Rogoway's

 Albert Dreher

The Artist As a Colorado native, Albert Dreher was exposed early to the timeless beauty of the area's indigenous landscapes and natural mysteries of ancient cultures. His fascination for sacred power places of the American Indian grew with his increasing desire to transform his career from that of advertising designer to fine artist. "As time passed," Dreher cites, "I have a vision and a growing need to translate that vision through the contemporary arts. The only way I knew to truly accept and communicate the integrity of my ideas was through a new medium."

In 1981, Dreher painted and consigned ten original paintings to the former Scharf Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, for his first one-man show. These initial works appeared not only to symbolize humanity's emergence from one world to the next, but his own as well, since Dreher took with him disciplines and methods he had acquired throughout the first half of his creative life. Dreher quickly became known as a pioneer in oil wash techniques and artist on the leading edge of contemporary painting. In ten short years, Dreher has risen to be one of the 20th Century's most respected artistic communicators of the nature and values of collective consciousness of his time. Rich in unity Dreher's works bespeak the Indian's ultimate beliefs in nature of one reality.

Everything in a Dreher painting flows; space, color, time, art and reality. The circular sun/moon symbol seen in nearly all the Dreher's pieces is a constant symbol of hope arising out of despair - the light dawning behind darkness. Dreher believes, "If I can evoke any emotion from the viewer - whether it's happiness, depression, nostalgia, or spiritual reflection - I've succeeded. With such success comes the belief that each painting carries a little piece of his heart."

Today Dreher's work days are not long enough to supply the demand for his unusual oil wash paintings, which can be seen in galleries throughout the West. His favorite subjects are the power places of the prehistoric American Indians (The Anasazi) - especially the ancient kivas and cliff dwellings he finds hidden in the sacred mountains and mesas of the Southwest. Other popular subjects highlighted in Dreher's unusual paintings include the American Indian woman, traditional adobes and Midwest farmlands. Dreher journeys alone to these power places to sketch and paint..."places of the soul, " he says, "that are complete with both lost realities and the hope of newly emerging ones - endless cycles of death and rebirth resounds there, both in spirit and form." "Kivas," notes Dreher, "are structures where sacred rituals took place." "The Ancient Ones enjoyed a rich religious life and made no distinction between reality and fantasy. In fact, underground kivas contained a covered hole in the floor, opposite the fire, which symbolically represented the entrance to the Underworld - the place, they believed, from which people had originally climbed onto the surface of our present world."