southeastmain

City Archaeology, Mcloughlin Boulevard, Portland

I continue to mine Portland for painting ideas and have been getting a lot of use out of that zone of wasteland, McLoughlin Boulevard in southeast. McLoughlin Blvd is also State Route 99e, which was once a major north-south highway (before I-5) and so it has derelict relics of strip architecture from the '50's.

One reason McLaughlin a good painting prospect for me is not just because it's a six lane highway lined with asphalt and decrepit buildings, but also because the Springwater bike and pedestrian trail crosses over it, making it easy to look at and photograph. Many of my photos were taken from the bridge in the photo below.

So a couple of nights ago Jer and I took a quick tour of the evening light and McLoughlin, first from the trail and then from street level.

It's the incongruities that get me every time. Look at the lovely sky and the soaring bridge and the rhythm of light poles -- and the blast of highway with unattractive buildings lining it.

Among the most unattractive (which I am, of course, painting) is the square yellow one. It sits six lanes and lots of asphalt across from the round yellow one, both of which are in the first photo above (I painted the round one earlier and posted it here.)

This building may have been a bar at one time and perhaps owned by the same person who owned the building across the way. I figure he got a bargain on the yellow paint, long about 1954. When the street was widened, an impassible curb was added, so both these buildings, which may have been popular drinking spots, got left without highway access and finally fell into disrepair.

But just up Ochoco Street, a block away, is Johnson Creek, feathered in the greens of spring

I saw a guy in the house that peeps just over the roof of the yellow building (above) taking a wheelbarrow load of lawn clippings to his already spaded and seeded back garden. And another nearby house is kept immaculate and beautifully groomed as it lives in the shadow of one of the ubiquitous warehouses. Remnants of a city past; views of the city present; all tangled together with trees and water and wildlife and humans.

Oh yes, the wildlife. In the photo above, the clump of trees just beyond the desolate parking lot sits in a tiny water-filled bog, full of cattails and birds. Jer and I parked right next to it so I could photograph the yellow building up close, and when I opened the door, the sound of the birds almost drowned out the sound of the cars passing. We were both astonished and delighted. --June

Clackamas River at Big Cliff

Clackamas River at Big Cliff

-- Jer

Still Alive

I am still alive after Saturday's critique, but my body feels a bit like it has been run over by a mack truck. I can't sustain six hours of concentration anymore, at least not concentration where other humans are involved. Actually, I guess I did sustain it, but I may have to lose the next week or so, in order to recover.

So what did the guest critics have to say about my Mrs. Willards (the unquilted piece where she dices with the devil that I showed on Saturday's blog as well as another finished one with Mrs. W. waltzing with the wisteria?)

Well, they liked the Waltzing but had doubts about the Dicing. I understand the sentiment. What they might have said, had they been trained in the quilting arts rather than the painting ones, was that I needed to do a lot more intelligent (ie not mindless stipple) quilting, particularly on the background. And maybe muck about with some changes of hue or value, also on the boring but big background of the unfinished work. Of course, such changes would have to be subtle so as not to compete with the complexity of the rest of the work. Sigh.

They are right on, of course, and so I'm not going to show you Mrs. W. dicing half quilted; it's too obscene <snort>. Maybe someday.....

The other thing they said that was right on (and a bit sharply felt by moi) was that I may have to make a decision between the quilting art and the oil painting art. These "critics" are friends who know my paintings as well as my quilted works, so they were working with a fair knowledge of my work. I'm thinking on this -- but not too hard. First I have to recover from the truck -- I mean the day's -- work.

However, the sun shone a bit over the weekend and the temps became almost bearable, so in honor of the occasion, I decided to show some paintings that have to do with the weather. The first two are abstracts in honor of green -- they aren't successful as dealing with the question of how many greens can a painter paint, but I'm rather fond of them in a somewhat lighthearted way.

The last one is just to remind me that even if it starts raining again tomorrow, it could be worse. It has been worse (and will get worse again); but it also will get better.

This is a scene from the high desert, the Palouse, in eastern Washington, on February 1 2008. My painting instructor said the painting was definitely better than the photo from which I was working, which made me beam. (He's never seen my quilted art.) --June

Rapids

Rapids on the Clackamas River

-- Jer

Critique Day

I almost forgot to do the blog; Saturday is the day-long meeting of our wide-ranging fiber arts group, members of which come from throughout the state. Portland is hosting the group (which meets twice a year in different places), so the preparation for the four of us Portlanders who are responsible for this meeting has been more than usually extensive.

There is the usual pile of things packed up to take to the car:  the projector, the laptop, the cookies and almonds, the lamp, and of course the art -- an older piece for reference and a new one, hot off the sewing machine.

We are having two guest critics this time, something we haven't tried before. The critiquers, printmaker and watercolorist Tad Leflar and Mary Real, have done a superb job of preparation. They are presenting something they are calling "Aesthetic Tools for the Fine Arts" and have looked at slides of art from each of the members of the groups. So along with their list of tools, they have listed suggestions of art to inspire each of us individually.

Here are the tools:

Concept, Composition, Material, Abstraction, Negative Space, Asymmetry, Perspective, Time, Zone System, and Border are the categories they list, along with definitions that delineate art from science and craft.

The artists they recommend in general for us are Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse, the Cubists, Gauguin, 15th Century Italian Primitives (Fra Angelico, etc.) Hartley, Chagall, the Futurists, Leger, Joseph Stella, Miro, the Blue Riders (Kirchner, etc.) Diebenkorn, Klimt, Ukyio-e (Japanese Prints), Mexican muralists (Rivera, Squieros etc) Joseph Albers, Morris Louis, Alex Katz, Mark Rothko, Rauschenberg, Abakanowicz, and Hockney.

They also had suggestions for each artist based on the slides they looked at from them. For me in particular, the list consisted of Russian and Byzantine icons, 15th century Italian Primitives, Chagall, Frankenthaler, Albrecht, Mexican muralists, Beckmann, Kiefer, J. Bartlett, Rothenberg, Hodgkins, and Diebenkorn. I was going good until I got to J. Bartlett, who, along with Rothenberg and Hodgkins don't conjure up a single image to my mind. Guess I have some homework to get to on Sunday.

Here's the piece, un-quilted in the photo but now looking much better because it's been stitched, that I'll be asking for comments on. I forgot to photograph it in its stitched form.

I call the work various things, but "Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil" is the one that sticks best at the moment. It is hand-dyed and hand-painted cotton and something like 6 feet wide and 7 feet long. The epitaph on the tombstone is "Les Jeux Sont Faits" which is what French croupiers in gambling circles say when the betting is closed; it's also the title of a book by  Jean-Paul Sartre, published in English as "The Chips are Down." I like thinking of it as "The Game Is Up" or  "The Die is cast"  although there are no dice in this scene. Mrs. Willard is the hero of a number of pieces I've done in the past; it's been fun getting back to her snarky self. --June

Hatchery

Fish hatchery at Milo McIver State Park

No fish in this one. The ranger we talked to said they had recently been "liberated". -- Jer

Above the Clackamas

Jer and I have moved on to another Willamette River Watershed, the Clackamas River. While part of the Clackamas runs through urban areas, a lot of it is wild and part of it is officially Wild and Scenic. We wandered up the river the other day, stopping in McIver Park, where I took photos of the bog. I also took photos of the River.

The river is full of rapids and white water, hard to photograph but most enticing (if one is enticed by that sort of thing.)

The photo above had various versions. One of them has a mysterious element down river:

We can't figure out what industry it is that can be seen in the middle left. Something to be researched, I guess.

Here's another, pleasanter view of some rapids upstream from McIver Park.

For a fine introduction to white water on the Clackamas, read the Gorp web account of one kayaker's experience. We looked at the white water at Fish Creek -- and were impressed. --June

Green

I'm trying to suss out the greens that we are in the midst of. In a week, dawn will turn to day (so to speak) and the greens will be heavy, dense, and dark. But right now, they are enough to make a tender heart weep for glory.

If course the pinks are pretty phenomenal, too, but I find the greens irresistible. --June

Main City Park

Johnson Creek in Main City Park, Gresham

-- Jer

Critique #4

At last Tuesday's painting class, the substitute instructor never showed and so the class held its own critique session. I took three pieces (rather than my usual ten), pieces which showed three different approaches to the art I'm currently doing.

Two of these pieces I posted earlier:

Sunny Saturday on Hawthorne and SE 20th, oil on board, 12 x 16

Little House among Warehouses, oil on board, 12 x 16

And this one that I haven't posted previously.

Spring Forest, oil on board, 12 x 16

I'm not sure about the title of "Spring Forest" -- it's almost too directive, both words carrying loaded baggage. This last, without any attached title,  was the one my classmates focused on. Their comments were somewhat like comments they've made about my city scenes: "weird,"  "Hansel-and Gretel-ish," "maybe Hieronymous Bosch". They also had other interesting observations -- that the small size (12 x 16) of my city pieces might be just right for subject matter. And they wanted to know what direction I was going in -- did I envision doing more of the semi-abstract pieces?

I kept trying to explain that the abstracts most often came after I had exhausted myself working on the finicky city scenes; they were a product of the peculiar let down of one's guard that sometimes accompanies the day's end.

One of the class members finally said, "Oh I get it. Your abstracts come out of your representational work; you can't do one without the other." Bingo! That was it.

So I'm not planning on pursuing the abstracts, not exclusively, nor enlarging the city pieces (well, not many of them, anyway). Another person said that I will soon have painted every crack and crevice of Portland and while that's not true (there are too many cracks and crevices), I am having fun getting a fix on particular areas of the Sovereign Nation of Southeast Portland.  And I'm also enjoying what happens when I come to the end of my persnickety city and turn to the joys of color and texture and board. --June