Guy Rose (1867-1925), Pt. Lobos, Private Collection | Photo courtesy of The Irvine Museum
The Irvine Museum’s current exhibition The Nature of Water: Our Most Precious Resource will close June 16, 2016. The exhibition serves a dual purpose; it presents a selection of superb California landscape paintings and it makes the museum visitor aware of one of California’s historically scarce and precious resources, water.
“Much of what originally made California a ‘Golden Land’ was directly linked to the environment, especially the land and water that nurtured and sustained a rare quality of life,” says (The Irvine Museum’s Chairman) Joan Irvine Smith. “Over a hundred years ago, the splendor of nature fascinated artists and compelled them to paint beautiful paintings. As we view these rare and remarkable paintings, we are returned, all too briefly, to a time long ago when the land and its bounty were open and almost limitless.”
The exhibition features 60 works by 32 artists that documents the perpetual natural cycle of water in the atmosphere. Water exists in nature in three physical states, liquid (water), solid (ice), and gas (water vapor). The water cycle describes how a fixed quantity of water has remained the same for hundreds of millions of years. The amount of water on Earth is constantly refreshed—being cycled through the ocean, sky, and land over and over again. Without this cycle, whatever water exists would be used up and gone forever, and there would be no life on Earth.
Works in the exhibition feature scenes of snow, clouds, rain, lakes, rivers, oceans, and more by artists such as Mischa Askenazy, Franz Bischoff, Granville Redmond, Paul Grimm, Guy Rose, and Karl Yens, among others. In addition to works from The Irvine Museum’s collection, the exhibition features loans from The Mark and Jan Hilbert Collection and The Edward H. and Yvonne J. Boseker Collection.
Admission to The Irvine Museum is free.
Click here or visit the website for additional information.
