Lotus!

                                                watermedia on Yupo 14x11"

 Years ago the once esteemed art supplier, Daniel Smith in Seattle, started getting cute by offering themed color sets and goofy paints made from obscure minerals. Trying to be 'fresh' I`m sure. They were relentless in promoting these useless items in their catalogs and I always wondered who would buy them? Well, someone died and I came into possession of several tubes of these Daniel Smith 'exclusives'. Here are some of the names; Genuine Zoisite, Sedona Genuine, Undersea Green, Blue Apatite Genuine, and Duochrome Arctic Fire. As if painting isn`t difficult enough with normal color! But they were free so I`ve played with them and all of those hand ground from 'rare' minerals are simply muddy earth tones that granulate. I hope they weren`t expensive!
 My new supplier is Cheap Joe in North Carolina. Good prices, simple website, no obnoxious promotions and fast delivery. I`m very pleased.

I admit my bias. Even though I use it, I have no interest in photography. Cameras make me crazy and the terminology pushes me over the edge. Every time I have to submit something with 300 dpi I spend 15 minutes with a Wikipedia explanation and still don`t understand. I wait for John to get home from work.
All that said, I run into interesting images with some frequency. Check out Cody Cobb`s photography. He`s also from the Northwest and he has the brave heart of a poet.


paintings for sale in my studio

Portland Open Studio Tour [Oct]

Laurelhurst Drawings

Somehow I screwed up my hip and back so bad at the gym I haven`t been able to stand without a lot of pain. I stand to paint. So, I`ve had some free time. I was looking through old sketchbooks and remembering the paintings that came from those drawings. That was usually their purpose. I`m competent at it, I love looking at them, but I don`t much like doing them. I would carry around the smallest little sketchbooks I could find, then do tiny little compositions with enough information to build a painting with. On principle I would not use a photograph.
That was then. Now I find it far more useful to enjoy an environment while taking photos. I pay much more attention to my own reactions. What stimulates pleasure? Why? How could I translate that into paint? I`ll still have a sketchbook but it`s used now more for notes and for minimal drawings meant to be scaffolds of sorts for later paintings. When I download the camera, I`ll look all through the image and spot sections that have potential as a reference. The cameras are so good now, just mere fragments of an image will have a whole lot of content.
These drawings were done in Laurelhurst Park in SE Portland, near where I lived in the mid 90s. It was nature I could walk to and I spent a lot of time there.



Available Work [updated 8/12]