So here’s an update.

After a long struggle with health and painting, I’ve finally revived and have been painting the landscapes of the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. The change of venue from the wild and awesome desert to the gentle scenery of the Valley was fairly traumatic and also the cause (I think; I hope) of some really bad paintings, now discarded. But I’ve kept a few and think I may be able to tolerate the pretty landscapes and conventional views to which I’ve been subjected. (I’m engaged with a group of plein air artists who always choose not to paint the snarky or sardonic.)

The paintings imaged below have been done since the end of June. The first four (through the Storm) were attempts to provide a sense of expansion outward rather than focusing into the painting. This outward away from the center is what I feel the desert does, and I thought painting sky and/or water might keep me in touch with that expansion of space so essential to desert painting.

Morning Fog in the Gorge, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Sailboat on the Mighty Columbia, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Oak Island on Sauvies Island, 18 x 24″, Oil on board, 2009

Storm over Sauvies Island, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Then, I spent four days last week in Vancouver, BC (Canada) and chanced upon an exhibit of Emily Carr drawings at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

I’ve long been a fan of Carr, although she was very poor andpainted on brown paper with oils thinned with gasoline. The original paintings are almost always a disappointment because they have deteriorated over the years.

However, the Vancouver exhibit was of her drawings, and frankly I was stunned by them. (I had gone to the Gallery to see an exhibit of 17th century Dutch paintings, which were quite exquisite, but none of them stunned me). I returned to Portland to the centennial celebration of a pleasant park on an extinct volcano in my neighborhood. It’s fairly large, almost entirely treed, with some very distant vistas and three reservoirs. Before I went to Vancouver, I thought painting Mt. Tabor was a challenge I was likely to fail to meet. I was reduced, prior to last week, to painting gates:

Salmon Street Gate, Mt Tabor, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

And pictures of the “mountain” from a distance, with lots of city flotsam:

Mt Tabor from Hawthorne and 28th, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

(There’s another, larger, version of this which I think is better, but haven’t photographed yet)

However, after seeing the Carr drawings, on Saturday I tackled the forest that is Mt. Tabor’s proudest achievement:

In honor of the Mt Tabor Centennial 1, Oil on board, 12 x 16″, 2009 (draft1)

In Honor of the Mt Tabor Centennial 2, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

And among the gentle conventional landscapes, I managed a few Underwood whacks:

Bonneville Artifacts, Columbia Gorge, 12 x 15″, Oil on board, 2009

And before I took on the gentility, I did some plein air city work, which seems more like my old self:

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, North Side, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, West Side, 12 x 16″, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, South Side, 18 x 24″, Oil on board, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, East Side, 18 x 24″, 2009

I did another painting of the front (the north side) of this building from a photograph, mostly so I could paint (and hence capture in my brain) the front of the building minus the trees. The East Branch of the Portland Public Library was built in 1911 by a locally prominent architect who also built the central library, which is still in use and still quite magnificent. The east branch has fallen onto lesser times, having its large open central hall (a requirement of all Carnegie funded libraries) divided into two floors. Only the rear rotunda, truncated to make a very strange room, was left intact.  The paintings were done from awkward spaces — the last from the edge of a parking lot that bordered on a plaid pantry; the first in a parking lot next to a cement block commercial building. The south side shows the rear of the library behind the Coffee Systems company, also in a cement block building. Two major streets, 11th and Morrison, border the block on which the library stands and to its east is the Rimskykorseykoffee House, which resembles a haunted bordello.

All this is to say that while I was placed by my group in gentle breezes and loving landscapes, when I could I escaped to my natural milieu, the snarky somewhat sardonic city in which I really live. I even am thinking of doing one of my wild studio composites with that wonderful ironic ex-library.

And how are you spending your summer creativities? Snarky or genteel? Admiring the river as it rolls by or watching the semi’s, rolling toward the center city?

Jer and I are, god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, returning to the desert, to Beatty Nevada, in November, for another go at the Amargosa Playa. I have notions that have nothing to do with comfort and pleasing vistas. Although the vistas of the desert are, in my perception if not my art, very pleasing.

The Jolly Roger Bar, 12th and Madison. Oil on board, 12 x 16″

As you know, I’ve been painting around Portland, here and there, returning often to sites to note what else is there, what I may have missed, what more is available for turning into paint.

These paintings have a certain “feel” to them — a style that fits with the record of my visits. I work on-site and then tweak and fiddle in the studio. I also find myself making larger, stranger, studio-begot contributions to the sets of pieces.

I have already exposed the Fremont Bridge grouping to A&P; here’s another set of depictions of an entirely different place in Portland.

IOOF Building, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

At this corner, SE Alder and 6th Street, humans were a large part of the scene. In fact, although the casual observer might not recognize it, it quickly became obvious to me that this is a neighborhood, with people who watch out for the street, some of them renters in nearby apartments, many of them regulars who use the area to hang out, to see what the day will bring, smoke a bit of pot, check in with street friends, have a swig or two from a communal bottle.

The Melody Ballroom, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

The US Bank Parking Lot, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board 12 x 16″

As I painted, I got stories of all sorts from the neighbors, ranging from the tale of the fire that caused the apartment house windows to be so ill asorted (US Bank) to the charming Hispanic panhandler who never saw “in the U  S of A a painter on the streets” (Melody Ballroom). The congregation of the Rivers of Life Church peered at the dabblings on the board when I was painting the Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building, while someone who had been rocking at the Melody the night before was asleep out of sight in the corner of the IOOF building. The erstwhile Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building turned Volunteers of America Center once housed a senior day care, but now appears to be a school or halfway house for “troubled” youths, youths whose curiosity about plein air painters was vast and somewhat distracting.

The Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building (now Volunteers of America) SE Alder and 6th, oil on board, 12 x 16

SE 6th Avenue is between two main boulevards in southeast Portland, and large numbers of vehicles, whose inhabitants see nothing in the neighborhood except obstacles to drive around,  use the street as a way to avoid traffic jams on 7th Avenue or Morrison St.

The images above are plein air paintings, oil on board, all 12 x 16″, done at the corner of SE Alder and 6th in Portland Oregon. Below is the studio SE 6th and Alder — the way it evolved in my consciousness:

The Corner of SE 6th and Alder, Portland, Oregon. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30″

The SE 6th and Alder paintings are the result of approximately 14 hours of sitting at the site, watching people and vehicles, interacting with passersby, seeing the sun sliding across the façades of the buildings, and painting these things as they presented themselves on site. Later, in the studio,  SE 6th and Alder  becomes a place where cars are toylike, but the buildings impose themselves almost as human – elegant, funky, and imposing.

In short, these paintings represent experiences that I had in my encounters with this particular environment, on these particular days, in the late summer of 2008. They also represent something of what I am trying to achieve in my painting.

It’s easier to say what I don’t want to do than what I want to do. I don’t want to do beautiful (or at least not “merely” beautiful); I don’t want to faithfully record what I see, in the manner of a camera’s eye. I don’t want to focus on edges or color or shapes or the feel of the oil paint, although I obviously deal with these basics of painting all the time — and I enjoy thinking about them. But they aren’t my focus.

Bloomtime, 12 x 16″, oil on board

What I am striving for is to capture something of my sense of the place, a sense which is limited by my own ability to see and record what I see, to feel and record what I feel, and also limited by what is in front of me, by the environment itself. It’s something of a surreal set of overlapping circles — the objects in front of me, my sense of those objects, the interaction between myself and the changes that happen during my stay on the site — what I want, in short, is to capture a sense of this time, this place, through the limited yet hopefully interesting eyes of this particular human creature, myself. It can’t be done with monocular perspective nor realistic rendering; my eyes don’t see as the camera sees; my senses capture far more and far less and my vision encompasses peculiar bits of the scene, leaving other bits for some other visionary. My encounters add transitory information that has to work itself, however wonkily, into the paintings.

The Fremont Bridge as It Addresses the Land, Oil on canvas, 18 x 36″