Michigan-native Richard Abraham moved to Minneapolis in 1998, leaving a 14-year career as a designer and animator to study traditional oil painting techniques. Best known in the local plein air painting community, Abraham paints all his subjects outdoors and on location. His Minnesota landscapes – which range from creeks falling over rocks, rolling rural hills and quiet pastures blanketed by snow to the ruddy rocks of Lake Superior – are painted with light, quick brushstrokes. His atmospheric landscapes effortlessly capture the changing weather, lending his compositions an immediacy that can only be obtained by painting en plein air.

Painter Dan Mason has been exhibiting in Minneapolis for over three decades. He studied art at St. Olaf, received his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and recently retired after twenty years of teaching art at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park. Mason creates visual depth by employing layers of transparent oil glazes to the canvas. He describes his compositions as “abstractions of landscape, architecture and space.” He continues: “In some cases, the settings are imagined, with forms that suggest hillsides, cities, figural trees, harbors and other bodies of water. With others, I draw on memories of specific places: the waters of Gunflint Lake in Minnesota, the coastline of South Africa or the skyline of urban Chicago. The geometry of these places provides a structure in which I explore color, light, texture and illusions of space.”

Originally from Tartu, Estonia, painter Tiit Raid received his BA and MFA degrees from the University of Minnesota. Since 1997, and after 35 years of doing abstract work, Raid began painting landscapes inspired by the wooded area near his home in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Now a resident of Eau Claire, he continues to examine the tangles of branches, tall grasses, thick trees and sparkling waters that reveal his complex forest landscapes. Relying on several layers of acrylic paint and a painstaking eye for detail, Raid’s paintings are usually void of a horizon line, allowing the viewer to observe the quiet, intimate spaces found in nature. Quoting Robert Hughes, Raid writes: “The basic objective … is to slow-up the eye and encourage, beyond the quick look, a slow absorption.”

The artists will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, March 12 from 2 to 5 p.m. The exhibition runs concurrently with Stillness Arranged, a show of new paintings by Dani Roach in the main gallery. For more information please call 612-377-7800.