Tag: Painting

  • 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 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…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day Whatever, Oct. 14, 2010

    I have lost track of time. A bit of disorientation in space as well, but  mostly of time. After returning from the Lightning Field, I had to sleep a lot, and I had to re-orient my head to painting. We found a hardworking crew, putting up a fence around our back “patio” space. They start…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day 12, Oct 7, 2010

    I painted, (on masonite, not on stuccoed walls) the Painted Desert Inn this morning, and I demoed painting at the Painted Desert Inn this afternoon. Turns out demoing is a bit easier than painting, although in both cases the wind played havoc with the work at hand. No boards danced off into the badlands, but…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day 11, Oct 6, 2010

    I have no painting to show today, what with rain, hail, and demos at the Painted Desert Inn. Not to mention tourists freaked out by flooding and wild weather at the Grand Canyon and tornadoes at Flagstaff.  All in all, I was grateful for my “studio” in the enclosed and roofed upper patio space at…

  • Petrified Forest, Day 8, October 3, 2010

    This was our day off, a day which I intended to be so lazy that I would awake at 10, take 3 naps, and be in bed before 8. Good luck! I woke up as the sky was lightening, but closed my eyes fiercely against the temptation. Then I opened them again as the sky…