When you view his paintings, Ken Grant wants you to actually feel the warmth of the sunlight "as it streams through the window, pouring into the room and caressing the objects therein."

Hanson Howard Gallery, 82 N. Main St., Ashland, is featuring an exhibit of Grant's oil paintings this month. The canvases are typically 36 inches by 48 inches or 30 inches by 40 inches and depict inviting interior landscapes with some reference to the sea in the background.

"None of the houses are by the sea," Grant says. His partner is an antiques dealer. When there is an estate sale, Grant accompanies her and photographs the house. "I come home with loads to work with." In the final painting, to get the effect he wants, Grant will remove walls and change what's going on outside — usually adding the oceanic reference.

"I want you to feel like you're in that room or a room you remember."

The mood of his paintings may strike the viewer as austere or lonely. There is no furniture or carpet on the shiny wooden floors, no curtains on the large windows and no paintings on the yellow ochre walls. In the painting "First of Summer," three suitcases stand at the foot of the wooden, white banister staircase.

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Where are the people?

"They haven't left," Grant explains optimistically. "They've just arrived." For him the mood is clearly peaceful and serene. "Like a new beginning. Like a fresh canvas."

Grant works to give his oils a transparent luminous quality that is especially effective when he depicts wooden surfaces. "I'm interested in how light reflects off things," he says.

Born in Klamath Falls in 1938, Grant has lived in Oregon all his life. And he has been painting all his life. From 1956 to 1962, he studied at the Advertising Art School where he taught drawing and anatomy for three years. From 1969 to 1970, he studied drawing and sculpture at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art).

From 1958 to 1970, Grant worked in various aspects of retail-store window and interior display design.

In 1960 he and a friend opened an art gallery in Cannon Beach. He would return there in 1972 with his wife and two sons. His years in Cannon Beach are the inspiration for the presence of the sea in much of his work.

Since 1982 Grant has made Portland his home. After years of doing pencil drawings, he returned to painting in 1994 and now paints six to seven hours a day to satisfy the many galleries that show his work.

"What I ultimately hope to accomplish with my work is to draw the viewer into the painting," Grant says, "to feel the light and space and evoke a distant memory."

The Ken Grant exhibit will continue at the Hanson Howard Gallery through July 30. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday. Call 488-2562. To view more of Grant's work, see gallerygrant.com on the Web.