Larry Bryson

Larry Bryson is a contemporary impressionist painter of California, working in oil from his home base in Novato, in Marin County. His paintings gather the things a hurried eye tends to miss: an elephant seal pup on the sand, an egret waiting at the edge of a pond, the glow of alders, wildflowers along a hillside, the quiet scale of the redwoods. In his own words, he points out the things around that might be missed and emphasizes what makes them feel special. That way of looking began early. Larry grew up among the redwoods of Mill Valley, and his walk to school led through a forest and along a creek, there and back each day. At home and in the classroom, teachers and parents asked what the birds, the bugs and the plants had been doing that day. Art always drew him, but biology was everywhere around him, and the two have travelled together ever since. He earned a BA in art and education at Whitworth in Spokane, then joined the post-graduate painting program at San Francisco State, adding a second major in biology. College botany asked him to draw plant structures and life cycles, a discipline that still shows in his canvases. His paintings may move between looser and more exact passages, but their proportions, structures and colors stay rooted in what he has really observed. His path to the easel has been a long and generous one. From 1971 to 1974 he taught art and GED classes with VISTA at the Moses Lake and White Swan Job Corps centers in Washington, painting all the while. From 1975 to 1989 he turned to color photography of wildflowers. He worked in galleries and frame shops, among them Brunner's Fine Art in Santa Rosa and Rousseau's Fine Arts, and he spent twenty years in firefighting, engineering and emergency medicine, where he also made the county's first digital run books. Since 1994 he has devoted himself to fine art painting. Larry has always given his time to his community as well. He organized for the Novato Housing Coalition for nine years, edited newsletters, built websites for local causes, and for eight years helped organize Art on the Farm. His work has been juried into a statewide show at the San Diego Museum of Art, into the Oakland Museum of California, and twice into the Art of Seeing. He has had solo shows at the Gallery at Glendeven in Mendocino and at Rousseau's Fine Arts in Novato, and paintings such as Nicasio Fields, Soft Hillside and Seperate Worlds have been part of the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program. He is still painting new work, with Seal Pup, Among Giants and Seeking Dinner all completed in 2026. When asked to explain his paintings, Larry likes to borrow Milton Avery's words: if he could write it, he would not need to paint. For him, words are too narrow for what is visual, so he lets the paintings speak.