About
the Artist
Photograph by Wm. B. Dewey
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1945
Born February 2, in Southern California
1967 BA w/ Honors, Univ. Cal., Santa Barbara 1969 MFA in Painting, Univ. Cal., Santa Barbara Donald Archer was born and raised in Southern California. The light and space of California, the monumentality of its landscape has played an integral part in his work. After his university education, Archer taught for ten years, six of those as an Instructor of Fine Art at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. In 1979, he resigned his teaching position and moved to Santa Barbara in order to pursue painting full-time. In 1992, he moved to Cambria - near the Big Sur Coast and the rural inland valleys - where he continues to live and work. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions in public museums and commercial galleries, he participates in selected fine art festivals along the west coast. His work is included in collections, both public and private, throughout the United States and abroad. Donald Archer's paintings have been featured in American Artist magazine and Southwest Art magazine as well as five books: The Oak Group: The First Ten Years; Ranchos: Santa Barbara's Land Grant Ranchos; The Oak Group: Twenty Years 1986-2006; American Art Collector: Vol. 1, Book 1; and American Art Collector: Vol. 3, Book 1. |
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Selected Reviews "If
I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed." I’ve never forgotten my first glimpse of a landscape by Donald Archer. A road cut through a luxurious swath of green fields, undulating over hilly terrain with a cool disregard for painterly priorities, matched by a reckless sense of its ultimate destination. (There is always a road in an Archer painting---a road, or a stretch of beach or ocean that carries the viewer above and beyond the frame.) I liked the piece’s sense of order. It stood out with a patrician comeliness that drew my eyes back to it again and again. Any discussion of this artist’s work must begin with its unassailable clarity. His prevailing currency is full of radiant, pared-down truths. Archer provides the viewer with an immaculate surface on which are neatly deployed blocs of color. In a relatively small work like "Valley Harvest", you can "read" this surface from the frame inward: road, palm, crops, hills, grove, mountains, skies. What unifies this, what poeticizes it and lifts Archer beyond the crowded realm of merely competent painters is his palette. His is a rare case of palette as weapon. He wields color to clothe these landscapes with emotion. They’re never impressions, but what Cezanne called "explorations of faith" in the importance of the landscapes. And when a work is finished? "If I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed," Archer says. …A master of water media technique, he has an almost fanatical regard for achieving the right density of watercolor and tempera…. Archer sets himself tasks. His charismatic sun in "Field Near the Coast" illumines the fields in seven or eight different ways as it steps out into the morning. A mesmerizing painting like "Coches Prietos" pursues the light to the furthest hills, the last ravishing bit of twilight pronouncing its benison on the vanished day. There is always color until night extinguishes it. We are living in California, after all. And Archer is very much a California artist, as this small, excellent show demonstrates. For the time being, let it serve as an introduction to one of our most vital, important artists! Bill Beeson, art critic New
Times _________________________________________________________________ THE ART OF DONALD ARCHER: DYNAMIC AND POWERFUL As a collector and art dealer I am interested only in work that moves me. Donald Archer’s work has power for two reasons: one, his reduction of the landscape to a minimum of planes and volumes; and two, the raw strength and Spartan selection of his palette. In a lesser hand this reduction might appear to be influenced by more utilitarian graphic advertisements. But in Archer’s hand it creates stark, bold and triumphant geometric planes. The use of adjacent contrasting hues helps accelerate the impact of Archer’s colors. While other artists have tried this approach, in most cases their sense of composition is not vital enough or true enough to the landscape to carry it off successfully. A small watercolor of a farm being irrigated by a series of uniform mechanical sprinklers remains vivid in my memory. The white of the water and the green of the background are so boldly painted that the painting, which might have been busy and confusing, is anything but. It radiates a geometric strength that comes from simplicity of palette and boldness of composition. Donald Archer’s compositions are more dynamic than any other artist I know working in the watercolor medium. Frank Goss, director Sullivan Goss Gallery Santa Barbara, CA |
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© 2008 Donald Archer
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