Category: Context

  • Playa Residency, September 11 through September 25, 2013

    [Note: The dated entries to the residency journal were done on-site at Playa, but because of restrictions on the bandwidth at the site, none were uploaded until I returned home at the end of September. I will be posting those over the next month, starting with the one done on the first day.] In this…

  • Benton, Pollock, and, um, Underwood

    As I explored in previous posts (here, here, and here), I’m continuing my quest for compositional methods and ways of seeing that can give me a framework for my mostly intuitive working. Thomas Hart Benton and scholars discussing his work have dissected his use of vertical spirals, collage-like murals, and falling-into-your-lap figuration. Thomas Hart Benton,…

  • Wonky-Scapes, a truncated history

    I was prevented from hanging my upcoming exhibit Wednesday afternoon by construction issues, so I decided my spare time could be spent rummaging around in my brain, thinking about how I got to doing wonky plein air and studio city-scapes. The exhibit is Wonky PDX: City-Scapes by Yours Truly, showing at the Full Circle Gallery,…

  • Space and Place, the Tangle and the Wonkiness

    To continue my thoughts on space and place: I have been working on textiles, which means 10% design and 90% execution. Execution always gives me lots of time to think. So I am pondering, still, on my own art making — what I make, and why it’s not necessarily what I generally like in art.…

  • Space and Place, First Thoughts

     The Amargosa Panorama from Fra Lippo Lippi, by Robert Browning …We’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted — better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God…

  • PEFO Paintings, Mostly Finished.

    I promised to provide updates to this blog as I worked in my Portland, Oregon, studio on the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Paintings. I am in the process of moving this WordPress.com blog, pages and posts, to my website, but until that process is completed and ready for public consumption, I thought I would…

  • Petrified Forest Residency: A concluding remark or two, in Context

    I have been shilly-shallying about writing this conclusion for close to a month now. And it’s not because I don’t know what I want to say. I think it’s because I can summarize or I can expostulate, and while the first is almost too brief, the latter is too turgid. So here are some silly…