Featured Artist - Albert Dreher

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 places of the American Indian grew with his increasing desire to transform his career from that of advertising designer to fine artist. 

Dreher quickly became known as a pioneer in oil wash techniques and an artist on the leading edge of contemporary painting. 

Rich in unity, Dreher's works bespeak the Indians' 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 of Dreher's pieces is a constant symbol of hope arising out of despair - the light dawning behind darkness. 

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 pre-historic American Indians (the Anasazi) - especially the ancient kivas and cliff dwellings he finds hidden in the sacred mountians and mesas of the Southwest.

"Kivas", notes Dreher, "are the 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".