Kimono, 2009, acrylic on wood, 48 3/4 x 36 3/4 inches
Archives for painting
The Void: painting the desert
As Steve noted not long ago, perception — how, as well as what, we see and record — is prime territory for this group. Some weeks ago I wrote about painting in the desert, the Great Basin to be more precise, and, even more specifically, the Amargosa Plain just outside of Death Valley.
After having spent 6 weeks in the desert, perceiving and painting, mostly plein air, I am now back in Portland reading about desert perception in William L. Fox’s The Void, the Grid, and the Sign.
Fox has spent most of his life in and around a variety of deserts and back-of-nowhere lands, but in The Void he’s primarily concerned with the Great Basin, that large space between the Rockies and the Sierras, where water flows in, but never out, where there is no river coursing to the sea. He says that outside of Afghanistan, this area contains the most mountain ranges (316) in the world, but there are also 90 basins, places where what little water exists is captured between ranges and sinks or evaporates. The best known of these basins is perhaps Death Valley, although that lies outside Fox’s attention. The place I was painting, the Amargosa Plain, is also just outside his wide-ranging travels. However, much of what he says is apropos of the Amargosa and Death Valley.
Death Valley at the Beatty Cut-off, March, 2009
Happy Easter Everyone!
Tittle: Rebirth Net
Size: 76×61 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Green therapy, mud sketching on recycled paper!
The weather is been fantastically good, so in order to give an art lesson outdoors to the kids and enjoy the sunshine, I have taken them outside in the school playground/pound area for painting.
By dipping a paintbrush in the water pound, and mixing it with soil, you can create beautiful earthy shades, pretty much the same principle as watercolour.
By breaking grass and smudge it on paper you can make a shade of green, and by using a burned wood stick you can create some chalky black. Using only these natural pigmentations from nature you can create 100% organic art on recycled paper.
I have made two organic sketches, one that I prepared at home in my back garden and another one I used for a quick demonstration how it works for the kids.
Here are some of the results:
Age 9
Age9
Age9
Age 10
For more school art lessons check out my blog at Life of a Mother Artist
More to come…
Landscapes and Conundrums
And now, at this point (day 30) in this particular residency in Beatty, Nevada, I am pondering a conundrum about my own landscape work. I haven’t quite enough distance to say for certain [pun recognized after it was made] but it seems to me that my interest in context and a sense of place interferes with my achieving a stylistic breakthrough, particularly with the set pieces that I love, like the mountains around Beatty.
As my colleague and friend David T would say: if he walked into a gallery with my landscape paintings, he wouldn’t think of them as being “by June Underwood,”just as “nice” (not a compliment) landscape paintings.
Bison and BMW’s
This morning’s New York Times had an article and slideshow on BMW’s painted by more or less famous artists. My favorite is the design by Cesar Manrique, shown here a bit smaller than in the slideshow:
Now it may seem a long way from the Le Mans of Hervé Poulain or even from New York’s Grand Central Terminal, but the small Montana town of West Yellowstone (as the name suggests, just west of Yellowstone National Park) did a similar thing a couple years ago when they commissioned local artists to paint life-size bison sculptures that were placed around town.
Especially interesting here, from an artistic point of view (but I don’t neglect the relevance, especially these days, of the commercial significance), is the reversal of the common problem of representing 3-D space in a 2-D painting. Here the painter’s 2-D mindset must deal with the 3-D-ness of the sculptures. That means not only non-flatness and the volumetric cues, but the fact that the surface is not simply a distorted rectangle, but wraps around and contacts itself in multiple ways.
