Welcome

June Underwood takes her artistic prompts from her quotidian, her daily existence. She began as a textile artist, but her textiles became more and more painterly, and she took various painting classes from artists and instructors in Portland Oregon, her hometown. In September 2006, she was artist-in-residence at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon. She likes to say, "I went to the Fossil Beds a quilter and came home a painter."

Underwood’s paintings, mostly oils, begin with a personal  encounter, working always from what she has physically experienced. She can be something of a genre painter, depicting tiny mountain villages as well as Portland. These paintings verge on the wonky, and are clearly executed from a personal vision of city space.  More recently she has been painting landscapes.

“Each painting," she says, "has to come out of specifics of the place, anything from the smell of sagebrush to the aroma of panhandlers. I hoard experiences, paint within and from them, and hope the paintings resonate with the people, landmarks and tactility of the places I paint.”

In February and March of 2009, Underwood was workspace artist-in-residence at the Goldwell Open Air Art Museum in Beatty, Nevada. The Mojave Desert, with its "space without orientation," presented her with new insights into the nature of place. She continues to explore how the desert space, having little conventional atmospheric change of tone and not much vertical relief, can be meaningfully expressed through paint.  In August 2009, in far southeastern Oregon, just north of the Basin and Range territory, she painted From the Diamond Grade, a panorama of seven canvases, 12 inches by 112 inches.  The Diamond Grade panorama can be found in "Work in Progress."  While this particular panorama is finished, it remains "in-progress" because, in a personal and metaphysical sense, it is a sample of the most compelling visions she has yet to paint.

Underwood returned to the Mojave, to the Goldwell Studio at the northern end of the Amargosa desert, in November, 2009 to work on large canvases.  For an essay about the process and photos of the results of 30 days of intense work, you can check her residency blog, juneunderwoodpaintings. This link will take you to verbal ruminations and photos; feel free to browse through later and earlier entries.

Photos of the large linen paintings are also posted on this website, here.

Underwood maintains a general blog with her husband, Jer, which can be found at southeastmain. She is also a regular contributor to Art and Perception.

Underwood's essay on finding a personal voice, along with photos of processes used in producing one of her large art quilts, Miocene, is part of the Studio Art Quilt Journal, Vol 19, Fall, 2009, pp. 12-13.  "June Underwood's Motto: Fools Rush" in The Professional Quilter. Fall, 2007), by Eileen Doughty, features Underwood as an artist using somewhat traditional quilting techniques. Another interview was conducted about her oil painting at her residency in Basin, Montana; it is found in "The [Helena Montana] Independent Record" (January 04, 2008), entitled "Celebration of Place."