Adair Payne is a California painter whose landscapes are richly textural, often deeply atmospheric and highly evocative of place, season and time of day.

Payne uses a restrained palette, emphasizing the value relationships and textural elements in his compositions. Though many of his subjects are identifiably west coast landscapes, many resonate for me with creeks and forests of the Eastern Seaboard, and I believe Payne was located in the eastern US for a time.

I particularly find resonance with some of his deep woods subjects and the creeks and woods of 19th century master William Trost Richards from the Brandywine and Wissahickon Valleys here in Pennsylvania.

Though he is equally at home in brightly lit fields and hillsides, I find Payne to be most fascinating when he is exploring the subtle light and color of shadowed streams and misty woods. In those subjects, the visual appeal of his finessed textures and naturalistic foliage emerges slowly, entrancing you much as the real environment would.

There is a brief interview with Payne on YouTube that gives you a feeling of the scale of his work, and another here, as well as on his website, in which he discusses how he hopes to communicate with his work.

Though he works in oil as well, Ron Monsma creates his figures and still life primarily in pastel.

He has a refined approach, with subtle attention to edges and values and a Baroque sensibility for composition and light. I particularly enjoy those pieces in which he appears to revel in the textural characteristics of his subjects.

Monsma ia an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University South Bend, and is represented by Miller Gallery in Cincinnati, OH.