About the artist:

Bob Nugent received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1971. Since that time he has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Fullbright Travel Grant and a California Arts Council Grant for his work in Brazil. In 2005, after 34 years of teaching painting and drawing, Bob retired from Sonoma State University. The following year he was elected to Professor Emeritus in Art at Sonoma. Bob has had over 120 solo exhibitions and has been included in over 650 group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. Bob Nugent first became interested in the Indigenous peoples and rain forest of South America in the summer of 1984 during a trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil to see an artist friend. Over more than 30 years he has made repeated sojourns to South America and in particular the Amazon Basin of Brazil. Returning to Brazil now one to two times a year, Bob continues his research and study of the flora and fauna of the Amazon Region as well as other parts of the country. But it is the vital layer, as Nugent calls it, which interests him the most.