Exhibit Depicts Artist's Travelogue

"Shenandoah Gap, Virginia"
Oil pastel on paper 5/2004

The first public art exhibit of fall semester takes the viewer on a continental journey from Harrisonburg, Va., across the United States, part of Canada, Mexico and back to the Shenandoah Valley.

Bridgewater, Va., artist Robert (Bob) Bersson will display "Landscapes Across Time and Place," based on several cross-country road trips, in the third floor art gallery of Hartzler Library at Eastern Mennonite University.

The exhibit opens Sept. 3 and runs through Oct. 6. A reception for the artist will be held 2:30-4 p.m. Oct. 1 in the gallery.

Dr. Bersson is professor emeritus of art and art history at James Madison University.

One set of drawings transports the viewer from New England to Gatineau Provincial Park in Quebec to Soldier Lake National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Minnesota's Temperance River State Park along Lake Superior.

Crossing the Mississippi, the landscape changes to the bone-dry badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in northwestern North Dakota. The mixed-media drawing of Battleship Butte is a product of that wilderness sojourn. From there, the scene moves to Pacific City on the rugged Oregon coast. A red-brown conte crayon study of huge Sonoran Desert boulders at Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California closes the drawing pad of travel landscapes.

Bersson spent May 2004 at a cabin deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains north of the town of Shenandoah. A series of oil pastel landscapes emerged from that trek.

Return to the Valley

The landscape journey renews with a return to the Valley, where the artist spent the month of May 2004 at a cabin in the deep forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains north of the town of Shenandoah, where a series of oil pastel landscapes, some quite abstract and painterly, emerged.

Settling into a new home one cornfield west of the Dry River and several houses east of the town of Montezuma, the new vista out the artist's back door door inspired a series that stretches across seasons, weather conditions and almost two years of time - from August 2004 to May 2006.

Bersson created his landscapes in a variety of drawing media - hard and soft charcoal, conte crayon and oil pastel. The "painterly" quality of many of the oil pastels is the result of pushing and pulling the pigment with a cloth rag soaked in a paint-thinning solvent, he noted.

"The abstract and gestural nature of most of the works stems from my own Abstract Expressionist heritage and appreciation of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting," the artist said.

Bersson earned his undergraduate degree in studio art/art history from Brandeis University and received an MSed in art education from State University of New York at New Paltz and a Ph.D. in art education from the University of Maryland. He has had numerous one-person and group shows at college and universities and private galleries from 1967 to the present.

EMU's art gallery is open for viewing daily during regular library hours free of charge.

Library gallery hours:
Mon.-Thur., 7:45 a.m.-11 p.m.
Fri., 7:45 a.m.-6 p.m.
Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Sun., 2-11 p.m.

— article by: Jim Bishop; posted August 11, 2006