This time of year in Arizona is sublime as the temperature cools and the desert magically transforms. During this vibrant period, Bentley Gallery is pleased to announce Natural Rhythms, a two-person show featuring work by David Kessler and Jim Waid. Both artists have explored the delicate wonder of nature for decades. Their work reveals a heightened sense of our desert environment through skilled mark making and exceptional technique. In these artists’ masterful hands, one does not merely view the landscape; it becomes an experience.For over twenty years, David Kessler has followed a Photo-Realist tradition, using acrylic and airbursh to vivify his landscapes, often the Arizona desert where he lives. These highly complex and consummately crafted paintings have drawn the attention of collectors and curators from all over the country. Kessler’s paintings invoke and utilize both the Romantic response to nature, one that eulogizes the sublime, awe-inspiring vista and the Classical response to landscape, which is lyrical and domesticated.Jim Waid creates abstract worlds saturated with color, layered with mark, filled with rhythm and movement, and intricately textured. His canvases barely contain the landscape painted upon them; lush with growth they invite the viewer to explore the space. The artist said of his work, “I don’t want the paintings to be like you’re looking at a landscape. I want them to feel like you’re in it.” Initially the paintings seem nonrepresentational, however, they slowly reveal themselves to be made up of organic textures, abstracted natural forms, and the desert landscape. They convey a sense of nature, without the specificity of traditional landscape painting.