Atlas Project/Hudson River Valley and Catskills
My first fully realized Atlas Project installation opens at Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham, NY, on March 31st, 2018. Elaborating on my artist’s statement for my discussion below, I am also including photos of all of the work in the show.
Here is the gallery’s press release, nicely weaving together my previous artist’s statement about my paintings with my new Atlas Project statement. Thompson Giroux Gallery and I are very pleased to be pledging a donation from sales to benefit two local land conservancy organizations, a small thank-you to the earth for the beautiful vistas and open spaces that I have been painting for the past decades.
Forms of Water, 30″x36″. (G)
The artworks in Christie Scheele‘s solo exhibition Atlas/Hudson River Valley take the viewer on a walk through the Hudson River Valley’s open spaces from Albany south to Manhattan.
In this exhibition Scheele brings together paintings, drawings, printmaking and mixed media and explores the personal and collective connection between our lives today and our increasingly fragile environment. Scheele continues her immersion into open spacious landscape painting. Using soft lines Scheele allows the viewer to sense and experience a particular place in our local environment; the way the light makes you feel at a specific time of day, how a place has it’s own color palette reflecting memory and process. Scheele’s use of color and atmosphere creates a suspended moment to experience the intangible power of nature.
With each destination on the “Site Map” we are invited to take an intimate look at how process, history and memory play a crucial role in our relationship to our natural environment.
In an effort to support our local land conservation initiatives, artist Christie Scheele and Thompson Giroux Gallery pledge 5% of any sales by the artist during Atlas/Hudson River Valley on view March 31-May 6, 2018 to benefit the Columbia Land Conservancy and the Woodstock Land Conservancy.
Please join us Saturday March 31st from 4-6pm for refreshments and live music by Josh Connors & Otto Gardnier.
For more information please visit www.thompsongirouxgallery.com or call 518-392-3336.
Thompson Giroux Gallery is located at 57 Main Street, Chatham NY 12037.
Gallery hours: Thursday – Monday 11am to 5pm, Friday 11am to 7pm.
Closed Tuesday & Wednesday
Closed Sunday April 1st
Image credit: Christie Scheele, “Forms of Water”, 2016, Oil on Linen, 30″ x 36″.
Land and water use have been political since the beginning of our time on earth. As these issues become increasingly critical, I have been catapulted —but also eased, nestled— into expanding the environmental discussion that until now has been mostly implied in my work, putting into context my decades-long celebration of the powerful beauty of our planet.
River with Lighthouse, 12″x36″, oil on linen.
Ebullient Winter, 18″x24″, oil on linen. (G)
My new Atlas Project maps my work while mapping the world, revealing a web of meaning around and between the individual pieces that I create. The matrix that connects all of my landscape imagery is saturated with memory, both personal and collective. To show these connections, I am working in one thematic grouping at a time, creating a legend, or site map, to each body of work. The Site Map is a key both to a given installation and to the region or theme that it explores.
The Site Map for Atlas/Hudson River Valley, the first of these exhibitions, is created with collage on a Rand McNally road map of the river valley, the Catskills, and our wider region. It contains numbered mini-monotypes of all of the oil paintings on view and corresponding map tacks showing the locale depicted on the map.
Site Map with Extensions, as it appears on the gallery wall.
Extensions of the Site Map include Mapping Memory, lino/mono prints of regional flora and fauna with written personal observations; a collaged and monoprinted map of the source of the river in the Adirondacks; a collage of the Hudson Canyon, extending 400 miles out to sea from NY Harbor; and a fourth extension discussing climate change and local impacts.
Using drawing, printmaking, pasteling, writing, and mixed-media along with oil paintings, I am exploring the interrelationships of process, history, and memory. These are revealed not only by air, land, and water but also by my materials and personal history as an artist, family and community member, and frequent inhabitant of the outdoor world.
The Atlas Project text is therefore a blend of natural history and personal memory. For the Atlas/Hudson River Valley site map I decided to tuck the text of my stories into an envelope that I created with rice paper. You can see these along the left-hand side of the Site Map, and an open one below:
Detail from left-hand panel, “Mapping Memory”.
Other bits of writing get more into the life-cycle of the wildlife depicted. I chose the species included in the map based on my interactions with them but also on a long-standing fascination. We probably all have these — how amazing, to me, is the Red Eft, so bright among the fauna of the NE United States? How cool is the life-cycle? Here is my story about these creatures:
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the salamanders that I caught as a child near Oneonta, NY, are the same creatures as the Red Efts that I greet after every rain or heavy dew on the trails of the Catskills.
They have three life stages: the first after hatching in ponds; the second when they turn from brown to red and lose their gills, traveling on land for several years to find a new body of water. Finally, in their adult phase the tail widens, and they turn back into a greenish-brown color, living and breeding as aquatic animals with lungs to complete their 12-15-year life span.
At eight I was enamored of catching and releasing in a pond that we swam in during summer months. On one occasion I brought two newts home in a mayonnaise jar, stocked with moss and bits from the bottom of the pond. I changed the water every day with nearby creek water and left the jar under a big tree on our lawn, dropping in small insects from time to time.
One day I spotted eggs in the moss. Such anticipation!
A few days later we heard young voices coming from our front yard just after dark, and looked out to see two boys walking away. The next morning, I found my jar empty of water and newts, the eggs drying in the sun.
Reflected Suns, 32″x48″, oil on linen.
Printmaking become an integral part of Atlas/Hudson River Valley. Below are two monotype versions of the image used in “Reflected Suns”, exploring the more graphic possibilities of the medium.
MReflected Sun #2, 10″x16″, monotype. (Sold)
MReflected Sun #1, 10″x16″, monotype. (G)
And the mini-monotype on the Site Map (placement of these had to do with compositional concerns, as the numbers and map tacks are what identify the precise locales):
The first energy and ideas for this project evolved in 2016. That fall, I was experiencing profound grief over election results and their potential to set policy that will accelerate climate change. I was also contemplating a scheduled residency on Nantucket in February of 2017, and my upcoming 60th birthday later on that year. The second two factors prompted a question—how do I want to expand and deepen my range as an artist? The first, my accelerating concern over the health of our planet, gave me direction.
This extension to the Site Map addresses the issue of global warming:
These two recent monotypes reflect a view of a section of the Schoharie Creek valley in summer and then during the massive storm flooding caused by Irene:
MVroman’s Nose/Green Fields, 8″x10″. (Sold)
Vroman’s Nose/Flooded Fields. (Sold)
And two additional monotypes of our region:
MSweeping Sky with Fields, 8″x10″, monotype. (Sold)
MWhite Field #1, 8″x10″, monotype. (Sold)
The Nantucket residency produced a prototype Site Map where I first used the idea of making small monotype prints of the oil paintings to be included in the grouping or show. It is a very rich process, artistically, entering a new world as you are creating it, and also full of the discomfort of facing the unknown. To read about my residency, go to this link to my blog post:
https://scheeleart.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/artists-residency-on-nantucketnew-atlas-project/
I so loved the collaging-on-a-map process while working on the Site Map that I decided to create some of these as stand-alone art pieces. The first, below, leaves much of the under-map showing, and in addition to pattern and magazine papers; samaras, wasp galls, and other bits and bobs, I hand dyed some of the green papers used for the Catskill Park area.
Atlas/Hudson River, 18″x14″, mixed media/collage on Rand McNally Road Map on board. (Sold)
I live in the High Peaks area of the Catskills, so many of the pieces in this show are images of the mountains, roadways, streams, and of course, the Ashokan Reservoir, seen above in blue within the Park.
Esopus Mists, 12″x12″, oil on linen. (G)
Indigos with Glowing Light, 18″x24″. (Sold)
Affinity/Dusk Road, 30″x30″, oil on linen with frayed edges on primed board overlaid with graphite gridding.
Another collage, also of the River, is more tightly composed and with more contrast than the first, and includes the small river towns of Kingston, Rhinebeck, Poughkeepsie, and Newburg.
Atlas/HV Collage, 2 panels of 16″x8″/ea.
For the third, following my own lead with the Site Map extension, I hand-died rice papers in varied blues to reinterpret the Hudson Canyon, the below-water extension of the river itself.
Hudson Canyon Collage, 12″x12″. (G)
The Hudson River originates in Lake Tear of the Clouds, in a remote area of the Adirondacks, as pinpointed in the upper extension, above. It empties out into New York Harbor:
Harbor with Soft Light, 13″x20″, pastel on paper.
Many images are Hudson views between NYC and Hudson, NY. The stretch between Poughkeepsie and and Saugerties is well-traveled in the summer by us in our small lake boat. Lower sections are often views from bridges and the train.
2 Shores/Reflected Sun, 12″x12″, oil on linen.
Refracted Golds, 20″x40″, oil on linen. (Sold)
Downriver, 24″x24″, oil on linen.
River with Big Sky, 24″x30″, oil on linen. (G)
Rare Summer Silence, 20″x30″, oil on linen. (Sold)
River Island with Castle, 9″x36″, oil on board.
Gleaming Bridge, 20″x40″. (Sold)
Affinity/Shore Lights, 16″x8″, oil/linen/board/graphite gridding.
Red River Shore, 20″x30″. (Sold)
This is not a catalogue of all of the wonderful views of the HV and Catskills, but rather an organically created collection of a number of the paintings that I have done over the past 10 years or so of our region. In this way, the grouping is a bit of a retrospective.
I am frequently hiking and driving around both the East side of the Hudson, into the Berkshires, as well as the West side, reaching into of the foothills of the Catskills, providing sources for some favorite views of the river itself as well as farm fields and hillsides.
Triptych in Reds, 24″x24″/ea. panel, oil on linen.
Long Storm Cloud, 8″X28″, pastel on paper.
Meadow with Peaks, 14″X18″. (Sold)
Trees with Mists, 18″x48″, oil on linen. (G)
Mountain Sky/Blues, 24″x48″, oil on linen. (Sold)
“September Dawn”, 10″x28″, pastel on paper. (Sold)
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Particularity of Place, 36″x36″, oil on linen. (G)
Layers of Meaning, 30″x24″, oil on linen. (Sold)
Snow Fields, 12″x12″, oil on linen. (G)
Snow Shadows, 12″x12″, oil on linen. (G)
The final study done for a large piece in oil, now sold, inspired by the Maya Lin Wave Field at Storm King:
Green Waves, 5″x28.5″, oil on paper.
My upcoming groupings will include Atlas/Forms of Water, and Atlas/Cape Cod, the former creating overlap with the place-based themes and requiring a different solution for the map (I am thinking maps, actually).
I alternate between focusing on aspects of this work that I am currently inventing and my continued immersion in my open, spacious landscape paintings, looking to draw it all together into a cohesive whole, mirroring the wholeness of life on earth.
Sweeping Greens/Jostling Trees, 28″x68″, oil on linen. (Sold)
A link to the Violet Snow article in the WoodstockTimes:
https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2018/04/02/artist-christie-scheeles-map-magic/
Many thanks to those who have helped this project along: my husband, Jack, for design and paste-up help; Kate McGloughlin of the Woodstock School of Art for teaching me monotype techniques; Mary Emery for inspiring my rediscovery of printmaking; The Artists Association of Nantucket for hosting the residency that advanced this work; Polly Law for brainstorming titles (including “Atlas Project” itself) and language with me; Jenny Nelson for being my sounding board; Loel Barr for showing me some of her cool collage techniques; Thompson Giroux Gallery for planning and mounting this large and complex solo show; Geoffrey Rogers for his expert framing; and Mark Loete for the perfect photographs of the Site Map and extensions.
“Gallery:Studio – A Symbiosis” Solo Show with Albert Shahinian Fine Art
Having a quiet chat during a lull in the reception…
Light that Glows, 32″x60″. $7,500.
Soft Greys from Peaked Hill, 10″x60″, $4,200.
Green Waves, 12″x75″, $8,000. (Sold)
https://scheeleart.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/the-evolution-of-a-new-concept/
Rare Summer Silence, 20″x30″, $3,200.
Cranberry Bog in Reds, 48″x24″, $5,000.
Affinity/WinterSunset, 36″x48″, $6,500. (Sold)
“Extravagant Sky”, 36″X60″. $8,000.
Triptych in Reds, 3 panels of 24″x24″/ea., $7,500.
White Field, 20″x40″, $3,600. (Sold)
Angle of Repose, 40″x30″, $5,000.
Drifting Clouds, 20″x20″, $2,200. (Sold)
“Affinity/Dusk Road”, 30″x30″, $4,000.
Sunset with Taillights, 40″x20″, $3,800.
Sunset Contours, 20″X20″, $2,200. (Sold)
Sunset Harbor, 20″X16″.
Hill Beyond Hill, 3 panels of 24″x20″/ea., $7,000. (Sold)
Height of Summer, 36″x48″, $6,500 (sold).
Summer Fields, 30″x30″, $4,000.
Moving Sky, 30″x36″, $4,500. (Sold)
Juncture, 18″x52″, $4,200.
Affinity/In Motion, 48″x12″, $4,000.
Sundrenched Field, 20″x24″. $2,500. (Sold)
Skyblues/Seablues, 10″x8″, $800.
Winter in Blue/White, 12″x12″, $1,300. (Sold)
Angular Tidal Flats, oil on paper on 12″x12″ board. (Sold.)
Mauve Sky, 6″x12″, oil on board, $650. (Sold)
Affinity/Duo/Palms, 2 paintings of 16″x8″/ea, $2,000. (Sold)
Glistening Greys, 10″X10″, oil on linen. (Sold.)
Gold Bush, 10″x10″. oil on board, $700. (Sold)
2 Suns, 10″x10″, oil on board, $700. (Sold.)
“Study/Sunset Sea”, 5″x5″, oil on primed paper, $550.
Study/Skyline, oil on paper, 7″x7″, $700.
“Factory at Work”, 7.5″x3.5″, $600.
Affinity/Boatyard, 10″x10″, 2014, oil on linen with frayed edges on board overlaid with graphite lines, $900. (Sold)
“Hilltop Contour”, oil on a vintage child’s slate, $750.
Additional works at the gallery:
Gleaming Bridge, 20″x40″, $3,600.
Summer Sky over Divided Fields, 20″x24″, $2,500 (sold).
Black Treeline, 36″x48″, $6,500. (Sold)
Sweeping Greens/Jostling Trees, 28″x68″, $7,500.
Mists from Palmer Hill, 12″X36″, $2,800. (Sold)
Dawn Headlights, 12″X36″, $2,800.
RefractedGolds, 20″x40″, $3,600.
Favorite Field/Soft Greens, 3 panels of 12″X12″/ea., $3,200.
“Intervening Space”, 20″X20″, $2,200 (sold).
Stormy Sea, 12″X12″, $1,300.
Evening Shoreline, 12″X12″, $1,300.
Study/Mountain Contours, oil on primed paper, 4″x14″, $800.
Affinity/Bridge at Sunset, 12″x24″, $2,000.
Green Waves, oil on paper, $1,600.
“Conviction of Beauty”, 12″x42″.
Red Sky with Gleam, pastel on paper, 5″x12″, $800.
River Sunset, pastel on paper, 11.5″x19″, $1,600.
Mountain Fields, pastel on paper, 20″X24″, $2,500. (Sold)
White Trail, 40″x30″, $5,000. (Sold)
So much happening! Summer Season 2014.
Over the top busy this spring and summer, with new galleries, a solo show in place and several other shows coming up between now and August.
We had a lovely, packed opening reception at Chace-Randall Gallery in Andes, NY. I will be updating the blog post I created about the work in the show as pieces continue to sell—but you really should see the show in person, if you couldn’t make the opening! Thank-you to Zoe Randall for the party and especially for a great job hanging the work. The show will be up through July 7th.
https://scheeleart.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2657&action=edit
With the largest painting in this show, “Interwoven Stories”.
Host Tom Lavazzi pouring wine…and tons of nice conversation passing around.
Owner/director Zoe Randall and I in front of the postcard piece, “Turquoise Light”.
I am showing again at Butters Gallery in Portland Oregon— and so pleased to add this reputable gallery in a new locale to my list. I participated in the “Line” show there last winter, curated by Melinda Stickney-Gibson, and have remained on the roster. Opening June 5th is a 4-artsist landscape show, invitation below. For my work in the show, see their website:
http://www.buttersgallery.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=486&sr=1&ppage=6
BUTTERS GALLERY LTD 520 NW DAVIS PORTLAND OREGON 97209 (503) 248-9378 (800) 544-9171 gallery hours: tuesday-friday 10-5:30 saturday 11-5 http://www.buttersgallery.com
East / West
June 5th – 28th 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday June 5th, 6 – 9 pm
My newest gallery is Edgewater Gallery in Middelbury, VT. This happened the way we artists love it to happen—a phone call offering representation. A beautiful space and locale, I am happy to be on the walls, and look forward to events there, starting with a visit and meet-and-greet in October. I just shipped off this triptych, painted with them in mind. See their website for additional work:
http://www.edgewatergallery-vt.com/scheele-christie.html
“Hill beyond Hill, 3 panels of 24″x20″/ea.
Up next is my duo show (with M.J. Levy Dickenson) at Julie Heller East in Provincetown, July 18-31, with an opening reception on July 19th from 6pm on. That same night we are also hosting a reception through the gallery at the Anchor Inn with larger pieces of mine and the work of Polly Law, 7-9pm. The idea is that viewers can go from East End to West End and see both shows.
Arriving at the Anchor Inn/JHG on June 5th, this new piece.
“Entering Province Lands”, 30″X60″.
In August I will be showing with Louisa Gould Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard in a show with Louisa herself and Paul Beebe. Dates are August 7-27. with opening reception August 9th, 5-7pm. I am new to this beautiful gallery in Vineyard Haven, though I have been showing on the island since 1998, beginning with Carol Craven Gallery and most recently with Dragonfly (thank-you, Carol, Don, and Susan!). The show will include several large-formeat pieces of Vineyard locales.
Here are a few pieces hanging now in her Memorial Day show, including several new ones recently delivered.
“Lifting Rain, 20″x60”.
“Summer Sunset/Tidal Creek”, 36″x12″.
Tucked in among all of these shows with my galleries is a very sweet happening, a show called “Three Generations” at Cano (Community Arts Network of Oneonta) in Oneonta, NY. This show will feature my mother, Gerri Scheele, with the ceramics that she was so well known for and the landscapes that followed; myself; and my daughter and son Tessa and Tony Scheele Morelli. This will be a special family affair staged at the Wilbur mansion, where I did my first oil painting at age 11 and where my mother showed extensively for many years.
Heading next week to Gold Gallery in Boston, this newly repainted piece. I am looking forward to my second solo show there in March of 2015.
“Endless Sky”, 36″x72″.
Some spring sales:
“Bridge Crossing in Violets”, 12″X12″. (Sold by Butters Gallery.)
Sunset River Expanse”, 20″x62″. (Sold by Albert Shahinian Fine Art.)
“Approach,” oil on vintage blackboard, 11″x13.5″. (Sold by Chace-Randall Gallery.)
ALL of my galleries have work of mine at all times, so wherever you are or travel to among these locales, check them out!
Workshops are upcoming at the Woodstock School of Art June 23-25 and Provinctown Artists Association and Museum, September 15-18.
Abstraction and Narrative in the Landscape
Working in Oil or Pastel
Using photograhic reference, we will investigate how the elements in a landscape painting serve the whole, accessing the formal qualities of color, shape, edge, and composition to create compelling imagery. The first day we will explore these tools and how they impact the implied narrative of the painting through exercises in oil or pastel on paper. In these studies we will add, subtract, move elements around and change color using our painterly hand. Instead of painting over changes, each study will remain intact while we start a new one so that all variations can be rigorously critiqued and compared before being used as a springboard for a larger painting.
Days 2-4 will include a demo of color-mixing from primaries; more compositional studies, and pursuing fully realized landscape paintings on canvas or larger pastels. Instruction will emphasize the reduction of detail to create a strong, clean composition, along with discussion of both the abstract and the narrative qualities brought out in individual paintings.
Staying Fresh
How do we do it?
I have been working exclusively with landscape imagery since 1990, and painting full time since about 2004. I like nothing better than to be in my studio working, and since I have multiple galleries that all need work, that means a good number of landscape paintings over the course of the years.
So how do I keep it fresh, avoid being bored (which would surely show up in the work), not fall into painting the same painting over and over again?
This is a big question for artists who have a market for their work. Some do just that—paint the same thing, essentially, for decades on end, though realists and plein air painters often have a great love for minute changes in subject matter and locale and keep themselves happy and entertained with these shifts. No judgement here from me–the happy or engrossed artist is the key to good work.
We have all seen artists in the blue chip realm who disappoint with a new body of work (will Susan Rothenberg ever be able to delight me as much as she did with the early horse series?) And yet, the custom of many decades now is for an artist to work serially, ideally moving gracefully and yet compelingly from one body of work to another, maybe over the course of a few years (and often marked by the solo at their major gallery, when it is assumed that that work will leave their studio and never come back, making it easy to start a fresh series). Preferably, from the market standpoint, there is some stylistic or thematic continuity from one series to the next.
I found my true niche with my minimalist mode of landscape painting back in 1990, and a few years later felt a need for opening up my explorations. I addressed it then by expanding the range of my subject matter and palette. Initially, I had avoided anything overtly dramatic, keeping to tonalist color and flat light, and the first shift brought me into a complex sky, or a brighter, blue-sky day.
(The photos in this post may be more current examples, since I have not even begun to get all of my pre-digital slides and photos scanned.)
“Rare Summer Silence”, 20″x30″, (courtesy Gold Gallery), an example of the sort of palette and light that has drawn me from the beginning.
“Sky in Motion”, 24″X20″ (sold by Gold Gallery), which shows the kind of complex sky that beckoned a little later on.
As the years passed and I felt ever more firmly in the saddle of my approach, I dared take on subject matter that borders on the cliche for a landscape painter—sunsets, a beach path, fluffy white clouds, even a sailboat at rest. I enjoyed the challenge of painting these subjects while avoiding the melodramatic or sentimental, at first by aided by instinct and later with a clearer understanding—which I now teach—of how this can be achieved.
“Sunset Sea in Red/Gold”, 20″x60″, (private collection).
I also played with format. The first time I did a vertical landscape I had never actually seen it done, and I found it quite daring. Later, I explored extreme verticals, as well as horizontals.
“Cranberry Bog in Reds”, 48″x24″ (courtesy Gold Gallery).
The next time I felt restless, I still thought of subject matter, now manmade elements. I started with phone poles, and moved on to urban images, road imagery, and then grittier industrial imagery. In 2003 I had a show at Albert Shahinian Fine Art, then in Poughkeepsie, called “Manmade”.
“Exuberant Storm, 30″x36” (sold by Chace-Randall Gallery).
“Conviction of Beauty”, 14″x40″ (courtesy Albert Shahinian Fine Art).
“Bridge Crossing in Violets”, 12″x12″ (courtesy Butters Gallery).
A few years later, I pondered how to get my love for the grid into my work (bearing in mind that my background is in contemporary, not traditional, art). On first glance, it seemed that there were only a few ways to incorpoarate this with landscape imagery. But I decided to just get started doing these first ideas, and eventually it became clear that there were many ways to bring the landscape and the grid together.
“River in 5”, 5 panels of 10″x10″/ea., (sold by Albert Shahinian Fine Art), one image stretched over a number of panels.
“Trove”, 35 3″x5″ oil-on-panel paintings (private collection). In order to make these separate images hang together and not be too busy, I used at least some reds in each piece, and toward the end I painted six or seven very minimalist black-and-red images to create a sort of matrix for the brighter, more complex pieces. Also, some of the images had already been explored in larger pieces, usually in a different format, and revisiting them was a pleasure.
“Rainy Road/Fireflies”, 3 panels of 12″x12″/ea. (sold by Gold Gallery), three versions of the same stretch of road and close to the same moment in time, with implied movement and a non-linear nod to film.
Somewhere around 2002, once again contemplating my next move, I began to use vintage boxes and other distressed objects as my support, selecting imagery and palette to mesh with the elements already present in the object.
“Approach”, oil on vintage blackboard, 11″x13.5″ (courtesy Chace-Randall Gallery). Elements and color in the image reflect grain, texture and color present in the frame of the blackboard.
This series sometimes requires applied problem-solving in to addition visual/aesthetic decision making, and I enjoy the stretch of the brain.
Many of these pieces have been set in lovely old compartmentalized boxes, trays, or pans, which means that they also explore multiple-panel imagery.
“Mountain Fall in 6, 5″x18” (courtesy Albert Shahinian Fine Art). This appears to be an old coin drawer from a cash register. At first I thought of putting small panels within the compartments, but that obscured the lovely curve at the back. Finally, I created flexible pieces of backed linen that follow the curve. I had to take them in and out a number of times while I was painting them, since being set back changed the light and therefore the color substantially.
When I was preparing to do my Cyclone Sampler, I spent a great deal of time just figuring out what I was going to paint on before nestling the tiny panels into the compartments of the box (I settled on bevel-cut 8-ply matboard—bless my framer—that I sealed front and back with multiple coats of matte medium, since I did not want to put glass over this piece). A spontaneous decision at the end, purely aesthetic, was to leave a few compartments empty, avoiding the feel of a catalogue.
- “Cyclone Sampler”,21.5″x10.5″, (collection of the Tyler Museum of Art). Unlike the expansive feel of my single-image landscapes , this piece shows the vast energy of many twisters tightly contained within the grid.
This series has as many possibilities as the amazing things that I come across that fire my imagination, though I often have to stare at the object for up to a year before I decide what I want to do with it.
Irrigated Fields, 4″x18″(sold by Albert Shahinian Fine Art).
- My most recent addition is the Affinity Series, oil paintings on linen with frayed edges on board overlaid with graphite gridding. I don’t even remember the exact thought process that brought these into being, but it started with the idea of manipulating the support. I was enjoying both selecting and adjusting the subject matter to the individual vintage object that I was using in the pieces in that series, and was interested in creating a more specific support myself, forcing a considered mesh between it and the painted imagery.
Generally the imagery that works best with the frayed edges and gridding in the Affinity Series is either very minimalist or has strong linear elements.
Affinity/Boatyard, 10″x10″, 2014, oil on linen with frayed edges on board overlaid with graphite lines.
That I ended up with graphite gridding as an overlay was a circle-back to my longstanding interest in the grid, bringing the viewer’s eye to the surface of the piece and creating mixed associations. Some of the latter I hadn’t even thought of, like the historical use of gridding to aid with proportions while transferring a small image, or maquette, into the larger finished piece, an association that other artists have pointed out to me.
Affinity/On the Grid, 36″x48″, (courtesy Gold Gallery). In this very recent piece I pushed the gridding quite a bit, moving to black instead of graphite and actually spending more time very selectively gridding than on the earlier painting portion.
Many pieces now are some combination of these series. For example, often the frayed linen on board of the Affinity series works well in an old box.
“Factory at Work”, 7.5″x3.5″ (courtesy Julie Heller Gallery).
All the while, I have continued to paint my wide-open landscapes on linen. Doing all these other explorations makes a small new slant on a salt marsh or hillside painting feel exciting and fresh, even though I have been painting this imagery for 24 years.
“Blue Light”, 20″x60″, 2014.
I love expanding the repertoire, adding both new versions within a body of work that reflects longstanding interests and, every so often, a whole new series. In my week-to-week, month-to-month, I juggle these series simultaneously, rather than consecutively, keeping myself riveted to what is developing in my studio.
The constant is the landscape.
“White Light/ Red Light”, 24″x24″, (Courtesy Chace-Randall Gallery). Sneak peak at a new piece going into my upcoming solo, opening May 24th!
What is next? (I have several ideas just taking shape, so not sharing yet!)
Winter Series
Perhaps it is because of the non-winter of 2012. Maybe it reflects the variety of weather and color that we are experiencing this year. In any case, at the beginning of 2013, I looked around my studio and saw that I had a series of winter images emerging. This is not something I normally do, creating a grouping based on a season, especially one that is so…charged? Controversial?
Since we do not reliably have snow cover in winter anymore, these images vary from a minimalist snowy field with bits of reddish vegetation poking out at the top, to a view of the Walkill with no snow cover at all.
Two of them were inspired by photos posted by friends on Facebook, used, of course, with their permission. This is something that I don’t seek out, having enough reference in my studio to last me about 500 years. But when I see the right thing…hard to resist!
About half were started in 2012, but all have been finished in the month of January.
Enjoy!
White Field, 20″x40″, 2013.
Riverglimpse in December, 36″x48″, 2013.
Winter Cloudbank, 12″x12″, 2013.
Cranberry Bog in Reds, 48″x24″, 2013.
Winter Field, 10″X30″, 2013.
Soft Snow/Approaching Cars, 12″X12″, 2013.
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