Featured Artist at RiverSea Gallery

"You Are the Only One" 24"x36" Acrylic on panel

This coming June, I will be the featured artist at RiverSea Gallery, in beautiful Astoria, Oregon.

In this exhibit "From Now To Yesterday", I will be presenting a whole new body of work. With this new effort I have continued to explore compositions based on vintage snapshots. Choices of subject include a fisherman in the Florida swamps, bikini-clad lovelies creating a stir in the early 70’s, and a young, stylish couple posing next to their brand new Model T.  Most of the work is on flat-grain verneer plywood, which has a distinctive, dramatic wood grain. I specially oriented many of the compositions to feature the wood grain as an element. Sometimes the grain is used as a flat abstracted pattern element in the image, other times it is used to describe objects in the painting, such as the sky or ground.

Painting sizes range from small and practical to large and dramatic. RiverSea Gallery is in Astoria, Oregon, a historic town where the Columbia River meets the Pacific. Housed in a 1920’s storefront in the downtown historic district, RiverSea Gallery is within strolling distance of restaurants, theaters, hotels, boutiques, museums and other galleries.

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 2nd, 6-8pm. Artist Talk at 6:30pm

Second Saturday Arts Walk Reception: Saturday, June 9th, 5-8pm

RiverSea Gallery 1160 Commercial Street  Astoria, Oregon 97103  503.325.1270  www.riverseagallery.com

Open Daily

Monday-Thursday: 11:00am - 5:30pm
Friday-Saturday: 11:00am - 7:00pm
Sunday: 11:00am - 4:00pm

---

A minor artistic interuption.

My partner Jim and I sold our house - hooray! We are building a new house in Lake Oswego, OR. So we have moved into a rental for the next 6 or 7 months until it is built. I just set up my studio in our rental a few days ago, and began art making again after a couple months hiatus. Here are some pictures of our move #1.

My studio in a box.


There are a lot of flat things in an art studio.

My treasured easel. My mother bought it for me at a garage sale in 1993. This is a time when I had decided not to be a painter anymore' She said "Well, I think I will buy it for you anyway, just in case." Bless you, Mom!



Jim and I love lots of big books with pictures in them.

The huge room that has served as my art studio for the past 5 or 6 years.

My new itty bitty one at the rental! But I am happy happy happy. Its little, but it has great light.

My beloved easel...

The spare bedrooms in our rental are serving as storage units.

An embarrassment of riches. They are packed!

Day four of the Leedy Grange mural... completion!

Ah! After four days of my mural marathon, I have completed the image. I will go back to touch up, and take care of loose ends, but for the most part I think I am done! Working with house paint is very different than working with artist paint. It has a totally different consistency, at once thinner, and yet more gooey.

It was also a very different experience to do art in a public space, with a public purpose. Sometimes people would actually honk and yell encouragement from their cars!

 It was also really great to have locals come by and talk about the neighborhood and how much it has changed over the years. One woman came by and said she was born in a house right across the street where the Walgreen's is now. Al from Al's Barbershop came over to say hello. I used to play outside his shop when I was a little girl, and my friend Melissa's dad used to get his haircut. My mom and dad were founding members of Cedar Mill Community Library, which was also originally housed on that block in about 1973. So it felt good to contribute to that community I grew up in and spent so much time right there in that area, and to feel a part of it again.

Day Three of the Leedy Grange mural

It was a great day to paint a mural! I got a good sleep last night, and got a lot done today. As the painting gets closer and closer to completion, the changes will be less and less noticeable.

Day two of the Leedy Grage mural...

It was misting this morning, so I was a bit nervous that it would start to rain. But it eventually passed. I started on the color today.

First day of the Leedy Grange mural.

  Well it was the first day at the Leedy Grange mural... I arrived at 8am to start drawing, and draw I did! I completed the drawing at 4:30 pm and I am looking forward to busting out some paint tomorrow! Here are some pictures, plus a little video I took at the start of the day.

My First Outdoor Mural

During the week of September 12th, I will be painting an 8 ft. by 16 ft. mural on the Leedy Grange Hall in the neighborhood of Cedar Mill  835 NW Saltzman Rd., Portland OR. It will be based on this photograph, which is of the founding members of Leedy Grange in 1908. 

I was born and raised in Cedar Mill, so my heart is truly in this project. I will be outside painting the mural, so if you are in the neighborhood, come by and say hello. If you can't do that, keep your eyes open for photos documenting my progress on this blog and my facebook page.  Here is a small sketch I have done for the project.


Stay tuned!

Friday I went to pick up my paint. Miller Paint has generously agreed to donate the paint for the mural. I made up a tiny color swatches for them out of my acrylic paint at home, and they have done a beautiful job matching them exactly! Once I picked up the paint and saw how beautiful it is, I started to get excited.

Today I went to the grange hall to set up and draw a grid on the wall. The grid squares on the wall are one foot in size, and corresponds to the photograph I am working from. The grid on the photograph is just under one inch in size.

Tomorrow I am going to get up far too early and drive out to Cornelius to obtain my scaffolding from Grand Rental Station. (cute name, huh?) Then the magic will start. I have bought large, fat sticks of charcoal, and I will start the drawing process (which is my favorite part!)