The Maude Kerns Art Center is proud to present our exciting season opener, “Escape to the Forest,” featuring work by Yoncalla artist Susan Applegate, Eugene artists Joanna Carrabbio and Marco Elliott, and Gearhart, Oregon artist Greg Navratil. The exhibit opens on Friday, January 9, with a free public reception from 5 – 7 pm. “Escape to the Forest” is on view through Friday, February 6.

The four exhibiting artists, whose work is immersed in the natural world, create distinctly personal visions of the rivers and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their various interpretations reveal a view of nature that is, in the words of Greg Navratil, both “grounded and magical.”

Yoncalla artist Susan Applegate is well known as a painter, muralist, and illustrator. In 2019, Applegate was one of 45 artists exhibiting in the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art “Visual Magic” show honoring artists who began their creative careers in Oregon during the 1960s and 1070s. For “Escape to the Forest,” she displays her paintings of the woods on her property and in the process expresses her personal feelings about the interior of the forest. A path leads through the the woods to a spring head that has provided water for her family over generations. Her simplified shapes and forms suggest a certain monumentality while the image of a well and the path to the spring head symbolize renewal and regeneration. Applegate says that “it is the forest of my interior landscape that I am painting.”

Eugene artists, husband and wife Marco Elliott and Joanna Carrabbio, have in common what they describe as a “humble and profound admiration for the enchanting wildness in Nature.” Carrabbio, who with Elliott spent many years in Los Angeles before relocating to Eugene, is a painter, graphic artist, and accomplished muralist. She displays a series of paintings titled “Leaves,” representing in oil and watercolor the shapes, colors, and textures of leaves. Carrabbio works through a process of layering and scraping away pigment until a satisfactory image emerges. She says: “Although the focus at times has been on detailed representational structures of flora and fauna, this body of work draws from emotions and dream-like memories loosely improvised with color, texture, and design.”

Marco Elliott works in a wide variety of media, including painting, printmaking, assemblage, and mural painting. In 2021, he was selected to exhibit work in the “Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Program Exhibition” at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. For “Escape to the Forest,” Elliott incorporates the female figure within a forest landscape in a series titled “Natural Woman.” Elliott emphasizes the fusion between the physical body and the sylvan environment. Explaining why he uses the image of a female body in these works, Elliott says that he wants to present “a guilt-free Eve set in a pristine forest landscape, not alienated from [it], but a pulsating organism, natural and innocently immersed in the profusion of diverse life forms of the primeval rain forest.”

Gearhart, Oregon artist Greg Navratil has shown his work in solo and group exhibits throughout the United States. In 2025, he had solo shows at both Bayside Art Gallery in Port Hadlock, WA as well as at the Grants Pass Museum of Art in Grants Pass, OR. In his acrylic paintings, Navratil focuses on the abstract and chaotic qualities of nature. He celebrates the natural splendor of the Pacific Northwest by using an unconventional method of applying paint with squeeze bottles to create a sense of spontaneity. Navratil considers his paintings “an invitation to pause and appreciate the complexity hidden in seemingly simple movements - - water dancing over stone, leaves caught in sunlight -- and to find delight in the unexpected details that make nature feel both grounded and magical.”

The public is invited to a free Artist Talk in conjunction with “Escape to the Forest” on Saturday, January 31, from 1 – 2 pm.