1990
In 1990 I flew from my home in New Mexico to the Northwest for a visit. I had a pocket sketchbook with me and did the drawing somewhere over Utah. The juxtaposition of the geometry in the agriculture against the organic eroding landscape, fascinated me. The painting was one of many large watercolors I did in Chimayo NM.
I`m posting this because I`ve been knee deep in my annual website update. For some reason this is never simple and takes way too much time. And I`m having old slide images transferred to CD so I can view them again. To my dismay, I found out many were already losing color though they had been stored properly. Listen up painters! if you want a lasting record of older work, get those slides transferred as soon as you have time to sort through them. I had no idea they would deteriorate so quickly. Picture Perfect in the John`s Landing neighborhood of Portland did a quick, quality job for me at a great price.
Last weekend I stumbled on the work of Jonathan Apgar on Pinterest and it stunned me. Although completely abstract and painterly, they seem to have spatial qualities we see in the landscape with divisions created by casual patterns and biomorphic shapes. Often the paintings are dense with strokes in odd and original colors. There is a haunting character to these massive works, take a look. On his generous website, he even shows a tutorial on building stretcher bars! I asked him if I could post some of his images and he was kind to agree.
Jonathan Apgar
Jonathan Apgar
Jonathan Apgar
available work in the studio
3 comments:
Oh, I like his work. I clicked over to his site. Will keep him in mind for my column at EIL.
It's so interesting to see how you translated your aerial sketch into a painting while remaining true to the patterns that originally caught your attention. The lake went from a vertical shape to a flattened body of water with accurate perspective.
I'm not so fond of Apgar's work but I suspect that seeing the work in person would quickly change my mind.
Thanks for making me aware of Apgar's work--I like.
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