"The Exquisite Still Life" show, Salem, Oregon

The other day I sent out nine pieces for an exhibit titled "The Exquisite Still Life" at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. Also showing will be Oregon painters Lisa Caballero, Bobbie Jansen and John Van Dreal, so I was surprised and delighted when asked several months ago to participate, being all the way out here on the opposite coast. The show starts this coming Monday the 6th and runs through the 31st, with a reception on Wednesday the 8th from noon to 2 pm. If you live in the area please come.

Mangosteen

6/12. Mangosteen, oil on linen on panel, 7x5 in. SOLD

I do realize how annoying it can become to see blogs you've gotten familiar with sit untouched for a long time, so I'm going to tell myself to snap out of it and get back to posting. (I blame my inner recluse, again, and will try harder to keep the little bugger from climbing back into my head through the broken back window when it's dark. Once he's in there he's quite the tyrant.)

We noticed mangosteens at our Kroger store one day and I just had to get some. Over a decade ago, during my last visit to relatives in Indonesia, I tasted this out-of-this-world fruit for the first and only time, fresh off a tree. I think they grew on a tree but I may be remembering wrong, as the memory would become like a vision and the taste like a legend completely detached from the reality of the experience. It probably makes sense that, after all the excitement of finding them in an American supermarket then getting to cut one open for my wife to finally be able to taste these mysterious things that I had for years been unable to describe in words, I (and she) was a bit disappointed. Maybe it was because they hadn't come to room temperature, or that they were mangosteens from Thailand and maybe different from the ones I had in Indonesia. And it didn't help that it cost $10 for only four of them. Don't get me wrong, they are fantastically and exotically tasty (or tastily exotic?), and to my two-year-old daughter they will always be exotic because honestly I don't see us spending that kind of money again anytime soon on fruits that don't contain much actual edible fruit. But to my wife, because I had spoken of them so often so mythically, they were only just so-so. Wanting to understand better all this hubbub over mangosteens, she looked around on the Internet and landed on this amusing article. Thank god we didn't pay $22.95 for two.

So it was maybe because I had this disappointment fresh on my mind, or I was worried that it was too expensive a fruit to have sit unrefrigerated for too long, but I think I began the painting hurriedly and ended up laboring too much on it, getting caught up in the shell-like hardness of the skin and the shifting colors. Not that it doesn't capture the feel of a mangosteen, but I feel the painting was slightly tainted by my feelings toward the thing.

Perhaps it was fortunate that at about this time I did some more little pieces for Cameron Gray (his new show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica opens tomorrow the 26th). It's interesting to see where my little tiles end up within a picture - in this piece from March (click "all sizes"), one of the more explicit ones forms the bright white of the girl's right eye. In all there are six tiles of mine - here's one detail. (Thanks to "C-Monster" for those Flickr photos.) Some of the recent ones, more innocent:

If I were teaching I might give students small challenges like these (working from reference photos), to help stay/get "fresh." I was amazed this time by how much quicker I was able to arrive at new color mixes, ones very different from what I'm normally used to. Serious "play" I guess.

IC14 Show

Well, back to the Illustrators Club show. The gallery that evening was packed and hot and stuffy and I was nervous and sweaty and feeling more un-photogenic than usual, so I'm not in these pictures. Really I was just happy to be there.

I am sorry that all I documented of the event centered around people looking at my piece (or not looking, as that's a gold medal winner by the awesome Greg Harlin they're admiring):



But I did catch these guys taking a closer look:



I was so proud to be in this group, knowing I was a small fish in the pond. And hey, my name was mentioned in last Friday's Washington Post review!

Illustrators Club show!

Happily in the time I was "away" some good things came along, one being the news that this little piece was accepted in the Illustrators Club of DC, MD & VA's annual juried show, and we're planning to drive up for the opening tomorrow (sorry I'm posting this at the last minute).

For now I'll say some other stuff is in the works too, which makes me think that Yeats' old crane of Gort may himself be enjoying a trout or two....

Management profoundly regrets and apologizes for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused; and Eddoes #2

5/6. Eddoes #2, oil on linen on panel, 5x7 in.


(in progress)

Well, I never thought I'd become one of those loathsome, horribly selfish people who could let their blogs languish for months with no explanation why. Originally I intended to stop for some soul-searching (whatever that means). I felt that I had been working too comfortably, that I still wasn’t getting at whatever it is I wanted to get at, if you get that. Most likely it started with my going to Charleston and seeing my friend and coming back and seeing a lot more great art online and getting annoyed with myself and with how I see (or don’t see) things. The old hermit in me said it was time to step away and hide out for a while, so I decided to put this (almost-)daily painting "project" face down and not feel too guilty about it.

I was telling myself I had to work out the composition of a new portrait of my daughter. Looking again at my old art history books reminded me of the enormous impact that Correggio, Bellini, and other Renaissance painters initially had on me, and it made me want to tackle something on a little larger scale in which I could play around more with light, do more subtle things. But I maybe just got more overwhelmed looking at more good stuff. And that portrait of Breagha never got started.

As my friend Gary put it, sometimes "life happens" - I found myself sidetracked by non-art projects (e.g. building a shoe rack for the narrow space by our front door, putting up some shelves, rearranging our computer work area). At some point though I helped do some tiny paintings for an artist in Southern California named Cameron Gray, who puts together these large mosaics with photos of body parts, food, and such things as reference (see a past show). Here are some:

A few of these are for a piece in a show opening July 26th from 6:30-8:30 at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, Bergamot Station. I find/found painting these to be great practice (matching value and color), even if I normally wouldn’t force that sort of thing on myself.

My hiatus hadn't exactly been a vacation, though I must say it has been nice after the kid's in bed to once in a while spend the rest of the evening in the same room with my wife, and not at my easel. And a lot of times I would get lost in a book about falconry or abstruse Old English stuff (which relate to the portrait I want to do), but sometimes I'd just watch news and get mad at the political coverage, which just meant that I was in a worse comfort zone and that I needed to get back. Time the dragon awoke and came out of his barrow....

So, back to the eddoes above - I can’t remember when, but one night at least two months ago I had started painting them, and they then sat there patiently waiting to recapture my attention. So the other night I finished the painting - though by this time the little things had shriveled considerably (getting moldy underneath) and were sprouting real thick, sharp-looking green shoots. It was hard to overlook their present condition and rely more on my memory for some details, but I did my best.

Gary Grier show, Charleston

We decided sort of last minute to drive down to Charleston, SC, on Friday to catch the opening reception for my good friend Gary, who is showing alongside printmaker Lou Stovall (read a review here). The drive took much longer than anticipated with the baby, but luckily we made it in time and I got to catch up a little with him and a couple other old schoolmates, Sean and Shane, who each came from out of town as well for the big night. It was so surreal seeing these guys again after almost ten years – we were all noticeably more mature (at least on the outside), yet it felt like we had parted ways only months ago.






As Gary told me, much of the work in the current show was a result of his walks to and from his studio, just outside of Charleston’s elegant and prosperous downtown. With the feel of the pavement beneath his feet day after day came the realization that here were neighborhoods in decline which needed to be preserved or at least documented in paint. I'm always impressed by the sincerity of his paintings, and it was especially awesome to be able to stand in front of a large group of them for the first time. Maybe just experiencing an old friend’s brush marks in person again was inspiring enough, but I got a real kick out of all the rich ochres and neutral browns in his middle shadows, those great Old Master colors that inspired us so much during our days at school. On Saturday the two of us spent a long while in his studio talking about paint and reminiscing about those good old days, and I left on Sunday morning with a sense of renewal.

Overall our experience of downtown Charleston was a brief whirlwind tour, but we had enough time to do some strolling, get all messy at a little crab shack just beyond the fancier establishments on East Bay St., and visit the Gibbes Museum of Art where I surreptitiously photographed a couple of paintings that I found interesting:


- a modern looking Robert Henri; and a portrait by Antonio de la Gandara of the infamous "Madame X," which the unfortunate lady commissioned in the hope of undoing the great scandal caused by Sargent's earlier painting. (See them better on the Web: 1, 2.) The Henri piece was part of a small, eclectic group that included a W.M. Chase portrait remarkable for a sketchy part done in Gary's same browns and ochres; a large and almost garishly loud Childe Hassam; as well as some magnificent Hokusai and Hiroshige prints.

On the drive home through the Carolinas there was an extremely strong wind, and we passed through dust clouds and the smoke of what we later learned were huge brush fires just before the Virginia border, which turned parts of the sky amazing shades of red and purple. It was a fantastic end to a pleasantly surreal weekend.