watercolor, collage, pride

 

                                                Algodones 2 watercolor on Yupo 26x20 inches

                               Spring Leaves, Iron Mountain watercolor on Yupo 26x20 inches

                                               North Coast watermedia on Yupo 35x23 inches

June 26 and 71 degrees at 4 pm? Thank you! 

Our day will come. By this date three years ago, a 'heat dome' had parked over the Pacific Northwest killing hundreds. I`m grateful for todays cool beauty.

Once again it is Pride month. My community of Lake Oswego celebrated its first Pride Event. We went early having no idea what to expect and wanting to be visible bodies if the crowd was small. It wasn`t.

 It is a unique honor and privilege to have lived in this era. Within my lifetime, within my culture, homosexuality has gone from unspeakably disgusting to widely accepted. And for one month, actually elevated. It is still disorienting but when I remember that my Christian mother was there at my wedding, I just feel blessed.

New collages;

                                       Furtive Movement watercolor on yupo collage 14x11 inches

                                          Floating Gate watercolor on yupo collage 12x9 inches

                             Each Flower Tracks the Moon watercolor on yupo collage 14x11 inches

                                     Bikram Dilemma watercolor on yupo collage 26x20 inches

 I`m trying to figure out why making collages is such a different experience from painting. The collages are completely engrossing with time awareness lost almost immediately. When I paint, I`m often waiting for something to 'set up', thinking intently about early 'layers', examining my ultimate visual 'reason' for painting a particular subject and then trying many different techniques to find the one best for this part of this project. Lots of thought! Until, if I`m fortunate, something better takes over. I think most painters paint for this sublime occurrence. When all the processes become harmonized, the angst has vanished and there is an understanding that something special is happening. Each choice makes perfect sense and looks wildly fresh. What a validation and yet totally independent of everything! You can never make it happen only be there when it does with a brush in your hand. Most of the time for me, painting is a complex mental moral entanglement that must be solved. This is why when I try to bring new insights into my process and it still ends up looking  like other RDTs, I`m exasperated. It`s like no matter what  exciting things are happening in the brain, the hand only knows one way of acting.

 These are from last winter, watercolor on Yupo 12 inch diameter. The fabulous Ginny Zanger told me yupo was now being made into circles, so I wanted to try them. Honestly, it wasn`t a great experience. There was a vertigo quality in making them, like they wouldn`t hold still. I even did some abstractions but they seemed unmoored altogether. I like the way they look but getting there was weird.

A neighbors irises. They stopped me on my walk and the more I looked at them I felt certain that their beauty was by design. Someone had thought about those colors and their placement. What a gorgeous carefree patch of life. For me anyway.

                                    

 I have been and known many lonely hearts. This woman found the biggest love of all. From the NYTimes, Modern Love

Finally Finding “The Magic”

Since childhood, I yearned for love. Once, I came within weeks of marriage before it abruptly fell apart. He said we were missing “the magic,” and, admittedly, he was right. A few men came and went. I’m now 59 with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. I still don’t have a partner, but I’ve fallen desperately in love with life. Exquisite beauty emerges everywhere: my cat on my lap, a cashier extending an unexpected smile, sunlight skipping across a lake. I use each day to soak up the world’s splendor. “Not yet,” I whisper to the heavens. “I love it here.” — Clare Cory

It was time for a new one. Some of you longtime readers might remember when that upper palette was new 12 years ago. It looks so awful because I couldn`t keep acrylic paint away from it. My painting process often required watercolor and acrylic applications at the same time. No regrets though now being older, I`m going to try to keep them separated. I`ve rearranged my studio setup to allow enough space for both. If I can actually pull that off, there is hope.

This is a photo of the delta of the Sacramento River I took from a plane a couple of weeks ago. I`ve been curious about it as it was the subject of the last body of work by the late Wayne Thiebaud. Often confused with pop artists, his wonderful work was representational and broadly appealing. The paintings that made him famous long ago were of desserts and deli counters.

                                                                    Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud lived to be 100 and these later paintings were based on the rich agricultural fields of the delta. The productive lands are not a tourist attraction so I`ve never seen them. I`m looking out the window and suddenly there it is! It`s so cool what you can see if the weather is cooperative. Flying down to see my family, we saw a moody Crater Lake and on the return,  saw Morrow Rock and then the Salinas Valley before the delta appeared. Twice before I`ve been able to pick out the landmarks of Yosemite as we flew by. Anyway, Thiebaud was a remarkable painter and by every account a splendid human being. He seems to have had a foundational curiosity and humility that took him far.

                                                                     Wayne Thiebaud

                                                                    Wayne Thiebaud

                                                                    Wayne Thiebaud

I don`t know how or why. Facebook is now sending me the best stuff my heart could desire. Essays by James Baldwin and Susan Sontag, poems by the familiar and unfamiliar, anecdotes about Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith and remembrances of W H Auden and Joseph Campbell. I love it. Facebook gets me at last.

Read this astonishing poem; 

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity. ~Louise Erdrich

 My last plein air effort. Not great but better than my average. Probably because I was sitting next to Jean Gale. Good things happen when she comes around.

god I love Roz Chast

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Forests, real and imagined

                             Selva Profunda 1 watermedia on Yupo 14x11 inches 35.5x28 cm

                              Selva Profunda 2 watermedia on Yupo 14x11 inches 35.5x28 cm

                           Summer Morning CB watercolor on Yupo 14x11 inches 35.5x28 cm


 Trees are why I am an Oregonian. Even though most of the original forests are long gone, the scrappy ones that rose in their place please me too. My fate was set during my family camping vacations in Northern Calif. and Oregon. I took a long detour through New Mexico but once I arrived at last, I knew I was home.
 The paintings above are recent, the third one done on location. It really doesn`t matter if I`m sitting there or not. I remember what they look like once I begin. What I especially enjoy when I do paint on site is the stillness and the intermittent sounds. Usually I`m walking through them getting some exercise. I`m taking it in but it`s a shower, not a soaking bath.
 At 19 on a farm I lived on near Mendocino Calif., I would walk into the woods and find a nice spot. I always had a piece of plastic in my back pocket that I sat on to avoid getting wet. I`d smoke some pot and then just study the forest in detail. It was an education.
 More;

 For those disheartened citizens shocked and appalled by the administrations environmental destructions, here is an article to give you some hope. The state of Maine once had a governor as hostile to nature as Trump but they are turning things around fast. Thank you Governor Janet Mills!

                                                              Wayne Thiebaud


 And here is a lovely little clip of Wayne Thiebaud talking about his career. What an example of kindness and humility and obsession. He`s nearly 100 but still creating. Here is a recent interview with him. Everyone loves Wayne Thiebaud!

                                                     Flood Waters by Wayne Thiebaud

                                                Ice Cream Cones by Wayne Thiebaud



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Watermedia on Yupo Demonstration Sept.21, 2 pm, White Bird Gallery, Cannon beach OR

Moonlight - plein air - Bartow

                                         Moonlight on Oxbow Slough oil 20x16

This is a redo. I thought it was finished but it couldn`t stand the test of time. I didn`t want to look at it after only a month. Not good. When I like something, I linger over it, look at it in different lights, sometimes take a picture on my phone so I can see it in bed in the morning, there`s  a minor obsession involved. So I had to try again and this time I got it.

The plein air festival in Lake Oswego ended last week, I painted four of the seven days. I really enjoyed it too thanks to engaging friends, sublime weather and Oregon`s embarrassment of riches, its natural beauty.
Here I am with Ruth Armitage submerged in the tall grasses and trying to paint the creek just a few feet away;

Burt Jarvis took the photo and that`s his set up in the foreground. Although we were trespassing, his family had once owned this property at the mouth of Tryon Creek and he had great stories of his young life, right there!
I was painting with watercolors when it began to rain. That`s not a happy combination and it`s disastrous if working on Yupo. My piece was ruined but the experience was fun.
A couple of days earlier I did this painting of Oswego Creek;

                                       Oswego Creek Pool watercolor on Yupo 12x9


 A long time hero, Rick Bartow, has been given a retrospective at the Jordon Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. I don`t get out much but I wasn`t going to miss this. I asked Eugene friend Carol Marine to join me;

 The show was huge and emotional. This artist is such an interesting man, he gives it all to the project he`s working on. Having spent much of my life in New Mexico among lots of sentimental 'Native American' art that seemed made for tourists, Rick`s work is refreshingly dark. It`s in his sculptures that his inventive mind really shines;

And he`s a fine painter as well. I saw florals I wasn`t aware of;

and the more familiar animal/human metamorphosis;

Then Carol and I did some painting on location at the Clearwater Park in Springfield. Not in love with my effort though I did seem to suggest sunlight and shade;

                                          Springfield Plein Air watercolor 14x11


Here`s a better plein air painting from a couple of years ago;

                                             Minto Brown March watermedia 12x9


Wayne Thiebaud is probably the most beloved of living American painters. For good reason too, his paintings are imbued with joy;

Here is a wonderful, in depth profile.

In conclusion, I have a product endorsement.
If you`re a sweathog like me, or married to sweathog, take note of this sunscreen which [so far] does not melt and leak into one`s eyes! Stinging blindness while out in the summer bliss is the leading cause of sunscreen non-compliance. This stuff stays put! The texture is sort of challenging, it`s super sticky and you need soap to get it off your hands.  Available at Costco;

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