Watercolors, oils, pastels and acrylics — some 40 works in all — fill three rooms for the April show at SageBrushers Art Society gallery in Bend.

What makes that tally even more impressive is that the exhibit is a one-man show, a retrospective exhibit of paintings by longtime SageBrusher Norbert “Norb” Volny.

A reception for the exhibit will be from 2:30 to 5 p.m. Saturday at the gallery (see “If you go” on Page 13).

The show includes some of Volny’s earliest paintings, including surprisingly mature impressionist paintings done at age 10, when he was an “Army brat,” he said, in Mannheim, Germany. (He began cutting his artistic teeth even younger than that if you count the paint-by-numbers work he did at age 8.)

“There was a Herr Schmidt who my folks found out was teaching some kids how to oil paint,” Volny, 64, explained Monday morning at the gallery, filled with his bright and colorful landscapes, portraits and more while a class was being held in an adjacent room.

“They asked him if he’d teach me, and he said he didn’t teach any kids younger than 12. They talked him into trying me out. I ended up painting with him for about two years, twice a week about an hour and a half at a time.”

You can see some of Volny’s childhood efforts in the show, including two 1956 portraits that hang side by side. They’re nearly identical, right down to the buttons on the subject’s shirt, although one painting is noticeably smaller than the other.

“His method of teaching was we would paint a subject together, and then he’d give me a smaller canvas to paint on my own, totally, as homework,” he said. “I didn’t realize until I was probably in college how it was really harder to paint smaller.”

He gives a lot of credit to Schmidt’s teaching methods, but Volny’s 1956 “Alpine Chalet,” painted on his own as homework in 1956, could be the work of an older, more experienced painter.

After his father left the Army, Volny painted stateside with Central California artist Thomas F. Goff, designer of the famed “Hollywood” sign (which originally read “Hollywoodland”). Goff (1890-1983) was an impressionistic landscape painter whose oils are popular with collectors today.

Volny painted with “Grandpa” Goff, as he called him, from about 1960 to 1973, when he graduated with a degree in architectural engineering from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

In ’73, Volny moved to Portland, where he worked as an engineer and raised a family with his wife, Joan, who’s the reason more than a few of his paintings in the show are marked “NFS” (Not For Sale).

“She puts dibs on them, and then after a while, she’ll get tired of them and I’ll put them for sale,” he said.

Throughout his career, Volny continued to paint in his free time, which was in shorter supply when he was “working as an engineer, slaving away,” he said. His family moved to Bend in 1980, and he started his own company, Volny Engineering Inc., and did work on projects including Pine Marten Lodge at Mt. Bachelor.

Volny began painting at SageBrushers about 12 years ago, a few years before he retired. Always fascinated with other media, he began taking classes with other artists, including studying watercolors with Denise Rich.

Having painted with oils most of his life, he was used to covering “the whole thing,” Volny said, laughing. With watercolors, “you work more with negative space.”

In recent years, Volny has also been painting with acrylics, which likewise took some getting used to — but not because they were entirely new to him.

“When (acrylics) first came out, they were so lousy. I tried them in college, when I was about 20. They were so chalky, the paint didn’t blend and mix right. I tried it once, and threw them away. Now they make them where they have translucence, and you can actually mix them.”

Still, “you’ll notice that the oil is a lot more bright, for the most part, even though that’s 50-plus years old,” he said, pointing across the room at the early oils painted with Herr Schmidt.

The subject matter of works in the show is even more varied than the media used to create them: There’s a painting of three raccoons treed by his dog, another of Tahiti after a typhoon, his granddaughter sniffing a flower.

Volny paints both from photographs and en plein air (outdoors). He explained that he was drawn to impressionism as a child.

Liking that style, “it makes it hard sometimes to paint the High Desert and keep it realistic.”

You wouldn’t guess that, seeing, for example, his lifelike painting of two cowboys in “Spring on the John Day,” painted from a photograph with a little artistic license.

Father to a son and daughter who are also artistic, Volny said his five grandkids constitute his other hobby. But he still devotes about 8-10 hours a week to painting.

In fact, he has oils left from 1956 that are still usable, and said he plans to break them out later this year. He has no particular project in mind, just “hundreds of photographs,” he said.

“The big part of art is the social thing. It gives you an excuse to talk to people and relate to people from all walks of life,” Volny said. “It’s something you don’t have as much of working as, say, an engineer, using the left side of your brain most of the time. This is right-sided stuff. It’s fun for a change.”

If you go

What: Retrospective exhibit by Norb Volny

When: Through April 29; reception from 2:30 to 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: SageBrushers Art Society, 117 S.W. Roosevelt Ave., Bend

Cost: Free

Contact: www.sagebrushersartofbend.com or 541-617-0900