Don Van Amerongen is a Northern California painter and photographer based in Occidental, California. His work explores the tension between movement and stillness, often hovering between landscape and abstraction. Swirling skies, shifting shorelines, and ambiguous figures dissolve into one another, creating spaces that feel both familiar and dreamlike, as in this piece, where land, water, and sky seem to be in constant motion.

Van Amerongen studied painting, printmaking, and design at the San Francisco Art Institute, Sonoma State University and the Kendall School of Design, and also attended workshops with Ansel Adams early in his career. His work has been exhibited widely across California and beyond, including shows at Southern Exposure Gallery San Francisco, Gallery Route One in Point Reyes, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley, Riverfront Art Gallery in Petaluma, and galleries in Portland, Denver, Napa, San Miguel de Allende, and Los Angeles. He has received several awards The California Arts Council Grant, Sonoma County Community Foundation Fellowship and Sobel Scholar Ship Award. He also has been published in American Artwork, Bohemian Magazine and 1340 Art Magazine.

Across oils and photographic works, Van Amerongen often starts from an observed landscape or figure and lets it dissolve into color, gesture, and atmosphere. The result is a body of 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.

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