June O. Underwood (born in 1942) grew up along the Susquehanna River in Appalachian Pennsylvania and has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1989. This site is about June’s visual art — her dyed and stitched textiles, oil paintings, wirework, ink, and watercolor — as well as the writings that she has completed. Most of the artwork was done after 1995; her most recent book, Conversations with Friends: A Story, is to be published in fall, 2026.
At age 84 June also confesses to being a wife (63 years) to Jerry Underwood, mother to Jan, grandmere to Sam, as well as having taught literature and writing to undergraduates and graduates in a variety of places and spaces. But those are different kinds of stories and living than these of visual art and published writings. This website is about my visions and musings and imaginings. In a sense it’s an archive and a memoir, and in another sense, it’s re-visioning for its author.
Hand-dyed and painted. Machine stitched
Miocene is painted and dyed silk and cotton, which was then layered with batting and a back and quilted. I began doing art with commercial prints and traditional quilting techniques. But the artistic possibilities of stitching and painting led me to 1) educate myself in the studio arts through every means possible and 2) to use quilted textiles as canvases, using the stitching as if it were thick oil paint — to convey movement and shapes and texture.
Golden Canyon. 52″ x 58″, Oil on canvas, 2009
A writer and observer of landscape says humanity’s concept of landscape is “a hodgepodge of sensations, impressions, meanderings, and insights: real embodied experiences in a real, encompassing place.” (p. 196, of Landscape Theory by Jennifer Jane Marshall)) This hodgepodge of the realities of the personal impressions and the external world is what I undertake to retain within my paintings.
Circling. 30 x 40″, oil on canvas, 2009
My immersion in the world around me has been conveyed in a number ways. I paint panoramas, capturing scenes over days or weeks.
I work in multiples and series because I’m fascinated with what happens when I return again and again to a place, time, or personal insight.
I write essays, short stories, stories that are more like novels, and have published a “journal,” which was written to be published.
And sometimes I just play around, painting family portraits, braiding wire, pouring ink, and taking photos, just because.
I’ve been a contributor to Art and Perception and the Ragged Cloth Cafe blog as well as an essayist on the Henri Art Magazine. I have been at art residencies in Oregon, Montana, Nevada, and Arizona and loved them all. The residencies introduced me to new people and new landscapes, which was what kept me wanting to create. Staying in a new place for a month or two and producing color on canvas while being there focused my mind while expanding it. And now that age and circumstances force me to remain mostly at home, I use the studio to play with visions, on paper as well as canvas.
“A mystical experience, says Marilyn Robinson, author of Gilead and Home, “would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. … there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.”
Indeed, ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.
For a brief listing of facts about me, click here
juneunderwood.com 