BELLINGHAM, WA.- Returning Home: Six Decades of Art by Ira Yeager surveys the artist's multifaceted approach to art where figures and landscapes, vibrant colors, and abstract lines harmoniously mingle. Highlighting more than 50 works of art, ranging from intimate en plein air studies to large oil and acrylic canvases, the exhibition provides viewers an opportunity to appreciate Yeager's stylistic development over 60 years.

On view at the Whatcom Museum's Lightcatcher building from February 6, 2016 and running through May 15, 2016, the exhibition marks the first Washington museum retrospective of the artist, who left Bellingham, where he was born and raised, for art school in San Francisco.

Ira Yeager has traveled the world and created a unique body of work that illuminates the characters and landscapes that he encountered while abroad. The exhibition reflects the ways that he reinvented himself as an artist while exploring the many places he called home: Florence, Corfu, Tangiers, Santa Fe, New York City, San Francisco, and Calistoga.

Born in Bellingham, WA in 1938, and exploring drawing from the age of eight, the region exerted a formidable influence on the budding artist. His father, Ira Yeager senior, the founder of the sporting goods store of the same name, outfitted and led fishing and hunting expeditions in the Pacific Northwest. But Ira, born of a sensitive nature, rejected this machismo culture and found refuge in the world of art.

"I longed to be on the shore painting when I was a child," said Ira Yeager. "Painting was one of the things that helped me—that was my passion."

His father's store opened up a fertile avenue of artistic inspiration by providing Yeager contact with Native American traders from Western Washington and Vancouver Island. Although New Mexico sparked the artist's interpretive series of aboriginal people, Bellingham provided the seed. He eventually looked outside of Whatcom County for a cultural center with an established art school. After graduating high school, he moved to California and attended the California College of Arts and Crafts where he studied with renowned painters Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991), Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), and Nathan Oliveira (1928-2010).

Yeager's artwork reflects his love of travel, which began in the 1960s. He lived in Italy, Morocco and Greece, explored France and Spain, and has traveled extensively to other countries where he interpreted landscapes and culture. After living in New York City, Yeager returned to San Francisco in the early 1980s and has lived in the Napa Valley since 1990, where wine country landscapes have influenced his work.

Returning Home includes the artist's luminous Napa Valley Vineyards, playful interpretations of baroque and rococo masters, and the series titled Indian Paintings that occupied him for forty years. From the verdant valleys of Napa where California's finest winery grapes are grown to the eighteenth century French courtly painters, Yeager draws inspiration from both reality and fantasy. Add to this mixture the artist's unceasing wanderlust and a touch of the exotic, and the result is a prolific body of work composed of many chapters in the artist's stylistic evolution.