The photoshopping of the oil painting is great and, even if exaggerated, is worth pondering. I too like the cool foreground and I like its exaggerated state. I will be playing with that.

I have maybe 3 pieces (2 partly finished textiles) that I can push around, and now, I know I can do it in Photoshop to try out possibilities. Like Leslie, I hadn’t thought of that, although I have photoshopped in deciding about cropping and adding to, etc; in textiles you have a freedom of size and scale (and an ability to revise sizes) that you don’t have in other media. This is even more true than in photographs, since I can add more to a piece as well as take bits away. And I’m not restricted to what the original material consisted of — I can add large sections of new material if I wish. But I digress.

Leslie, thanks for the comparison with Hanneke. I’m flattered that you would even make it. I struggle with the painting (as I said, textiles are my first medium) and so have been drinking in Hanneke’s paintings and drawings and the comments on them. I want to have enough control in my painting that I can both see and manipulate the paint to do what I want it to do, not just accidentally sort of accomplish it.

The multidisciplinary approach of A and P seems to be working very well for many of us.

What I think it illustrates is that these “rules” of color are meant to be broken. The cool in the forground is much stronger of an image to me.

June,
Before Steve showed those two versions, I was going to mention that my feedback to Hanneke about her grapes painting would not be the same I would give to you about hers. Your intents are really different it seems, but either of you can argue with me. It seesm like Hanneke’s paintigns are playing well within the rules of visual illusion and color, meaning they are about this careful, sesnitive observation and response with paint. She wants to replicate the sensation of sitting nad lookng at these grapes with intensity and connection.
Yours, on the other hand are very much about observation, combined with, I feel, an interest in playing with the color and responding to an emotional response to the landscape. You are painting about place, both literal and metaphorical. And your sense of color is a mix of what you see from the photos, what you experience standing there, and what you remember when you are gone. The series is gorgeous. I repsond most to the textiles at the moment, but I want to spend a long time looking at all of it, as they really do talk to each other.

I am also intrigued by the almost-but-not-quite symmetrical — partly because it seems flawed and thus more human and perhaps more natural, but also because it’s just a trifle jarring. It makes for a touch of unease, a sense of indeterminacy. “Indeterminacy” as the 21st century art form was the theme of a lecture I gave a few years ago; the topic was just a tad ambitious <snort> but interesting to meander about in. The idea isn’t mine, but rather comes from a writer about craft forms, whose name escapes me at the moment.

And you have caught the attributes of the Miocene epoch. While we were there, my husband was studying and feeding me geological information from the Fossil Beds, which range from about 65 million years ago to 16 million years ago. The land is almost entirely Cenozoic in age — late comers in geological terms (although there’s one large anomalous exception) — and within the Cenozoic, the Miocene is the period from which most of the fossils at John Day seem to be being found. The whole Cenozoic era for Oregon was a tempestuously volcanic time — Oregon basically rose out of the sea during the early and mid-Cenozoic. From the volcanoes came both destruction and fertility. I think of “Miocene” and “The Rising” as twinned figures, maybe male and female — or maybe both female — but I’m not sure I could articulate why.

And I’m pleased if anything I do feeds your art — that is more than I ever imagined I could do.

Thank you for the comments on the way the color is working.

I chose the photo and oil because they most clearly exemplified some of what I was saying. But I am not sure the oil is finished. (In fact, I seldom am sure an oil painting is finished.) And I hadn’t noticed the warm ochre/cool pink, although I was thinking about adding greater value range.

However, I had done some previous work with desert landscapes (Arizona rather than Oregon) and had deliberately used the warm distance with a cool foreground. It did seem to work for me in those pieces. So perhaps I was unconsciously using the same temperature scheme. I think I need to somehow enhance the effect, though, if I want it to be seen as intentional. I’ll be thinking about it.

Before seeing your post today, I felt badly about my confusion how to interpret the Sleeping Bear Dune landscape in Northern Michigan. Was I going to concentrate on photography, painting or textile art? Now I learned from you that these approaches complement one another. Thank you.