Expressions West 2009

Friday I got word that my painting what remains will be included in the juried exhibition Expressions West at the Coos Art Museum. This Annual juried competition features the works of painters from 13 western states

This is what it looks like, although its not so gray in person!
what remains is part of the larger series of narrative abstract paintings "heart loot: and other stories"
Other images from the series can be seen at my website

what remains
2008
11"x17"
oil on canvas

On exhibit April 24th - June 27th

More about the Juror
Juror: Richard V. West
Richard V. West is an art historian, curator, author, and former art museum director in a forty-year career that has spanned both coasts from Maine to Washington. He is currently Director Emeritus of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and serves as a trustee of the Gage Academy of Art.

West has juried a wide variety of distinguished regional and national exhibitions covering all media throughout the United States. He has also actively curated a number of art exhibitions that reveal his interests in both the fine arts and popular culture – from ancient Greek art to contemporary editorial cartoons The co-author of books such as Language of the Print and Standing in the Tempest: The Painters of the Hungarian Avant-Garde, 1908-1930, Richard is currently preparing a monograph on the American painter and illustrator, Rockwell Kent.

More about Coos Art Museum
Coos Art Museum is the cornerstone of visual arts on Oregon’s Southern Coast. Through collections, exhibitions and educational programs, we are building an arts and cultural community and promoting the appreciation, understanding and expression of visual art.” Located on the scenic southern Oregon Coast Coos Art Museum is the 3rd oldest art museum in Oregon. CAM traces its roots to the Coos Artist League, active since 1950. Members of the League conducted early operations in storefront locations before moving to a Carnegie Library Building. In 1982 Coos Art Museum members, acquired and remodeled the old US Post Office building, a historical art deco structure built in 1937. The Museum has five active galleries totaling 16,000 sq feet of display space and a 540 piece Permanent Collection of mid-20th Century and contemporary American art.

silverpoint drawing & a day at the beach

It was a productive weekend. Saturday I drove to the beach and took lots of pictures of waves, and cave walls and weathered logs. Sunday i spent most of the day in the studio finishing the my second large silverpoint drawing and making good headway on a large painting. The whole experience was marred only slightly by the gash on my right index finger where a potato got away from me while making potato leek soup.

Now for the pictures (I'm having a hard time getting the silverpoint to show up bright, and am losing detail correcting in photoshop, they are much lovelier in person I think)





beach pictures:

papercuts & embroidered lines

I'm obsessing over papercuts and embroidered lines.

Last night I couldn't sleep and I saw all these small tableau's around me. These little still lifes, the way my rubber boots were aligned near a plant, a bit of garlic in a small glass bowl on a windowsill. I've been thinking about my obsession with sewing threaded concentric lines onto paint chips, and tightly bound silverpoint drawings, paper cranes folded out of old grocery ads....wondering how all these things are related. And painting. Working again on a bigger painting (after almost 2 years of smaller ones), a eulogy of sorts that has been forming in my mind for a long time. Feeling almost ready to really open myself up, but not quite there, and also feeling a bit lost in the shuffle of my life, and thinking about what i want to do with the works that i create. Should I open an etsy shop, send work to more galleries, hunker down and really explore the ideas that seem to be shifting around me, go to grad school, learn to code websites, all of the above?

I've been looking at this artist alot, and another called know hope.

And how much i just want to repeat to myself over and over again, know hope.