Featuring Works by Dennis Worrel, Mark Andres, and Richard Rowland
Exhibition | June 4-27, 2026
Reception | June 6, 3-5pm
Free and open to the public
The Hoffman Gallery in Manzanita presents its June Gallery Exhibition featuring works by Dennis Worrel, Mark Andres, and Richard Rowland.
The exhibition runs Thursdays-Sundays, June 4-27, 12:00-5:00pm. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Dennis Worrel is a painter and printmaker. He currently lives and works on the northern Oregon Coast near Tillamook. His interests include traveling, hiking, reading, and gardening. He is a founding member of Arts Accelerated, a local non-profit gallery and art center. Dennis received his MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Dennis Worrel’s Statement:
I am a schooled artist drawn to the works of folk and visionary artists. I grew up in Northern California in the 60s and was first inspired by the works of Bay Area Figurative and Funk artists, for their irreverence visions and their self-deprecating sense of humor. Art making for me is an ongoing personal exploration of the natural world around me. My subject matter often draws from personal experiences and memories, histories, family photographs and animals.
I have long been fascinated by how memories are formed, revised and internalized. These recent works stem from my interest in the place we call the Oregon Coast, my home for the past 20 years. Working with paint, ink, and graphite, I reimagine memories and stories left behind by those who came here to work in the woods, the mills, rails, and small towns. My intention is to deepen our connection by merging stories we bring with memories and stories from people who came before us.
A goal of mine was to create work that looks like they came from an earlier time. The imagery frequently is built from a collection of composite photographs found locally and from family albums. In this way, I am recreating layers and fragments in the similar way that memory is created, stored and recalled. All of these wood paneled paintings, for example, began as plates used to make monoprints. Remnants of the ink remained on the plates after printing which I did use for base to start my paintings. I then took the worked plates and painted over them with acrylic paints and inks.
Mark Andres is a painter and award-winning filmmaker. His paintings are in many public collections including the Portland Art Museum, The Maryhill Museum, Oregon Health and Sciences University, the University of Portland and Portland Community College, where he has taught painting and drawing for over 30 years. He has written, illustrated and directed nine animated silent films, many of which have won Best Animated Film at festivals in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Mexico City. He is represented in Portland by Augen Gallery and in Astoria by Imogen Gallery. His profile on OPB’s Oregon Art Beat was nominated for a regional Emmy last year. The work in this exhibit highlights his long interest in river and coastal landscape painting.
Mark Andres’ Statement:
I paint in the space between outward and inward looking. The world asserts its hidden rhythms through the mind and eye. Those hidden rhythms are what thrill me when I look out, and which the photos I take inevitably fail to convey: the deepest mysteries—the rhythm of our origins—birth, death, the eternal return—when it’s only just a view of a river and a few buildings. Painting is the act of looking, a verb made into cloth, colored dirt, and goo, which at its best moments can hold the spirit of the artist at one with the spirit of the viewer.
Painting puts the world back together after the act of naming it has pulled it apart.
Painting was invented to convey the thing that cannot be conveyed in words, that “ungraspable phantom of life” which another water-gazer, Ishmael, in Melville’s Moby Dick, tells us is “the key to it all.”
Richard Rowland received his BA from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, where he studied art, religion, and ceramics under Judy Teufel and Professor Jan Shield. After receiving his BA, he studied ceramic materials under Ray Grimm and Jay Jensen at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon for an additional 2 & ½ years. In 2005, he received his MFA from the University of Tasmania-Academy of Arts, in Launceston, Australia, studying under Professor Vincent McGrath and Dr. Owen Rye.
Richard Rowland’s Statement:
I have developed my work toward social practice and in 2005 I received the Oregon Governors Art Award for my contiual work in the arts and community. Examples of work I have created include: collaboration with writer Barry Lopez, the Comanche Peoples, and Texas Tech University on the Reconciliation Project, in which Barry and I travelled to Tule Canyon in Texas to recover clay and some of the remaining bones of Comanche horses that were killed in 1874 by the Texas Rangers, led by a Colonel McKenzie, and made work using the unfiltered clay and bones from that canyon to return to the Comanche people now on a reservation in Oklahoma. In another collaborative project, along with other local potters, we have made thousands of selected soup bowls for the Women’s Resource Centers in Clatsop and Tillamook counties as annual fundraisers for over 20 years; and I have made art installations for CMH that helped establish a Planetree designation for our new hospital, including artworks for patients as well as permanent work for the care facilities and the CMH foundation; Indigenous collaborations, with exhibitions at Evergreen College, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Warm Springs Museum, and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.
In my role as 3-D Art Faculty at Clatsop Community College where I taught Ceramics for 21 years, I curated art exhibits from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest. I exhibit my work at the RiverSea Gallery in Astoria, Oregon.
The Hoffman Center Art Gallery is located at 594 Laneda Avenue, Manzanita. The exhibition is free and open to the public. The gallery is closed the last Sunday of every month.