Living Off the Land by Harriet Modler
American Style, December 2007.


Phyllis Shafer's lyrical landscapes, set in the high altitudes around Lake Tahoe and the deserts of Arizona, are a remarkable change from the urban world that the artist inhabited for most of her life. Shafer, who spent many years in New York and San Francisco, now paints her deepest feelings with accents of swirling, sensual cloud formations.

"I use the land as a metaphor for the human condition," Shafer says, expressing admiration for how Native Americans have done so for centuries. "When I'm out there, I feel just like one more cactus or pine tree in the landscape. That's where the soothing reassurances come from on a psychic level."

Shafer credits New York dance classes for her work's sense of movement. Yet it was her geographical shift to the mountainous West that inspired the heightened perspective and softly flowing lines in her work.

"The more time I spend in any setting, the more I become connected to the cycles of nature," she says. "I don't just paint in a realistic style. Instead, it's a marriage between observation and fantasy coming from a felt response to the landscape."

Shafer is a plein air painter, creating up to 90 percent of each work in the field before finishing it in the studio. She uses gouache about half the time, oils the rest. Her oil painting "The Oxbow" is in the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

One of Shafer's favorite sites is California's Yosemite Valley. This past summer she took part in a four-week residency at the national park through the Yosemite Renaissance project. While Shafer was painting the park's landmark El Capitan monolith back in 2006, a busload of Japanese teenage onlookers became so enthusiastic that all 50 took turns posing for pictures with her.

Shafer painted in San Francisco and earned her master's degree from the nearby University of California at Berkeley. Because teaching is her other passion, she moved to the California- Nevada border to become an arts instructor at Lake Tahoe Community College in 1994, a position she still retains.

Her commercial breakthrough came in 2002 with the beginning of her association with Stremmel Gallery in Reno. That year, she was the first of 25 artists selected by gallery director Turkey Stremmel for "Artown," Reno's annual summertime arts festival. For its citywide exhibition, "Counting Sheep," Shafer rendered the region's monumental sky, mountains and forests on a three-dimensional fiberglass bighorn sheep, a piece now displayed at Reno's McKinley Arts and Cultural Center. She painted a landscape "across the belly," then worked in perspective on the legs.

"Phyllis is one of the greatest up-and-coming artists I've ever met," Stremmel says. "Every time she brings us new works, she amazes me with her consistency, quality, talent and depth of understanding of the landscape."

Shafer has had two solo exhibitions at the gallery, which has sold nearly 100 of her works.

Contemplating Shafer's stylistic creativity, Stremmel says, "Phyllis is a contemporary artist painting in our time," noting, as have others, similarities in her approach to those of great early-20th-century landscape artists.

But it's her ability to convey her love for the land with each brushstroke that sets Shafer apart.


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