Opening Reception Friday, May 7, 5 – 8 p.m.

The Kress Gallery, Riverpark Square, Spokane, Washington
Music by Haywire (Don Thomsen and Dan Black)
Catered by Twigs

I’m putting the last touches on paintings for Metamorphosis, my show at the Kress Gallery in downtown Spokane. I’ve been painting for this show for so long, I can hardly believe it’s almost here! Metamorphosis is my first time to exhibit oil paintings exclusively, and it will feature some of my most ambitious work to date. I’m so excited to see it go up. I’ve even hired a swing duo, Haywire, featuring Don Thomsen and Dan Black, to play at the reception. I hope to see you there!

Metamorphosis (works in oil) runs May 7 through July 18, 2010

Umm… ta-daa? It’s weird but I’m not sure how to feel right now. I’m done. I made fifty oil paintings. It took all week to make this one, Olivia, a painting that wanted to fight me at every step.  I thought such a stubborn painting deserved a real person’s name. Happily our love/hate relationship ended on a love note. Otherwise I’d be starting number fifty-one next week.

Paul thinks it was all psychological, that I had a block on finishing number fifty. It’s probably true. I’m happy to have reached the goal, but right now I’m feeling kind of a letdown. I wish I hadn’t finished midday on a Friday, but maybe on a Wednesday so I would have had time to dive into my next project. Now I have to wait until Monday to get my hands dirty again.

All whining aside, next week should be exciting. Not only do I get to change perspective a bit and start making new pastels for Bellevue and Sun Valley and whatever other shows will be on the schedule, I get to play with some gorgeous new Terry Ludwig pastels I bought on my way home from Bellingham a few weeks ago. Terry introduced himself and hung out in my booth for a while at Cherry Creek last year, and he was a lot of fun to talk with. I had tried his pastels, but so far only owned a handful. So when I stopped at Dakota Art Pastels, the great pastel candy store in Mt. Vernon, Washington, I went straight to the counter for some of Terry’s buttery-rich colors.

I asked for a set of intense darks, but they brought out two sets… one intense darks and one new set of Maggie Price Essential Grays. I opened the lid of the gray set and after a barely-subdued “SQUEEEE!” I left with both. (After paying for them, of course, and feeling a bit sorry for the three resident dogs whose hearing may have suffered permanent damage.)

So, there you have it. Next week get ready to see some new pastels, and more on the show schedule over the next month too. Onward!

I told you I’d do it! And, here it is. The oil version of Nirvana, my big, bright, hopeful, next-to-last painting in my group of fifty. Nirvana is all about transformation, and with this painting that seems to work for a few different reasons.

For one, I suppose it marks the near-completion of my transformation into a multiple-media painter. Maybe more importantly, it also convinced me to become a painter that takes the time to tone canvases before painting. I’ve done that exactly one time before this, adding a sepia wash to a canvas that I was to paint with one of my Zen Garden images. That time I applied the wash right before I wanted to start painting, then became frustrated that it took so long to dry.

This time, I toned the canvas with a grey-purple color right before leaving for the coast. Four days later when I started to paint, it was dry, and I was a very happy art chick. What a difference! Not so much in the final result, but in the speed with which I was able to get into the really interesting part of the painting. Without toning, underpainting used to take frustratingly long as I struggled to cover every millimeter of the bright-white gessoed canvas. I would find myself fighting with these white edges where areas of color met and I tried not to make mud between them. Toning completely eliminates the problem.

Also, I put off toning because I was afraid I would lose the ability to use the white background to create ultra-intense, transparent , glow-y colors. Meh. There’s plenty of bright color in Nirvana. I needn’t have worried.

So, wow! I get to enjoy the fruits of my “discovery” on exactly one more painting before turning around to work at the other easel. But hey. Better late than never.

I always name my paintings after they are completed. Sometimes I will start a painting with a title in mind, but I can’t think of a single instance when the painting ended up with that title. I think if it did, it would be because I pretty much phoned the whole thing in. No matter how clear an idea I start out with, if I am paying attention, after a point the work will evolve on its own. And it will demand a fitting title.

Sometimes the title is obvious. It just pops into my head in final form, I write it down, done deal. But the most interesting adventures in naming often happen when only a partial title comes to mind. This oil (number 46 for anyone who’s counting) is a good example. As I worked on it, the element that evolved beyond my original idea was the bronzey-gold, or the idea that the blue-green leaves were turning to bronze. It occurred to me that the blue-green bits resembled oxidized copper as well. As I finished the painting all I knew was that I wanted to incorporate the idea of bronze or gold into the title. 

I couldn’t think of an interesting way to do that, so I headed to the thesaurus and dictionary to do some word association. But looking up bronze, I found nothing more than a pretty standard definition (boring) and some references to suntans (useless). With only one more place to look, it was Wikipedia to the rescue. After skimming over a very long entry, I found some history of Turkish bronzes, including the story of how an Armenian alchemist named Zildjian discovered the musical properties of bronze while attempting to turn base metals into gold. Turning base metals into gold… Alchemy! Perfect.

All poor Avedis Zildjian got out of his discovery was the largest cymbal-making company in the world. But I got a title for my painting. Ha!

Just a reminder for anyone in the Spokane area: eye4art is this Saturday at Mead High School. I’ll be there with a few new pastels and maybe some new oils as well. Find more information on this art show and sale here.

I’m so close. Forty-four oil paintings. While I feel some excitement about reaching my goal of fifty, there’s a bit of a sense of melancholy to go with it. Really, I’m just getting into my groove. I finally feel comfortable painting in oils. I suppose that means I set a good goal for myself. And, it will be interesting to see how my oil work affects my pastel work. But I don’t want to stop!

I’m especially happy with my latest piece, Ascension. It was one of those that could go either way at the planning stages, then becomes a pleasant surprise in final form. Some aspects of it were deliberate, such as the stormy gray-greens contrasting with red and orange. But the tasty deep-reddish purples sort of appeared unexpectedly at the end, after I had signed the piece, in fact. I walked away for a few hours then came back to find the painting begging for purple. Paintings are quirky creatures. They just do that sometimes.

Full disclosure: I’m not sure if I should count this as forty-three or not. I un-stretched an earlier painting and stretched new canvas on its frame to paint Red Skies. Mostly this was to save the time of getting a new frame made, and I can always re-stretch the earlier painting. But I confess it was not one of my favorites. I guess I’ll just wait and see.

Red Skies, detail

Oh, hey, the sun just came out. I guess one out of three ain’t bad. Onward.