Thank you!

 

 Two watercolors from New Mexico both over 30 years old now. You`re seeing them because I have no new completed work. I`m still in that promotional hyper-drive for a bit longer. First of all, thank you for the photos of your messy desks, I feel the solidarity! To the neurodivergent who sent me assurance, thank you! I don`t meet the criteria, as far as I can tell, for ADHD, but I sure can create a mess in doing almost anything. For a short time while we were in our thirties, I lived with my oldest brother Gary. He was tidy and clean and I felt like a dirt devil in his home, but I`ve learned to live with it.

You visitors to the first Lake Oswego Open Studios, thanks so much! It was a success beyond any of our hopes. We were correct, there were enough artists in our community and a population willing to support them. There were joyful encounters throughout the neighborhoods. In time I think the event will be a valued part of the cultural life of this town. 

 Here is my promotion; my show opens Saturday Nov.4 at the White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach Oregon. I`ve shown there for 38 years. This weekend opening is part of the towns Stormy Weather Festival which was created to encourage art lovers to visit at the beginning of the rainy season. It`s in the autumn that the coast has the wildest storms. The idea was to celebrate it and create a weekend full of fun, special events. I`m going to be giving short demonstrations of my painting techniques in watercolor on the plastic paper from Japan called Yupo.  1 pm on both days. Though public speaking is terrorizing, somehow I can paint and answer questions calmly. Come say hello. Ask me anything.

This is just a short post but I have a Public Service Announcement. While visiting my old buddy in New York, she tried to forward a recipe she liked from the New York Times. But it was blocked. My subscription to the Times does not include the food section or games. Now I pay $20 a month but they want more for my access to recipes. So I vent my frustration and mention what I pay every month. She says her subscription is $4.07 and includes everything. So now I`m angry but wait until I return home  before calling. I absolutely enjoy the digital newspaper so I wanted a back up before I threaten them with leaving.  I decide I`ll take the LA Times. I get a guy in a call center who immediately gives me everything for $4 a month, good for a year. I get credit for the last renewal they took from my bank account. When a year is up, he said just call back and make some noise and it will be extended again. Do all of these newspaper sites do this? Seems like a kind of theft. If you feel you`re paying too much for a digital subscription to anything, it may be worth your while to call them and negotiate a new rate.

click HERE for work in my studio for sale

Exhibition at the White Bird

 

 The show I`m having at the White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach Oregon coincides with the 50 year anniversary of the gallery. I`ve been a part of it for 35. The poster above is available from the gallery, $35.

 The founder of the gallery, Evelyn Georges, was in New Mexico on vacation and staying in the bed and breakfast of a friend. My work hung in the guest rooms. Meanwhile I`m in Oregon giving it a trial run while living with my brother Gary. After a year, I moved back to Santa Fe for a while longer before coming to the Northwest permanently in 1993. Evelyn came by my studio in 1986 in a section of Portland now called the Pearl District. She looked at lots of my work with most of it done after the month long workshop I had participated in with Richard Diebenkorn. I was inspired and really productive and she asked me to show at her gallery. Evelyn wasn`t easy but she was a true believer in the relevance of art. Our relationship was tested but it held fast, I knew she cared about and believed in me. 

 The White Bird has always had an eclectic group of artists and for many of them, showing there was their first experience being represented by a gallery.  A long time employee, Allyn Cantor, bought the gallery from Evelyn before her death in 2014. As the new owner, she continues in the same spirit. I`ve never worked with anyone who was so simultaneously sharp, empathetic, and principled. She has been so kind to me even when I whine. The public, promotional part of a painting career has always been uncomfortable. I`m friendly and like the attention but I do not want to clamor for it. I write my blog, post my paintings on Instagram and Facebook, appreciate the notice and let Allyn do the other promoting.

Here are the paintings in the show. They all are 26x20 inches [55x51 cm] in either pure watercolor or mixed water soluble mediums such as acrylic, ink and crayon on the plastic paper Yupo;

                                                                 Downstream Tahquitz

                                                              Above the Cold Ocean

                                                                              Beltane

                                                                     Coastal Nocturne

                                                                         Cliff Corner 

                                                                      Dune Sea Sky

                                                                              Estuary

                                                                        Forest Edge

                                                                         North Coast

                                                                        Glacial Water

                                                                           North Slope

                                                                      River Run Park

                                                                       Over the Sea

                                                                           Reliquary 3

                                                                   North Coast Cliffs

                                                                Stafford Valley October 1

                                                              Stafford Valley October 2

                                                       The Cloud Lifts from the Mountain

                                                               Surrounding the Creek

                                                                      Summer Cliffs

                                                     Oswego Creek Spring 23x35 inches

 I was in Cannon Beach this morning to see the show. Most of the paintings are unframed and hung beautifully. It`s an unconventional presentation with a distinct advantage. The paintings can be rolled up and shipped in a mailing tube at a cost much less than shipping a framed painting with glass. They are also suitable for professional mounting and hanging without glass at all. They have been varnished with a UV protection matte varnish.

Here are some photos from Cannon Beach earlier today;

The pandemic made it worse but my inertia on updating my website has ended. After many recommendations, I sat down with Squarespace and tried to do it myself. Unsurprisingly it was disastrous. But I had paid already and begun the transfer of my domaine name. I put out a call of distress and sure enough the network came through for me. A watchful mom saw the S.O.S. on Nextdoor and promptly suggested her bright son design it. I go talk to him and he assures me he`s the guy I want. I believe him.

Not as much but I am painting too. There are several paintings in process in my studio and I think this one is finished;

oil on Multimedia Art Board 12x12 inches

                                                              

 I also will be part of the Portland Open Studios Oct. 9 and 10 and Oct. 16 and 17, 10am-5pm. I have open windows, good ventilation and masks will be required. I`m confident it will be a safe environment.

I live at 5373 Lakeview Blvd, Lake Oswego OR 97035

Please come by

Click HERE for work in my studio

Matters of Scale

                                                       River Shore watermedia on Yupo 6x20


 Could you imagine this watercolor 10 feet long? Would that be interesting or too loud? The issue of how large my paintings should be has plagued me since I was young. I`ve tried hard to have a career with integrity yet this one issue has compromised my practice since early on. Practical concerns have mostly won out. Like many young people I moved more often than was desirable and the transportation and storage of big paintings was always a problem. I wanted to work large but they didn`t sell very well. The impulse to do them wasn`t pure either. Was I just clamoring for attention with their scale? Was that OK? There are so many logistical matters to think about in the life of a painter! Do they give the students any help with this in art school? Because I didn`t go, I`ve had to figure out most everything myself. In several periods of my career I just said to hell with it, I`m going to go big. Some of those 30 year old paintings are stacked fifteen feet away from where I`m sitting now writing this. The inability to find homes for the large canvases would then cause an over-correction. Nothing that isn`t comfortable to carry. Or later, nothing that won`t fit in my car. Then the pressure builds again and I have a new brood of bigguns. Now I have a bigger car too! One might think the answer is within me but it`s not! Not yet anyway. This isn`t a fatal dilemma, I`m not tortured by it. The primary thing is I`ve painted consistently for forty years.
Though my studio is large, the ceiling is low. There is a real limit to what I can get past my stairwell. And as I`ve gotten older, it`s certainly easier to manage the moderately scaled pieces. Sometimes I think I could be happy painting tiny botanical studies at a desk and at other times I want to do 20 foot long watercolor scrolls. So on it goes, round and round.
Maybe it`s mature to be practical, I greatly admire Thomas Nozkowski, and all of his stuff would fit on my back seat.

The painting above comes from a small patch of grasses and trees along the Tualatin River backed by a steep hill. It`s in a park in West Linn, close to the baseball diamond and is just spectacular to me. Somehow the light on this spot is always dramatic. The paintings below all derive from this same magical corner on the river;

                                                               Riverlight Study wm 12x9

                                                           Riverbank Study 2 wm 14x11

                                                                 Riverlight 1 oil 20x20

                                                                  Riverlight 2 oil 20x20

                                                             Riverbank Study wm 14x11

Hugh Hefner

 Allow me some words of gratitude for the life of Hugh Hefner.

I`m a feminist, I understand the arguments and controversies his life and business provoked. And I`ve always found him creepy. But he did the world a great favor in his effort to legitimize sexual desire. The Playboy 'sex friendly' attitude helped liberate a lot of compressed and suppressed feelings about sex. In doing this, I believe he helped women have more understanding and control of their choices and roles in life. He and the advice columnist Ann Landers were also among the first public figures to say the obvious; homosexual people are born and part of nature. I appreciate that.

 Now for some pure bragging. Watch my tremendously gifted cousin, Anya Cloud, in some contact improvisation here, with the great dancer Matan Levkowich. Exquisitely beautiful.

                                                                       Prince Harry

 I used to rail against the idea of monarchy. The notion of superiority by birthright was deeply offensive, undemocratic and racist! 

I hadn`t done my research. 

When I read of Queen Elizabeth`s active role in WW2, my beliefs began to shift. Now I understand the British monarchy at least, to be an example of moral courage, a model of service to the common good and boosters of the best Britain has to offer the world. Look through these pictures of Prince Harry at the Invictus Games. What a lovely humane young man! 

We used to have such a leader too.

 OK, my big Pinterest discovery is Heli Huotala, a Finn of great sensitivity to nature and of the properties of paint. I could live in one of her paintings.

                                                                  Heli Huotala

                                                                    Heli Huotala

                                                                  Heli Huotala

She is doing everything I hope to do.

                                                                High Summer-Sauvie Island

 My watercolor demo from two weeks ago on the coast turned into an oil painting. Things change!

 Last week to see my show at the White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach OR!

Travlin Randy

                                     High Summer/Sauvie Island watercolor on Yupo 20x20


 I`ve been to East, I`ve been to the West.
John and I finally made our trip to the Painted Hills, a unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. I have wanted to see this marvel for many of the 25 years I`ve been here. Maybe having come from New Mexico, I had had enough of an arid geology. I was more than ready now and they were worth waiting for. Eastern Oregon is remote, expansive, extremely beautiful and mostly unsung. We stayed at the Painted Hills Vacation Rentals which was an Oasis hanging on the side of a canyon above the town of Mitchell.

 There are three cottages one of them quite large. They hosted 42 astronomers during the total eclipse of the sun last month and it was quite a party. The complex itself is a work of art. Bright cheerful colors everywhere in the jungle of trees and flowers.

Mitchell itself looks like an old west mining town whose glory has passed. But rebuilding is in process and the town has three restaurants!

 The last smoke from Oregon`s terrible forest fires still hung in the air when we saw the Hills. Still awesome but subdued in the haze. We knew that rain was coming and the next day we woke to dazzling weather.

The Sheep Rock Unit 40 miles away was our next destination. The colors and formations were impressive and even the dried grasses and weeds had a pristine beauty. Pinkish grass against turquoise cliffs was a color combo I had never seen before. The sweet John Day River was a bonus.
Such an utter opposite to the rainforests where I live and only 4 hours from Portland!
Yes I painted;

                                                             watercolor on Yupo 12x9

                                                              watercolor on paper 8x8

                                                               watermedia on Yupo 8x8


 I went to the coast next to do a demonstration at the White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach where my show is in process;

Nice low key event, and I wasn`t nervous at all this time. The painting at the top of the post is the demo and it was created from a 20 year old drawing.
We stayed in an old three bedroom house near the estuary and very close to downtown for only $100 a night! [Seasense-503 781 8886]

 The next morning we spent at Hug Point. It was low tide and the caves were accessible.

 Two great weekends in Oregon. Didn`t break the bank and they left me feeling lucky.