Christopher Gerlach

Christopher S. Gerlach (born 1952)

Christopher Gerlach has been a practicing landscape painter and artist for thirty years, in the United States and Europe. He received formal training in academic draughtsmanship, life painting, and medical anatomy at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, received an award from the Royal Academy in London, and was appointed Murray Landscape Scholar to Oxford University in 1979. He also holds a Masters of Fine Art from San Diego State University. He is committed to a revival of realism in the tradition of the Impressionist and Painterly Realist schools of France and turn-of-the-century America and Britain. He was, through the generosity of the Versailles Foundation, the first plein-air artist to paint in the newly-restored gardens of Claude Monet at Giverny, in 1981.

Gerlach began his career exhibiting at the William Sawyer Gallery in San Francisco and lived there, and then in Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, in Arizona, and most recently in Southwestern Colorado, in Pagosa Springs. He has made many painting trips to San Diego and La Jolla. His paintings evoke a cheerful, optimistic mood and capture the brilliant constrasts of saturated color and sunlight and shadow that prevade the landscapes of France, the tropics, the high country of Colorado, and the sunny coasts of California. His paintings hang in museums and public collections, including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California and Buckingham Palace, and in many other public and private collections.

Gerlach has been active in research for the improvement of social conditions and ecology, and supports cultural preservation and revival for indigenous peoples in the USA and abroad. He has worked in government and community and urban planning. He does research and field work in ecology, forestry, hydrology, and integrative psychology, and is the author of a number of works on social and environmental issues, including ecology, indigenous culture and sovereignty, psychology and treatment of emotional stress and trauma. He is a Fellow of the North American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has taught drawing classes at San Diego State University and has lectured and given seminars on plein-air painting in Santa Barbara. He presently resides in Pagosa Springs.

MORNING LIGHT (View of La Jolla from Torrey Pines)