Recent Exhibition

Rain Shadows @ C.O.C.C. Bend, Or

This exhibition gets its name from the weather term: when wet air hits a mountain, it drops its rain. By the time it crosses over, the air’s dry, and the land beyond it is in a rain shadow. I’m interested in that hidden source of transformation – the way something monumental leaves a mark just by just standing still. A mountain range touches the sky, and changes weather for the whole region. Grief, memory, need for belonging – these are just as heavy and transformative forces in our lives. 

Mountains, trees, water, and lava are characters in my work. Mountains hold slow, geologic time, solid to the eye yet changing dramatically in the vast ocean of time. Trees live faster, carrying evidence of storms and fires in their bark. Floods of water have scoured the land. Lava pooled so thick it made the tectonic plate sag, forever obscuring the rocks below that. Some changes we barely notice, some leave scars you can’t miss. I grew up in Oregon, where the land itself is a conglomeration of rocks coming together from diverse origins around the globe. The people who are drawn here carry stories layered inside them.

In my studio, I paint the way the landscape shapes itself. I build up layers, wipe them back, bury them, and let the spaces between and the loose marks stay. I analyze the layers of identity within myself. A mountain turns into a head, a stump, a pile or an iceberg. Sometimes it stays a mountain, but smaller, more fragile, closer up. I think about chewing on mountains—slowly working through things too big to swallow whole. Since my mother’s death, I find her in the work too: not only as a portrait, but as part of the land. A presence you can feel even when you can’t see it clearly.

Here in Bend—inside a real rain shadow—these paintings ask what it means to belong to a place, and all the things that come together, some unseen to make a place that we see today. A family, an artwork or even a memory work in this way too, climbing on countless unknown ancestors just to be here today, or building up a lifetime out of a constellation of other memories. The paintings don’t seek neat answers. They offer an attempt to record the time lapsed. They offer a search, through the decay, for rebirth. A mountain that is still out. Maybe it’s the one you see. Maybe it’s the one you’re standing on. Maybe it is behind the clouds and yet you are sure that it’s still there. 

Don Olsen 2025