The Studio · Bishop, California
Alex Dzigurski
Cinematic landscapes, painted in oil — straight from the Eastern Sierra to your wall.
View Available Paintings →
( Morning on the Owens Valley — 22 × 30 in., oil on linen, 2024 )
Chapter One · The Painter
A second-generation plein-air painter, working from Bishop, California.
Alex Dzigurski was born in 1971 in Sacramento, California, the son of landscape painter Aleksander Dzigurski. He has painted on location in the Eastern Sierra every working season since 1998 — twenty-seven consecutive years of professional plein-air practice — and has been based in Bishop, California, for the majority of them. The Owens Valley, the White Mountains, the high passes above treeline, and the long west-facing light of the Sierra crest are not subjects he visits; they are the place from which he works.
His output is intentionally limited. No more than twenty-two original oils are released to market in a given year. Each one begins on a specific hill, at a specific hour, on a specific date — and is finished in studio only after the on-site observation is complete. The discipline is the work.
Chapter Three · The Chronology
A practice built chapter by chapter.
Four stages of training and work that produced the present studio — not a timeline of milestones, but of discipline accumulated.
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I.
Apprenticeship, Owens Valley · 1991–1992
Before formal art school, a year apprenticed to Jean LeGassick in the Owens Valley — learning, on foot and in the field, the pace at which Sierra light actually changes. This is where the discipline of on-site observation became non-negotiable.
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II.
USC, under McCleary and Marcus · 1992–1996
Four years at the University of Southern California, studying directly under Dan McCleary and Paul Marcus — the rigorous drawing and tonal construction that underpin every canvas since. The figure-painter's eye applied, deliberately, to landscape.
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III.
Professional practice · 1998–present
Twenty-seven consecutive years of plein-air painting — no studio fabrication from photographs, no shortcuts through reference. Fourteen solo exhibitions since 2005 across California, Nevada, and Colorado, and forty-plus group exhibitions including the California Art Club's Gold Medal Exhibition (2007, 2012, 2019).
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IV.
A signature member of the California Art Club · ongoing
A Signature member of the California Art Club; recipient of the Artists' Choice Award at Plein Air Salon 2022; four consecutive years on the Plein Air Salon Top 100 (2020–2023); one of only six painters under 50 named in Plein Air Magazine's "25 Painters to Watch in 2023." The studio continues, slowly, in Bishop.
Chapter Four · The Canvas
Forty to eighty hours per canvas. None of them in front of a photograph.
A canvas takes between forty and eighty hours to complete. Every one of those hours is spent either at the site — in the field, on a particular ridge at a particular hour — or in the Bishop barn refining what was observed there. No painting in the studio is begun from a photograph. No composition is constructed in the abstract and then "located" afterward. The discipline is not a marketing claim; it is the operational fact that justifies the work's existence.
If you are considering an original, this is also the reason a single canvas takes months, not weeks, to reach you — and the reason no two are interchangeable. The Eastern Sierra light on a particular October morning, painted across forty hours of observation, does not happen twice. The studio is not in the business of reproducing it.
The Studio, by the numbers
Evidence of a working practice, not a slogan.
of consecutive plein-air professional practice, since 1998.
spent painting on location in the Eastern Sierra.
average completion time per original oil — all on-site.
holding original canvases in private collections.