Don Van Amerongen is a Northern California painter and photographer based in Occidental. His work explores the tension between movement and stillness, often hovering between landscape and abstraction — swirling skies, shifting shorelines, and the human form dissolving into one another to create spaces that feel both familiar and dreamlike.
His process moves across photography, digital imagery, and oil painting, with each medium feeding the next. A photograph becomes the starting point for layered digital work — built up, erased, and reworked on the computer until the original image is felt more than seen — and that resolved abstraction often becomes, in turn, the ground for a painting on canvas.
His current body of work extends this inquiry into a sustained series exploring the inseparability of the body and the landscape — coastlines read as skin, tide as pulse — sharpened by an unflinching response to environmental crisis and an unsettled cultural moment. Color operates less as description than as emotional charge, carrying weight the imagery alone can't hold. The result, across all three mediums, is work that feels like memory surfacing: fleeting, emotional, and slightly unsteady, as if the world is shifting underfoot but still anchored in light and place.
Van Amerongen studied painting, printmaking, and design at the San Francisco Art Institute, Sonoma State University, and the Kendall School of Design, and attended workshops with Ansel Adams early in his career. His work has been exhibited widely across California and beyond, including Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco), Gallery Route One (Point Reyes), O'Hanlon Center for the Arts (Mill Valley), and Riverfront Art Gallery (Petaluma), with additional shows in Portland, Denver, Napa, San Miguel de Allende, and Los Angeles. Upcoming 2026 exhibitions include the Sausalito Center for the Arts and the Sebastopol Art Center.
He is the recipient of a California Arts Council Grant, a Sonoma County Community Foundation Fellowship, and the Sobel Scholarship Award, and his work has been published in American Artwork, Bohemian Magazine, and 1340 Art Magazine. His paintings and photographs are held in the collections of Wells Fargo Bank, the City of Santa Rosa, and Natural Resource Group.