Warren Rohrer, Caernarvon II

Acting on the realization that landscape (and more inclusively, nature) was more than what I looked at, I redirected my attention to painting processes, which, interestingly enough, often paralleled the agricultural processes I had known all my life. I built all-over surfaces by layering brushwork in which color was often extracted from seasonal information. —Warren Rohrer

For Rohrer, who grew up in an agrarian Mennonite community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, painting was a metaphorical link to the process of cultivating the land. Caernarvon is a rural community in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Rohrer’s subtle gradations of brown and purple begin with swirling applications of paint that are bordered at the bottom by a grid-like rectangular block of squares.

Rohrer graduated from Eastern Mennonite College and studied art during summers at Pennsylvania State University. For twenty-five years, he taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and exhibited with Locks Gallery. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 2003 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.