Sandy Roumagoux Northwest Painter

Sandy Roumagoux, Northwest Painter

Sandy Roumagoux, Northwest PainterMy Paintings are my interpretation of the ever relevant paradoxes of faith, war and nature. Much of what I do is predicated upon a personal fundamental acceptance of the “divine absurdities” of existence, and the duality’s in our existence of love/hate, violence/peace, silent/sound, night/day.

I focus on our cultures’ abuse of the environment, our love affair with greed, our throw away consumerism and our sanitizing of violence. These abuses are glossed over with religious platitudes.

I’ve been called political, but I don’t know how to separate politics from art. Both ask something of us, something that challenges us to a responsibility. Painter or politician, we come as candidates. We want our message to resonate with the body politic, with the voters. We make promises.

I was born in Yakima, WA in 1940 and raised on a farm near Camp Adair in the Willamette Valley, OR. After completing my B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, I returned to Oregon and Newport in 1985. The subjects from my paintings are influenced by my growing up experiences on a farm where I was raised by a family consisting of avid environmentalists and gun lovers.

Praise for Sandy Roumagoux

QuotationRoumagoux's paintings are often thinly painted creations, with thicker impasto layers used to great expressive effect. Especially interesting is the reductive nature of her work, eliminating extraneous detail from her compositions, to arrive at a finished work that offers the scenic elements which most interest her. There is often great sophistication in Roumagoux's paintings, illustrating the point that what may at first appear simple, will reward the viewer who lingers that extra moment and discovers the deeper beauty present in her work. It is this tension between an almost naive spontaneity of expression and understated sophistication, along with the genuine beauty of her rich color sense, which first drew me to her work, long ago. 

Roumagoux has exhibited extensively, throughout a long and productive career, including at the Blackfish Gallery, Portland; Mark Woolley Gallery, Portland; Oregon State University, Corvallis; Portland Center for the Performing Arts; Newport Visual Arts Center; Triad Gallery, Seal Rock; Quartersaw Gallery, Portland; Clackamas Community College, Oregon City; Jacobs Gallery-Hult Center, Eugene; Fine Arts Center, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; and many other venues. Her work is also featured in many prestigious public and private collections. 

— Michael Parsons, The Michael Parsons Fine Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon


Heaven Bound, the Book

Heaven Bound

21 paintings by Sandy Roumagoux
21 poems by James Fleming

Heaven Bound, the collaboration of Sandy Roumagoux's paintings and Jim Fleming's poems comes from a bonded pair who knew each other intimately, not in the biblical sense, but with the unison of souls painters and poets have had since before creation...

Learn more here...