MTC ART GALLERY

The MTC community art program presents:

Running Free: Celebrating Canine and Human Access to the
East Bay Regional Parks

Paintings by Elizabeth Ennis

MTC Offices
101 8th St.
Third Floor

Reception:
Thursday, March 24, 2011
4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Open
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays

Artist's Statement:
Dogs have appeared in my paintings since the 1980s but it was after 1999 with our adoption of the white Siberian Husky, Montana, and then the adoption in 2000 of a mixed breed, mostly black Labrador Retriever we named Dinah, that I began this series of dog paintings.

In the Bay Area we have the world’s best dog park — Pt. Isabel in Richmond, which is part of the East Bay Regional Parks District. It is a huge area on the Bay where dogs can socialize off leash and be free to act like dogs. Dog owners are also blessed to have the Regional Parks, areas of hills, fields, lakes and streams that are off leash to dogs.

I began to think of dogs in their mythological role as the guides of humans, and as guides in our contemporary struggle to reconnect with the natural world. So often dogs in art are portrayed as sitting calmly at the feet of their masters, embedded in the domestic environment of humans. Instead, I want to show them as part of nature, especially in that state of pure, fierce joy they seem to possess when left free to play and explore unleashed.
— Elizabeth Ennis