“Open roads and historical byways, geography and maps, the comfort of friends, beauty and freedom are my inspiration.”
About Jerry Mishler
Born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1951, by age 10 I had moved with family to Portland, Oregon where I grew up as one of 5 children and we vacationed all around the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
A cross-country road trip after high school, Army service as a weatherman in New Mexico, a degree in Geography from Portland State University, and 40+ years of extensive business travel around western U.S. highways have shaped my ideas of the landscape and exposed me to its many moods.
Starting with the gift of Jon Gnagy’s “Learn to Draw” in grade school I always enjoyed sketching and painting. Later, I kept at this on evenings and weekends while tending to family and a full-time business career. I was rewarded with my first show in 1998 at Brian Marki Gallery in Portland and continued painting and showing until I retired from business in 2017 - when I could devote a more full-time effort to my art.
My Approach
Generally, I work both plein air, or outdoors - and in the studio. My studio work is derived from my plein air paintings, drawings and photo references produced around my home in the Historic Columbia River Gorge and on my travels throughout the Pacific Northwest.
While my drawings started years ago as sketches for studio paintings - they have become works unto themselves. The irregular outline of these small works is meant to reinforce the fanciful nature of their reality. Each year a selection of these drawings are used to create calendar which I publish each Fall and can be obtained through the end of each year.
The aim of my drawing and painting is to help the viewer discover beauty amid the commonplace and, if I do my work well, experience some of the same feelings a particular scene evoked in me. While I consider myself a representational artist I’m not concerned with absolute fidelity to the scene before me but, rather, to the emotional idea that motivated me to choose that scene. I try to simplify and distill what I’m seeing and experiencing - and communicate this to the viewer. I’m particularly attracted to patterns in the landscape; both natural and man-made. and try to use these as the building blocks for my work.
