Many will recognize the bright deeply saturated warm colored landscapes of the Sacramento valley from aerial and ground perspective, a theme he continues to revisit. And of course,a show of his is not complete without his intimate valley cow portraits.

North 38° Latitude also presents the granite terrains of the Sierra Nevada with a cooler palette based more in the cerulean blues of the high altitudes. As a former geologist who loved the science of the Sierra Nevada, in recent years Gross has turned that passion of the high country into art…creating works at first as a ‘Yosemitie artist in Residency 2010’ and continuing since then. As he explains, “At first painting the Sierra was very difficult …I had a farm valley palette that didn’t work and anyway, how do you paint a huge mountain of white? John Singer Sargent answered that one for me with his exquisite watercolors of the Italian marble quarries. And then of course both Theibuad and Kondos have created their own wonderful mountain worlds. At this point, I have come to love painting that white granite, knowing and incorporating how a rock weathers, the exfoliating fracture systems, the glacial erratics, the high mountain cirques, roche moutonees, all come into play.”

Finally, Gross continues honing his landscape painting skills amongst the vertical city streets his birthplace, San Francisco, ?and the rolling northern California coastline, thus completing this sampler across the latitude north 38 degrees.

For our October exhibit, Phil Gross offers "My Left Hand" with an interesting back-story. One high school summer, Phil, naturally right handed, decided to be more than a one-dimensional basketball player. Consequently he spent endless hours learning to dribble and shoot a basketball with his left hand. Now, forty years later, he faced a related challenge. His right arm and hand developed a tremor, which made it impossible to skillfully wield a paint brush. Although it took much longer than one summer, he became a left-handed painter. As he says, "I can now say with confidence that middle-aged dogs can learn new tricks." Phil's show features his "signature" locations: nearby irrigation ditches, train tracks running through town, county roads and roadside bovines. Several works are from studies Phil did while “Artist in Residence” in Yosemite National Park in 2011. Look for telescopic perspectives inspired by our valley, backlit subjects (contre-jour, French for 'against daylight') and highly saturated palettes.

Large mural currently showing in xmas gallery show.