Bruce Everett’s plein-air and large-scale studio paintings of rural California landscapes have been referred to as painterly photorealism. For many years, the artist lived in the recesses of a rocky Chatsworth canyon and focused on the unique terrain of those sand-colored boulder formations and surrounding hills. Six years ago, he moved to the central coast of California and his new paintings look at the landscape north of Point Conception, which is often considered both the natural and cultural division between Northern and Southern California. While it is difficult to imagine any California location being remote these days, many of Everett’s perspectives are obtainable only by means of his hand-built Ultra Light airplane. Sometimes working from photographs made from the open cockpit of this plane, Everett creates bird’s-eye views of a California landscape we know, but assumed had vanished. Some of the paintings in this exhibition also required special access to properties such as the usually restricted Coho Jalama Ranch.

For the past 30 years, Jenny Okun has been recognized for her multiple exposure photographic abstractions of architecture made with a medium format camera. With this process, the New York Times states, “Okun reveals the very soul of the buildings she photographs.” In recent years, her photography has shifted to the layering of images digitally, creating more complex montages on a broader range of subjects and, most recently, projecting her artwork onto the stage. Okun’s ninth exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will feature images that she has created for the opera, Dulce Rosa, composed by Lee Holdridge with a libretto by Okun’s husband, Richard Sparks. Presented by the LA Opera, conducted by Plácido Domingo, the opera is based on the short story, Una Venganza, by Isabel Allende. Dulce Rosa premieres at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on May 17th and runs through June 9th. For this project, Okun made thousands of brilliantly colored photographic images of architecture and flora in Central and South America, then edited and montaged them into the seamlessly evolving projections that flood the walls of the stage.