Category: Landscape

  • Dateline: Mitchell, Oregon. Canoodling Conundrums on Day 3, Sept 8

    It was cloudy at 8 AM when we started off to the Painted Hills, an earlier day than yesterday. I was ready to finish off an already composed painting. The early start and muted sun turned out to be advantageous for capturing the color of the Hills. And the skies, full of clouds and Moran-like…

  • The John Day Fossil Beds, Further Explorations

    In 2006, I spent a month at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. At the time I was a long-time textile artist but a newbie painter.  My intent was to do studies in oils and watercolor and then transform these into textile art when I returned home. It was an exciting adventure, providing an…

  • Paintings from the Sandgren Workshop

    [Ed. note: this is a re-posting from the southeastmain blog] By june I’m finally ready to post the paintings from the Sandgren Workshop, not because they are fascinating and wonderful, but because, well, because it’s time. I did six paintings in three days, and then I reworked them in the studio. Five of the paintings…

  • 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,…

  • Thomas Hart Benton: Vertical Composition, Energy Fields, and Space through Size

    Thomas Hart Benton  seems to hold one or more of the keys to my attempts to consciously understand my own painting processes. Thomas Hart Benton, Boomtown, 1927 –1928* As I noted here and here, I am concerned to find that sweet spot, the riparian zone of visual art, where space becomes place, but is not…

  • 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…

  • SE Area Art Walk: Nye Beach (1) and A VW on Salmon St

    As I have mentioned, I’m participating in the Southeast Area Art Walk, 10 –5, March 5 and 6. So I’m gathering paintings and textile wall hangings, old and new, to show and perhaps sell, or at least to tell tales about. Here’s an old oil painting, from 2008, of which I am still very fond:…

  • Petrified Forest, Relationships Grouped: “Natural Monuments”

    As I have been stumbling to explain, my plein air experience is infinitely larger, more amazing and important, than my plein air paintings. It’s inevitable, the smells, the sights, the history, the culture, geology, geography, the wind and sun and sky — only tiny bits of this can be encompassed in any single painting. And…