Category: Plein air paintings

  • PSF Residency: Posts 7 & 8 (Plant 5, panel studies 3 & 5)

    Two posts this evening because I failed to get to Friday’s events until now. So, two days down on the res…. Here are two paintings, one from Friday and the other from Sunday, now ensconced in my studio. Both were done at the Eastside Plating Plant, Building 5. Both were done plein air. On Friday…

  • PSF Residency: Post #4

    These posts come slow and slower. I hope not to have to record slowest. I spent one day down on the res last week. I did one plein air painting. The temperature hovered at about 44 degrees, but the sun mostly shone. In that plein air day, I began the study of the buildings that…

  • Dateline: Mitchell, Oregon, Day 6, Sept 11, 2011

    Today Jer went to Paulina, Post, and Prineville, where he got milk and cereal and gas. I stayed at Hollyhock Cottage and worked on the three partly finished paintings. Here are the paintings, in the order of today’s workings: JOU, Basalt Formations at Picture Gorge, Sept 2011, 30 x 40″, oil on canvas JOU, The…

  • Dateline: Mitchell, Oregon, Day 5, Sept 10, 2011

    We zoomed out to Picture Gorge extra early today, hoping to catch the shadows and avoid the heat. We were carrying the large canvases in the carrier Neighbor Jim made for me; the carrier protects the car from oil paint, and me from sorrowful looks by Jer, who loves his 1994 Honda and can’t bear…

  • Dateline: Mitchell, OR, Picturing Picture Gorge, Sept 9, Day 4

    After I posted yesterday’s journal, I decided to work more on the paintings I had started earlier in the day. During the morning session, in addition to working further on the long narrow 12 x 24″ piece, I had hurriedly used up the paints on my palette  as Jer hiked up the trail toward me.…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…