Submitted photo

After 50 years in the field, professional painter Dan Florea will share some tricks of the trade with budding artists at the Frontier Art Center Saturday, Sept. 21.

International painter Daniel Florea has had an extraordinary career in the arts. He created the Bionic Buzzard kite, which sold in the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, and painted for the Catholic Church both in America and abroad. Florea has decorated hotel lobbies and rooms for some of the world’s finest hotels, won national awards, and lectured all over the world.

He keeps studios in Mattole, Israel, and Cuenca, Ecuador. In Cuenca, he is working on a national show for next year, expressing his love of South America and Ecuador.

Florea has shown his work in many of the world’s top museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His last U.S. show was a 40-year retrospective of his paintings at the Betty Gray Gallery in Sun River.

Florea is the driving force and one of the founding faculty members of the tuition-free Willamette Falls School of Art (WFSOART.com), where every teacher has a history of 10 years or more in the arts, independent of schools and colleges.

After 50 years of professional art, Florea says, “Go where art is not,” and engage. He also said, “I’ve had enough time to know something about how to teach meaningful art and best practices. After a lifetime of work, it’s time to pass along some tricks of the profession.”

The Willamette Falls School of Art faculty, which includes local artist MaryLou Wilhelm, believes learning about how to make art is critical to happiness, that art schools have an important place in our world, and that knowing how to make art and how to succeed at art is critically important to every art student.

The school currently enjoys creating “pop-up” art events around Oregon’s high desert.

Frontier Art Center is honored to host a beginners’ oil painting workshop taught by Daniel Florea beginning at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21. Contact Kate at 360-301-2236 or katemarsh2236@gmail.com for more information.