Ansel Adams captured Yosemite Valley in stunning black-and-white photography.

Richard Diebenkorn's reds and blues defined colorful Ocean Park in Santa Monica in a series of abstract paintings.

John Constable immortalized the Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire, England, in oils.

Landscapes, cityscapes and streetscapes have long provided the raw material for art, and the Sacramento region is no exception. Gregory Kondos, for instance, found renowned inspiration in the Delta.

Such artwork interests many people who might not usually visit art galleries. It evokes a sense of community, of belonging, of home.

Not long ago, art collecting was limited to the wealthy, but technology allows artists to create and sign durable, inexpensive reproductions in limited editions.

At Solomon Dubnick Gallery, photographer Tom Hulse's images of the Pancake Circus on Broadway or El Gordo Carnitas on 47th Avenue take ordinary sights and make you look again.

"A city like San Francisco doesn't work at all for me," said Hulse. "It's much too pretty, way too attractive. I'm not after that."

The sheer ordinariness of many places in Sacramento, in fact, may make for especially evocative artwork, several of the artists said.

Paula Wenzl Bellacera has shown her pieces around the country, and her images of Sacramento resonate far beyond the region. Many local scenes, like the old Iceland skating rink on Del Paso Boulevard, seem quintessentially American, she has found. There is something about the city "that touches the heart of people all over the country."

"I don't think most people realize how picturesque it is," said painter Steve Memering, who grew up in Sacramento.

Or perhaps they do. Demand for images of the Sacramento Valley encouraged Eileen Downes to create her series of American River collages.

"People were wanting Sacramento imagery, and the American River was what I knew," she said.

These are just seven area artists whose work celebrates the region they love.

Steve Memering, painter. Reproductions from $185 available at Smith Gallery, 1020 11th St., Sacramento, (916) 446-4444.

Thanks to Memering's painting, a streak of rosy pink will forever capture the glare of the sun on the side of the state Capitol. Aquas, limes and wine reds will cool in the shade of trees on the lawn.

"I paint from memory," the artist explained in his basement studio in downtown Sacramento's Smith Gallery, where he was working on a picture of Cesar Chavez Plaza.

Rather than trying to depict a location exactly, he edits and moves elements to re-create the scene as he and others remember it.

Memering studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. For many years, he taught art at Mitchell Middle School in Rancho Cordova.

"When I was teaching, I would get up at 4 a.m. and paint for several hours before teaching," he said. "If I don't paint, after about three days I really get to feel itchy."

Vicki Asp, painter. Reproductions from $185 available at Smith Gallery.

"Every part of the country has its own color," said Asp. "I used to live in Virginia, and I pretty much had to mix gray with everything. Here, I paint with pure color."

Asp travels throughout Northern California with an easel and a backpack full of paints. She has a few favorite places, such as an outcrop overlooking Donner Lake, where she paints a few times a year.

"There's something about being in the sounds of nature, the wind blowing against you, trying to capture the feeling of that particular day," she said.

Asp grew up in Oklahoma and Oregon, and has lived in Sacramento for 26 years. She used to paint Sacramento cityscapes, then fell in love with working in the country.

Painting, Asp said, "is learning to look."

She tells a story about working on a bridge in Yosemite in January several years ago, when the valley was covered in snow. A passer-by asked her about a shadow she had painted blue, saying he thought the shadow was gray. Asp told him to look at the gray rocks on the floor of the bridge and to look back at the shadow.

"He was amazed that he saw blue," she said.

Pat Livingston, digital imaging artist. Reproductions from $80, lithographic prints for $20 at his studio at 1021 R St., Sacramento, (916) 224-8288.

If you meet Livingston, he will likely tell you he was "one of the first digital artists on the planet."

In the early 1990s, he was working at a black-and-white photography lab in downtown Sacramento, making deliveries and printing photographs, when his boss asked him to operate a new Kodak machine that converted 35mm transparencies into digital images.

Livingston started coming to the lab early in the morning to use the new scanner for his own artwork. Now his photographic murals are on display in lobbies and conference rooms throughout Sacramento.

His most recent installation was a panorama of downtown Sacramento on two 15-foot, backlighted glass panels in DLA Piper LLP's offices in the Wells Fargo Building on Capitol Mall.

Shooting his own images or collaborating with other photographers, Livingston digitally creates panoramas and gives photos a painterly look.

Livingston then has his artwork printed on canvas. Spraying a layer of white ink on glass, acrylic and aluminum allows him to print on other materials as well.

"With this bad economy, everybody's going out of business," Livingston said. "For some reason, things have picked up for me."

He will show about 20 of his pieces in a joint exhibit with photographer Lewis Kemper at the Capitol Athletic Club, 1515 Eighth St., beginning July 15.

Paul Guyer, painter. Reproductions from $300 available at Solomon Dubnick Gallery, 720 Rhodin Lane, Sacramento.

Guyer was born and reared in Sacramento.

"I characterize my art as being a snapshot of this beautiful city from February 2, 1941, to today," he said.

The 70-year-old's paintings often feature automobiles and neon signs. He works from photographs of the city.

"The images that I paint, of cars, people, shadows and so on, are only there for a fleeting instant, and it's impossible to paint them in real time," he said. Often the scenes he wishes to paint have disappeared, and he relies on photographs in libraries and online archives.

He sells a small canvas for around $700. Many of his buyers, he said, "have very strong connections to or appreciations for Sacramento."

Guyer, who lives in El Macero outside Davis, attended Stanford University and worked for many years as an engineer and an architect.

"Now I am gainfully unemployed, which is a term I prefer to 'retired,' " he said.

Paula Wenzl Bellacera, photographer, painter and sculptor. Prints from $600, ceramics from $95 available at Solomon Dubnick Gallery.

The Polaroid Corp. no longer produces the instant film Bellacera once manipulated to turn photographs into dreamlike images of Sacramento.

After snapping a picture, she'd blur it by moving the emulsion around inside the film with a stick or a spoon. When the film developed, she would scan it and print an enlarged copy, which she would embellish with paints, pencils, and pastels.

The technique allowed Bellacera, originally a photographer, to emulate the style of the Impressionist painters she admired.

"I tried to capture Sacramento icons before they fell to ruin," she said of photographing her favorite government buildings, bars and parks.

Bellacera has lived in Sacramento all her life, except for five years she spent as a graduate student at Tulane University in New Orleans.

"Sacramento hasn't moved quickly to rid itself of its old buildings and structures," she said. Instead, its citizens have protected many historical signs and buildings, making the city an appealing place for an artist such as Bellacera to work.

Since her chosen medium became unavailable, Bellacera has begun working in ceramics, as does her mother, and painting, like her husband. But she has thousands of memories in her bank of old Polaroid photographs.

Eileen Downes, 49, collage artist. Reproductions from $150 available at Solomon Dubnick Gallery.

Viewed from a distance, Downes' collages look like paintings. But stand next to one and it will dissolve into misshapen bits of torn magazine paper.

"I don't just read a magazine," she said.

To her, a woman's brown hair on a slick page is the trunk of a tree. An advertisement for an alligator purse could be a scrap of bark.

A line of text could become the reflection of a cloud on the surface of the American River, which she depicted in a series of collages.

"I feel very strongly that artists should work from an area they're familiar with, to make the work more sincere," said Downes. She lives near the river, and her family has been in Sacramento for five generations.

Downes made technical illustrations for an engineering firm before setting up her own graphic art business. Now she is a full-time artist, selling reproductions of her collages for under $500.

Her medium allows her to embed words and ideas in her artwork. She used pages torn from Sacramento publications in her series of American River collages, for example.

For commissioned work, she will use images and family photographs from her clients' pasts to create something personally meaningful to them.

Downes is often working on several collages at a time, so that she can work on one while the others are drying.

"I don't ever want to stop," she said.

Tom Hulse, 57, photographer. Prints from $300 available at Solomon Dubnick Gallery.

When Hulse was 12, he learned conventional darkroom photography from his father.

"About 10 years ago, I reluctantly went digital, and it changed my life," he said. "It allowed me to get the vision I'd been looking for."

Like Bellacera and Livingston, Hulse alters his photographs of Sacramento to make them look more like paintings. He uses "that unromantic thing called Photoshop" to make his images look flat and surreal.

The Sacramento area provides him with the nondescript apartment buildings and anonymous suburban homes he shoots.

He may drive past a building many times before he realizes there is something there he wants to photograph.

"I will go out and look for pictures, but I often don't find them," he said.

"I'm still finding new streets," he said. "I've been here my whole life."

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