winter makes me want to stay inside

and drink tea and watch movies and listen to the rain and make things. I've been sewing paintchips and thinking about what I want this project to become. My process has always been to try trust the making. Its a process that fills me with both wonder and self doubt. I've been ruminating and sewing and starting to figure it out. I want it to be ambitious. I've been thinking about a stopping number. I'm over 300, 317 I think.
I want to make a chart out of them, or an infographic, or a long line that goes to unexpected places.

new art

made for the love show

Title: the land of no words

Media: silverpoint and thread on paper

Size: 14 3/4" x 11 3/4"

Year: 2011

I should probably have something more articulate to say about it, but I'm up past my bedtime downloading audiobooks to listen to while i do the most boring work ever tomorrow (aka my day job).

Love show details can be found here: http://portlandloveshow.com/

paintchip update

I've been steadily adding to the paintchip pile. So far I've got 288 completed, and I'm starting to think about the ways I want to expand the project. About all the houses/apartments I've ever lived in & about what the place we live says about us.

So here are some spare bedroom installed pictures.

another place to see my work

So I put a bunch of work Saatchi online tonight, and in the midst of trying to describe the kinds of paintings I've been making lately this spewed out. It seems right, this body of work is about the things I like to spend time looking at, and in a very roundabout way a comment on the struggle to find that balance between urban/rural/wild. I'm drawn to the kinds of places where that exist on those edges. I've long admired the beauty found in abadoned buildings and at the waters edge.

i make paintings. this series is a reflection of my fascination with the spaces where land/sea, nature/built environment overlap and try to co-exist. i'm smitten with the coast, the columbia river gorge, rivers of all sizes, mountains in the distance, broken down buildings, bridges, rain drops, trees, rock and earthen layers, pictorial logic & waves.

I'm headed down to the basement studio to clean and organize and make it more work friendly and hopefully work on a new little painting.

i should really be updating this more...

I keep meaning to update this blog more, and I really don't have a good reason why I haven't. I think my dislike of the quality of images my little point and shoot digital camera produces, along with my general ability to distract myself have something to do with it. Nonetheless I keep plugging along. Making things and taking pictures of them.

A few weeks ago I finished another large-ish painting. Another in my ongoing series about land and water and nature and manmade and the intersections between all of these things. Inspired first by a wonderfully decrepid building I saw on the side of the road somewhere between Alsea and Waldport.

until the rain comes pouring down, 2010
oil on canvas
40"x30"

until the rain comes pouring down (detail), 2010
oil on canvas
40"x30"

And finally, I'm pretty close to finished with a new (yet to be titled) smaller painting.

Paint chip installation - Nested

I probably should have posted this while the show was still up. But I had the opportunity this summer to be in an excellently curated group show called "I want to feel at home here" this summer at Milepost5.

Meg did a bang up job curating her first show. And I feel lucky to have been included with so many great artists from around the country. Here are a couple of images from the show itself. I ended up showing 180 of my ever growing paintchip collection, arranged in a grid 18 long by 10 high. It turned out great, even if it took a ridiculously long time to hang in a straight line (5+ hours) and only slightly less to take down (3 hours).

On to the images.

4X6

I've spent the last week furiously sewing circles onto slightly larger paintchips for a show in hong kong. It was one of those things I signed up for, then put on the back burner. It happened as we moved into the house and got engaged.

Least you think I've been a total slacker, I've been making art for another show, planning a wedding, settling into a house, setting up an art studio, along with a few other things.