A new Napa Valley Museum exhibition, “Consider the Source: Nature as Reference and Inspiration,” affords the opportunity to experience how nature serves as a wellspring of pictorial ideas and emotional responses for artists. Eleven invited artists, seven from the Napa Valley and four from other North Bay and Bay Area communities, share eleven unique responses. Some refer to nature literally and some extrapolate from Nature’s forms, forces and mysteries in works that venture beyond conventional landscape into the realm of pure, visual sensation.

The exhibition, opening Friday at 5:30 p.m. and continuing through Nov. 2, features the work of Gail Chase-Bien, Eleanor Coppola, Robilee Frederick, Deanna Forbes, Matthew Giuffrida, Miki Hsu Leavey, Joe Oddo, Robert Poplack, Tim Rice, Jill Strohn and Nancy Willis. Each of these modern-day alchemists takes the raw material of nature’s elements, and fashions art that captures a sense of place; explores some aspect of nature’s awesome beauty; or, more conceptually, approximates nature’s wondrous effects by emphasizing an improvisational painting process.

Viewers will see how the painter transmogrifies the hills, trees, sea, sky, clouds, light and shadow — the faces of Nature we know so well — into personal expressions teeming with potency. Sharp-edged shapes and empirically balanced compositions won’t be found in this show; it’s about light, weather, reflection, happenstance, space and the nurturing plentitude of nature. The poetry of joy melds with the gravitas of respect.

These artists are plugged into the great current of life coursing through the natural world, and sustain and renew themselves with it as they address the visual problems they pose for themselves.

The artists’ related works in “Consider the Source” may be seen as points along a spectrum, with traditional landscape at one end and abstraction at the other.

For example, Emeryville-based Joe Oddo and Vallejo based Deanna Forbes refer to landscape scenes, and capture nature’s undulations, juxtapositions, and textures, and how the special light of a moment generates sumptuous harmonies. Their individual paintings both describe and heighten a sense of place, marking their work as the most straightforward of these nature-interpreters.

Coming from the Bay Area expressionist school of gesture and loaded brush, they study natural passages, and then make taut chromatic dramas that have bold brush strokes working in concert with delicately modulated areas, much like a soloist riffing a line of notes while being supported by a rhythm section of sounds.

“Consider the Source: Nature as Reference and Inspiration”

Sept. 19 – Nov. 2, 2008

Napa Valley Museum