Alfred Currier

Oil Painter · Impasto & Plein Air · Anacortes, WA

Available at JG Art Gallery + Events™

JG Art Gallery + Events™ · Bainbridge Island, WA · Park City, UT · jgartgallery.com

The Artist

Alfred Currier was born in New Jersey in 1943, grew up in Ohio, and trained at the Columbus College of Art and Design and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He taught figure painting at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art and at Johnson County Community College before moving to Anacortes, Washington in 1991 — a choice that redirected his work. He has been painting the Pacific Northwest ever since, from a studio in a restored 1891 church building two blocks off the Anacortes business district.

His work takes two forms he keeps distinct: plein air, which keeps his technical skills precise, and impasto studio painting, which is where his formal inventions happen. The plein air is controlled by the subject; the impasto is controlled by what he calls the muse within. Both are in oil. The impasto work builds paint to a depth — raised, textured, physically present — that forces the viewer to see the surface as a material thing, not just a window into an image.

The Work

Currier's Skagit Valley work is his most sustained subject: the tulip fields in bloom, the bent forms of migrant workers in those fields, the mountains behind them under gray skies. He has painted this subject for decades and has developed what he describes as meaningful relationships with the workers he paints. His 1998 painting Hansa Tulips was chosen as the official Skagit Tulip Festival poster.

The University of Washington Press published a monograph on his work — Alfred Currier: Impasto, written by Ted Lindberg, former Curator of the Vancouver Art Museum. He was the cover artist for American Artist Magazine. His paintings are in the collections of Microsoft, Boeing, SAFECO, and Tacoma Art Museum, among numerous private collections in the United States and abroad.

Medium

Oil on Canvas

Location

Anacortes, WA
Resident since 1991

Press & Awards

American Artist Magazine (cover artist)
Alfred Currier: Impasto — University of Washington Press
Written by Ted Lindberg, former Curator, Vancouver Art Museum

Collections

Microsoft · Boeing · SAFECO
Tacoma Art Museum
Numerous private and corporate collections