Elemental

Here are some images from "Elemental," my current show at Planet Earth & the 4 Directions Gallery located at 524 Colorado Avenue here in Grand Junction CO. The show looks great; please stop by and check it out. We're having a huge Earth Day Dance Party on April 22nd; art show opens at 7pm and the music starts at 8pm. Charles King, who also teaches at Mesa State College, and his band will be playing. It should be quite the event! Caole Lowry, owner of Planet Earth, has gone to great lengths to make my art look terrific in her space. Thanks, Caole! Dawn

Pentimento Epiphany!

Wow--so there is a series of work that has been floating around in the back of my mind for at least a year now but has never made it to the studio because I haven't found the right execution for it yet. It stems from wanting to take my drawings to another level and not being proficient enough in printmaking to make that happen yet. It also has something to do with subject matter. I've always enjoyed drawing from small natural objects and trying to abstract them somewhat in the process (bones, especially skulls, wood, etc.) So, there I was last week, home alone and channel surfing, when I came across a short documentary titled 'Pentimento' which is about an artist in New Mexico named Fran Hardy. (It's still showing now and then on PAEC, the Pacific Education Channel, as well as some PBS stations if you have a chance to catch it.) It was one of those true "AHA!" moments--her technique was exactly what I had been looking for. So here's the scoop: Fran does these amazing very tight botanical illustrations on large (4x5' or so) panels in graphite. She then layers an abstract / non-representational color field on top using oil pastels, and then scratches through to the original drawing without knowing exactly what she's going to find. This is it--it speaks of process and time and a certain spirit about the subject matter, exactly what I've been looking for.

Here are some of my first experiments with this--it's a drawing of a bevel fungus that I've applied the technique to.

Off of the Subject...

So here's a classic de-construction of an image, starting with the finished piece and working backwards through the underpaintings to the initial outline. This piece is titled "Unaweep Ranchers," it is an oil on canvas and is 36x48" in size. I laid this one out a little differently than I usually do. Since I wanted the final image to be very low-key in color, I rendered the underpainting monochromatically using only Burnt Sienna and its tints and shades. In other words, my underpaintings are usually pretty technicolor, but for this image I used a more subtle technique. Actually this is a traditional technique used by Renaissance artists, only those guys, being infinitely more patient than myself, would lay out an underpainting in Burnt Sienna mixed with a nice oil medium such as linseed oil, let it dry for a month or two, then proceed to the next level (oil based mediums tend to slow the drying process in already-slow-to-dry oil paint.) Since I have better mediums available to me, and I am the world's most impatient oil painter, this sucker took me a week to complete. The image is from a treck we took up the Unaweep Canyon last September. It was one of those beautiful Colorado days where we had had a light dusting of snow, but the fall color was still on the trees. It looked like a black and white photograph where certain areas had been hand color-tinted. This is, in fact, from the same trip where I got the source material for "Living Waters."

So this is a hiatus from the water series. I started teaching art again this semester, and by the time I could get back to the studio I had lost the thread. I will pick it up again, but I felt I needed a gear shift just to get me started again. I think I have things balanced out enough that I will be able to get some real work done in the studio (finally!) Happy early spring to you,

Dawn

Watercolor-a-Rama

Yes, the next piece in the ongoing series is a watercolor (gasp!) It has been awhile since I completed a serious watercolor, or at least one I took seriously. This felt really good--this piece is 20x30 on 300# Canson 100 paper. (If you have never worked a watercolor on this paper you have to try it: it is not terribly expensive. This paper has two distinct surfaces on either side, one smoother than the other. This painting was painted on the smoother side, which is not as smooth as a hot press or as rough as a rough press.) The title of this piece is "Roaring Fork," named and based on a tributary of the Colorado that runs through Aspen. I'm still working on a better photo of the last image on "Upstream Downstream," my previous triptych. Sigh.

As I slog through "Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice" in preparation for the next class I am teaching at our local college, I at least have a good quote to share which is not attributed. "Color gets all the glory...but value does all the work." I would not have believed this as a younger artist as color has such an intrinsic emotional punch, but there is nothing more important to any art piece than its value, which is to say the feeling of light and dark in a work. You can fudge a lot with color, but if your values are off there's really no point in proceeding. Pick a light source and stick to it, that's all I'm saying.

Dawn

Upstream Downstream

Here are two pieces of a triptych I finished up before the holidays--oil on Claybord (archival panel,) the long narrow piece is 10x30 inches and the other two (one not pictured) are 16x20 inches in size. These are part of the running water series I've been working on; the third panel is finished but is not being photogenic enough to post at this time! I also have a series of pics of the underpaintings on all of these. I will try to get those cropped in and posted soon.

It's always difficult to work in enough studio time this time of year, between the holidays and year-end taxes and everything else. I am hoping to pick up the thread on this series and finish the other images I have been thinking of and then go on to something completely different. This series came about because of my endless fascination with running water. There is something magical about streams and rivers. The way the light refracts off the surface and also illuminates the bottom of the stream as it moves constantly, calling out its own music; it seems to have a life of its own. The many organisms that share this environment are also part of the allure. With these paintings I am attempting to capture some of that living motion in a still media; a moment of time frozen but hopefully still fascinating.

I will keep you posted (bad blog pun, sorry!) on the rest of the series as it progresses!

Dawn

Living Waters

Here's a piece from my latest series, which is all about moving water. This is the first presentable piece, titled "Living Waters," an oil on Claybord, a type of archival panel I'm very fond of. This piece is 18"x36" in size, and comes from a car trip we took up the Unaweep canyon on the Uncompaghre Plateau. Unaweep is Ute for "canyon with two mouths;" it is a very unique canyon in that the creek that created it has it's own divide; halfway up the canyon the waters split, so that the creek feeds into two different tributaries on each side of the divide. This is of West Creek (as opposed to East Creek; so the English names aren't nearly as poetic as the Ute...) The day we headed up was one of those weirdly beautiful days only Colorado can create; the fall color was still in full force but there had been a light snow which dusted everything in pearly white and diffused the light both above and below the horizon. At this point in the journey I had just disturbed an American Dipper, a small bird which fishes in rivers and creeks in the Rocky Mountains (the only bird which does not have hollow bones because of it's diving proclivities, just FYI...) (The dipper I disturbed was quite annoyed; they hang out on rocks in creeks and hunt for small fish and insects. I was in the way.) It was a truly magical afternoon; expect more imagery from this trek.

Here's a completely unrelated quote I just found in a book I'm reading titled: The Desert Is No Lady, Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art, edited by Vera Norwood & Janice Monk.

The desert is no lady.
She screams at the spring sky,
dances with her skirts high,
kicks sand, flings tumbleweeds,
digs her nails into all flesh.
Her unveiled lust fascinates the sun.

Pat Mora

Desert thoughts for you during the last vestiges of autumn!

Dawn

In Lieu of Cake

Above: The Red Brick Art Center with a few of my pieces showing. Here's the ski slope in Aspen Colorado, shortly before the snow falls in earnest! We have a terrific show up at the Red Brick Center. Aspen is the place to be for Halloween, by the way. I have never in my life seen so many people in costume and in character as well... People come from all over to be there. That being said, we had a poor turnout for our opening on November 1st, largely because the entire town was hung over. If you are in the area please come by and see the show; my colleagues are amazing and the space itself looks terrific. The downtown galleries in Aspen also had poor opening nights--the entire town does an Artwalk on the first Thursday of every month and apparently the commercial galleries had the same problems we had.
The Adjunct show at Mesa State came down today; after this I have a long break from shows and, as of December 7th, I will be done teaching for a little while. This is good as I have a lot I'm hoping to accomplish in the studio this winter. Actually I have a lot I'm hoping to accomplish in the studio this weekend. As always I will post anything worth posting!

Dawn