BIO of

RAINA A. VERHEY

Raina Verhey is an oil painter based in Central Oregon, known for her highly emotive western landscapes. Especially focused on desert regions, she employs strong, gestural brush strokes, swaying liminal space and woven earth tones to portray the ethereal spirit of the American West. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1999, Verhey was impacted by a lineage of mule-packing surveyors and travellers, thus heading West herself at a young age. Themes often found in her work are the juxtaposition of stone and hardy flora, towering swells of earth against minimal swaths of foreground, all meant to push the viewer outside of the developmental or societal usage of landscapes, and into the great story of humankind’s dependence and fragility in the Land itself. Verhey is self-taught through methods of plein air, dedicated experimental years and time spent in the backcountry of the American southwest with a sketchpad and a camera, training her eye and developing a unique compositional voice. 

Solo Showings

  • A Gentle Yield, (Campbell Gallery, Sisters, OR 2021)
  • Keepers of the Desert, (Space in Common. Sisters, OR. 2023)
  • The Hands of a Healer, (The Barn in Sisters. Sisters, OR. 2025.)

Group Exhibitions

  • STUDIO TOURS! Sisters Art Association. (Space in Common, Sisters, Oregon. 2023.)
  • STUDIO TOURS! Sisters Art Association. (Space in Common, Sisters, Oregon. 2024.)
  • Young Guns, Western Stock Show. (Denver, Colorado. 2025.)
  • TAYLOR + RAINA Studio Gallery (One Well, Bend, OR. 2025).
  • Sisters Studio Tours. Sisters Art Association. (Open Studio. Sisters, Oregon. 2025.) 
  • Camp Gallery. (Bend, OR. 2024 - Current)
  • Layor Art. (Bend, OR. 2024-Current.)

As a landscape painter, my work is always pushing into the space between what we see and what we sense, expressing those higher truths through imagery and texture. I spend a lot of time in the backcountry, huffing it across the open sage lands and up through the dells searching out my compositions and the story I am trying to tell. I grew up on Louis L’amour, German faerie stories and oral storytelling of a wild world. As much as I am inspired by artists such as Ernest L. Blumenschein and Maynard Dixon, I am driven by the pursuit of story and forgotten wisdom: the voices of the rocks and valleys that just whisper now.

The work in my collections is all made to hold conversation about our dependence on the Land, not for what it gives humanity, but the context it puts us into: spiritual beings, strung together in the womb of a spiritual universe upon an ancient land that reverently holds us accountable. It has been done on panel with brush and palate knife in my Bend, OR studio.

Me and my partner Matt Carter live and work as two artisans with our english lab Pip in the hills above Bend.

- Raina