long series of works based on visual memory or "dreamscapes". This involved numerous images and places occupying the same picture plane. These images dissolved in and out of one another in long horizontal compositions. Salazar had developed a technique and imagery that proceeded computer art but was essentially "Photoshop" by hand before Photoshop was available. At this point the artist's works in the early 1990's were being mistaken at times for sophisticated works created on computers using Photoshop.

With a desire to distance himself from what he saw as a coming concern, (digital art), the artist moved onto a technique and media that could not be mistaken for anything digital. With the encouragement of close friend and mentor Andreas Nottebohm, Salazar set fourth on a 4 year series of works on etched aluminum, a technique pioneered by San Francisco artist Nottebohm. While living near Lake Arenal in Costa Rica, Salazar's nights were consumed creating a series of paintings based on "The "Northern Lights" or "Aurora Borealis". This series was painted in layers of transparent acrylic on etched aluminum. From Arenal, Salazar exhibited the Northern Light Series in galleries in Alaska, Washington, and California.

This body of new work has a unique combination of the past and present as Salazar goes "Full Circle". The four most recent paintings to be exhibited are a clear reflection of his early "dreamscapes" of multiple images. These beautiful works combine multiple landscapes as Salazar explores a mixed media of Acrylic and Resin on Canvas.

The remaining works are  etched aluminum paintings that have evolved from the Northern Lights Series and create an amazing hologramic effect with dimension, yet allow a grounded view of a landscape, often placed within the plane of the hologram.  

These works embody representational imagery of sky as a way of reflecting the changing textures of the etched metal ground. These paintings in acrylic and resin on etched aluminum  play on the evolving reflection of light and color like the untouchable textures of water vapor that form clouds and rainbows. They are never static, always changing and evolving with each new point of view, as an object that lives in visual space more than in physical space.

These are some of the most unique and interesting paintings being shown today.      
Electric Blue I
18 x 29 Inches  Acrylic on Aluminum
 Sold
Entrada Al Cielo
17 x 36 Inches  Acrylic and Resin on Canvas
 Sold
Green and Purple Abstract
26 x 39.5 Inches  Acrylic and Resin on Etched Aluminum
 Sold
Electric Blue II
16 x 28.5 Inches  Acrylic and Resin on Etched Aluminum
 Sold
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