southeastmain

Order Returns

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Bruce and Jane came a-visiting from Corvallis and brought their painting clothes with them. Bruce proceeded to put on the second coat of Sweet Baby Rose and finished the job. Jer was happy to have it done, and I'm ecstatic about being able to move back in.

Of course, I have to change the furniture around, and that means changing out all the stuff in the cabinets and throwing out tons of paper and making piles of books to take to Powell's to be sold. Also looking at long forgotten photographs thrown into the back of drawers and finding (and throwing out) my whole loose-leaf notebook of dye samples. I made them, labeled them, organized them, put them into a cabinet and never again looked at them.

Of course, all has not been ordered or thrown out.

If you look behind the photographer of the photo above, here's a bit of what you see:

I'm still certain there a sewing machine in here somewhere. I think I threw some fabric over it in great haste so the plumbers could begin their work.

This small wrinkle on the face of my existence makes me know  how lucky I am to be able to recover, with relative ease, from the broken pipe and consequent damage. People all over the world are faced with much worse disasters and have far less help and comfort in making a recovery. --June

Sweet Baby Rose

Two days ago:

Today:

and here's a (rather bad) photo of one reason why I'm pleased:

Ignoring the view into the room and the yellow stripes caused by the incandescent lamp out of sight on the left, you can see that the red room matches the red in Terry Grant's quilted crow piece. Some things were meant to be.

And oh, the blog title? Well,that's what Miller paint calls this color of red. Me, I prefer Canned Tomato Soup. If I had known it was Sweet Baby Rose before I bought it, I never would have matched Terry's art. --June

Tideman Johnson Park

Forest in Tideman Johnson Park in Southeast Portland

-- Jer

Around the house

The hulking brutes (plumbers, carpenters, helpers, assistants to the assistants, and assorted others) have departed and we have now moved on to consider painting my office. It was formerly the dining room in this two-story four-square house, and as such, has characteristics that I had formerly ignored.

For example, the room is 13 feet by 13 feet (except for an area cut out by the pantry). Within those feet there are 4 doors and two windows! And one of the doors is a double pocket door.

Looking south, here are two of the doors, including part of the pocket door. The smaller door on the west  (right) leads to the dining room/kitchen area; the pocket door opens into my erstwhile sewing studio, now the holding area for all the furniture that was in the office.

This is the east wall, which has a door into a small enclosed porch, now being used as a storage area for fabrics.

And here's the north wall and back around to the second door in the east wall which goes through a small pantry to the kitchen.

We have concluded a couple of things from this factual account. The first is that it's no wonder I had most of my furniture in the middle of the room -- there's precious little wall space. The second is that the area would be a lot lighter if it weren't for the garden room and the porches. But the third is the best conclusion -- painting this won't take long or be too hard -- there simply isn't much territory to cover.

So we are going to paint the office. Colorfully. The paint has been picked out and some fancy overpainting kept in reserve in case what I picked out is too, ummm, colorful. Home dec isn't my strength, but sometimes fate, in the form of broken pipes, intervenes and we have to make the best of our limited talents. I'll post when we've finished painting. --June

Stone Work on Johnson Creek

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) lined the lower stretches of Johnson Creek in Portland with stone. I think this weir near Southeast 45th Avenue was part of that work.

The creek goes around an island at this location, and the weir blocks only one channel. The other channel looks like something a salmon might choose to navigate rather than going up this side. The creek still has a few salmon and other migrating fish despite nearly complete destruction of the stream's original habitat. Work to restore as much of that habitat as possible has improved the stream for fish somewhat in recent decades.
-- Jer

The Pink House

People  often ask me where the "pink house" is that I insist upon painting.

It's at the northwest corner of Morrison and 14th Street and the reason even inner southeast Portlanders don't remember it is perhaps because they are concentrating on the traffic.

The house, without much of its urban surrounds, looks like this:

Once the trees leaf out, it will be even more charming. I like the little green storefront additon, although the owner says it covers bay windows. It once held extravagant doll houses, made by one of the owners.

But here's some of the surrounding territory:

Down SE 14th Street is the long-empty Washington/Benson High School.After it stopped being a place of education, it housed various public school administrative functions, and later than that was the central clearinghouse for Katrina survivors in Portland for about six months. The school had a number of outbuildings which were recently demolished, leaving bare ground to be filled in, apparently by a developer who wants to turn the original building into condos. The city has kept a couple acres to make a much needed community center for the neighborhood. And the pink house anchors 14th and Morrison.

This is the scene diagonally across Morrison Street (the Pink House is behind me), looking at Crush, a relatively new bar on the street, which I am also rather fond of painting. And a small shopping center is beyond the photograph, on the left, filling the entire block with a number of storefronts and Nostrana Restaurant. It's clear that the Pink House is sui generis on the street. We wish it well and hope it continues to anchor the surrounds. --June

Crystal Springs Creek

Crystal Springs Creek in Sellwood

-- Jer

Johnson Creek Blvd, Springwater Corridor Trail

Jer and I are continuing our spring explorations of Johnson Creek. I am pleased to report that we've seen only about a tenth of it thus far. We have been accessing the creek along the Springwater Corridor Trail. The Trail, a bike and pedestrian pathway that will be 21 miles long when it's finished, generally follows Johnson Creek from its Willamette confluence to headwaters near Boring, although the last part of the trail is as yet unfinished.

Last week we got as far as Sellwood, where, at about 19th and McLoughlin, we found an access point and got to see the Trail as it crossed both Johnson Creek and the new bike and pedestrian bridge across McLoughlin Boulevard. This week we moved further east along the creek (and the Trail) to the Johnson Creek Boulevard Trailhead, near 45 avenue

This part of the trail runs through the Tideman Johnson Nature Park, "named after an early pioneer family whose original land claim included this six acre natural area. The Johnson family encouraged public use of its property for recreational purposes, sponsoring Fourth of July picnics and fireworks." The Trail brochure continues, saying that the site is "nestled in a natural gorge along the banks of Johnson Creek" and "was donated to the City of Portland in 1942."

The Works Progress Administration, during the Depression years of the 1930's, hoped to contain Johnson Creek's frequent floods encasing the stream with rock walls. They did a good job of building the walls, as parts of their work can still be seen, after 70-some years of floods and erosion. The walls did nothing for the floods, however, except make them more ferocious when they came.

West of this weir is an old bridge, now part of the bike path, and the path continues through the natural area. Jer reports that the area is quite beautiful. I stayed behind to paint the scene near the parking lot and rest rooms, the access point to this part of the trail. There's something fascinating to me about these interfaces with the city, where nature interrupts various human developments and forces streets to swerve and bend. It's a version, I suppose, of a riparian zone, only the "ecological" elements are the stream,cars, dogs, humans, pavement, and warehouses (the warehouse, whose shadow is part of the photo, is just out of sight on the right; it follows the Johnson Creek for a good city block).

As usual I got a lot of kibitzers as I painted. At least one of them insisted I should go west to the river and paint the flowering trees along the Willamette waterfront. I probably should go down to the waterfront and wander through the trees, but I think they are too glorious for mere humans to paint. --June

The High Note in Two Keys

At last I have gotten back to my sewing machine. The action was sheer bravado, a bit like pleine aire painting in Montana in December. We are still in the throes and throttles of repairs from the plumbing disaster. I had started a small quilted piece some time back and put it away until the repair mess was over. Then I lost it. But Wednesday night I found it again, and in a show of defiance against the universe that hid both the art and the sewing machine from sight, I unearthed the sewing machine and the thread, squeezed into the only space available to work in, and finished the piece. It felt good.

So now I can begin to ask the question, which is, is it worthwhile to take a painting and, by digitizing the image and printing it on silk, turn it into a quilted work of art? What are the benefits of doing so? What are the drawbacks?

Here are images of the two versions, oil painted and stitched silk, of The High Note.

The High Note, oil on board, 12 x 16

The High Note, about 22 x 30, digitized photograph on silk

I have some preliminary thoughts about putting the image on silk and stitching it. The textile piece looks different, not just because of the tactile and frieze-like nature of quilting, but because color takes differently with pigmented ink on silk than it does with oil on board. The image can be subtly changed through the stitching process, heightening or downplaying elements and thus changing something of the meaning of the oil work. On the other hand, printing the image, even on silk charmeuse, makes a less brilliant image than the original. And the image on textiles is less able to be tweaked when it's unsatisfactory. When you are finished, spending some amount of extra time and effort, you have a work that looks a lot like the other work -- is the time and effort worthwhile?

The uninitiated might ask, why not just paint with oils on silk or cotton rather than on board or stretched canvas? Well, oil paint eats fabric, unless the fabric is primed and gessoed and thereby rendered un-sewable. Nor can I manipulate fabric paints on un-gessoed fabric the way I can oil on board or canvas. The results on untreated fabric, even with fabric paints etc, are somewhat dummied down, simplified; the spread of the paint is very different when the surface is permeable, as it must be to sew on.

So this is the question I will be asking for the next couple of months. I think some of my paintings are more suited for turning into stitched art than others, but right now I don't have enough experience to tell which ones might be preferable. I sold the original oil painting of the images above, so I can't do an absolutely accurate assessment even of these two. But the next painting that I intend to stitch (another dog-and-High-Note) was not for sale, so I'll be able to judge the two side by side. And it's a more complex image, too, which could make a difference. Stay tuned..... -- June

Wilson River at Tillamook

The Wilson River at Tillamook, Oregon

-- Jer