Georgeann Wilson

The Sky, The Land, and The Talking Sticks

Well, I'm still on a bit of a sabbatical so here is another archive work of interest, from around 1982

Mark Montoya - some serious doodling!

While my skatboard work is not included in the current showing at Artery in North Portland, This image painted on three skateboard decks by friend and co-worker Mark Montoya is. A former grafitti artist and constant doodler, this showing in conjunction with the ARTISTS FROM BEAUTIFUL LOSERS exhibit represents Marks first public showing of his work. In addition to Mark's mixes media painting instalations, I am showing selected work from my recent drawing project Flow, and other current and former Katayama Framing employees Beau Gordon, Chris Mullins, Peter Murdoch and Vanessa Stockard are also on display.

Update! Marks boards remain on display at Artery and the recent exhibition of skateboard photography was covered by Skateboarder magazine Marks boards got some coverage at this site as well! http://www.skateboardermag.com/skateboarder-photos-videos/photos/flash/seen-of-change-art-show-portland/index.html

Artery is at
4114 N. Vancouver Ave
Portland, OR 97217

skateboard deck

This skateboard deck was manufactured by my friend Scott Moore from Subsonic Skateboards and I put this landscape of tree trunks sihlouetted against a gold leaf background onto it. Check out the Subsonic skateboard link. I also have some drawing from the work on paper "Flow" on view at "Artery" in North Portland, in conjunction with a show of work by artists featured in the "Beautiful Losers" documentary film. Featured there is skateboard artwork by another Portland colleague, Mark Montoya

The Tempest

Well, a bit of a stretch here to call this one poetic, but it is one of my pioneering pieces in the narrative vein so I will label it here to group it together with the other poetic narrative works. It's absurd humor and in your face crudness in the execution have always made this one a handful for many people to appreciate, and also made it one of my favourites! It features twin towers. I had seen the twin towers in Manhattan, and there are also a pair of towers in Century City in Los Angeles where I lived at the time. The towers in this painting aren't specific archcetectural features, I simply found the visual effect of identical twin scyscrapers a compelling visual and used them here to represent the harshness and isolation of the urban landscape. There is alot going on here with the factory puffing smog into the red sky and the artificial mountain in the backyard of the suburban house (think Disneyland) I suppose the Greek diety is going to blow it all away so that we can start anew? I worked on the study more as an independant doodle and saw all this as I contemplated what it might have been, and so found the path for the large painting you see here.


The Tempest
1983 acrylic on canvas
64 x 40



study
1982 acrylic, charcoal and collage on board
16 3/4 x 12 1/2

Update Watermelon Girl

Here is this painting as it stands so far. I haven't been working on it for awhile with too many other priorities distracting me from this calling, but i should be back at it soon

Never Trust the Fox

left panel
15 x 60

right panel
15 x 60

I can run I can I can. This is another painting that got bound up in my decade+ hiatus. During a brief time where I had a small studio in a single car garage at an apartment where I lived in 1991, I was able to work on three paintings. The right panel of this diptych was freshly begun when I stopped work and moved to new digs, where I was unable to manage a satisfactory work space. The dimensions of the canvas had been specific to cover the ugly backside of some kitchen cabinetry that faced out into the living room of that apartment. My oldest daughter was three when I stopped working on it. It was a well defined rough sketch at the time, and used it for decor on the walls of various bedrooms that my daughters shared throughout the next ten years or so. It was however far from a finished work. When I resumed work in 2002, I was met with serious protests from my girls, who had grown up with the unfinished painting as a part of their lives, and didn't appreciate the changes that it began to undergo. Free from the original constraints of covering the ugly cabinet work in a long forgotten apartment, I began to re think this project and decided to develop it further as a diptych with text elements, similar to the word paintings I had done in previous decades. In addition, I am now in the process of fabricating an ornate gilded picture frame with the title " Never Trust The Fox"carved onto it as a decorative element and a part of the conceptual foundation of the piece. The panels go together as a long, horizontal mirror image with the text on the left and the folk art styled image on the right

Oil on canvas
15 x 120
1991/2002/frame in progress

0 Degrees 155w

Or otherwise known as The Sea Monster Painting.
There is an array of NOAA weather buoy's across both hemispheres in the Pacific Ocean that track weather conditions, water temperatures, and currents, in order to learn about and predict the El Nino events that cause such havoc in the global climate from time to time. The title of this painting is the latitude and longitude of the center buoy in that array. This would be sort of an allegorical painting I suppose but that is an awfully big word for me and I don't suppose I really know what it means! Really though, I wanted to tell a story about mans historical fear of the unknown and longstanding effort to tame the natural world and thus be safe. This painting is partners with the Drowned Man on many levels. I will leave it to the viewer to figure it all out. I will say that the sea monster himself is a hybrid of a fifteenth century nautical map monster and a manga styled dragon which I did to please my young daughter who was passionate about that kind of artwork at the time that I began this work. She has moved on in her aesthetic appreciations, but this large scale painting remains very popular with young children, especially ten year old boys!

2006
oil on canvas
72 x 84

Looking Out of the Bay

And here is the final painting. Too large to either put into my storage space, or to bring with me when I cleared it out and moved my artwork here to Portland, it has had a place on a large wall in my family's home in Huntington Beach California since it's completion in 1987

The Bay
Oil and 22k gold leaf on canvas
120 x 60

Looking Out of the Bay study

This painting served as the study for my final grand painting of 1987. Essentially a sketch in oil paint executed in techniques more closely related to my work with acrylic. It is about 25 x 30

In Contemplation of Kline 1987

Franz Kline "Nijinsky"

This six foot square canvas is the result of two divergent parts of my life coming together in a somewhat random fashion. This was a bit like my pondering the visual relationship between sihlouetted trees and UPC codes which then led me to translate Andy Warhols 32 soup cans into 998 trees alongside a river in the Bar Code Project. In this case, my work as a picture framer in Los Angeles in 1987 brought me in close contact with the Museum of Contemporary Art's collection of Franze Kline paintings which had been recently donated and were being prepared for the museums innagural exhibit at the new downtown location. I had a black telescope eye goldfish of significant size and finnage at the time, and whilst studying my fish as I wound down from my job I discovered a close relationship visually between my fish and the paintings I had been working with. See for yourself!

Note: As I'm reviewing this post I have discovered a surprisingly detailed resemblance between the right third of my work and the composition in the Kline painting that I found to illustrate my narrative here. This is pure coincidence but serves to illustrate my point quite nicely. I did my work from sketches taken from life, and only became familiar with Klines "Nijinski" during the google image search for this article!

1987
oil and enamel on canvas
72 x 72
Kline photo courtesy of timeout.com

The Realm 1987

This large work, (60" x 72"), from February of 1987 was the high water mark from my early years striving to find my path as an artist and still stands in my mind as my most masterful work of art. The product of years devoted to learning the craft of painting, and my epiphany regarding the poetic possibilities of picture making and story telling through my artwork, I saw this painting in my mind as a complete vision and knew exactly how I wanted to execute it. Due to it's size and complexity both in composition and glazing layers, it took me close to two weeks to complete, even though I worked quickly with a clear vision and almost no need for revising. This was and is a rare experience for me when I work, as my general approach to making art is to first get something started, and then follow a path of experimentation and revision until my growing understanding of the work allows me to see the correct path to hone and fine tune the image to it's own true nature. This can actually be a very frustrating process for me, and with large work it is usually the case that I have to let it lie fallow for weeks at a time in order to get a sense of what either works, or doesn't work, so that I can go forward and work effectively. In painting "The Realm" I never experienced doubt or frustration, only exhilaration at having every brush stroke, wipe, and drip work out for me exactly the way I had hoped it would. Ironically, I was at the threshold of a long hiatus. By the end of summer my studio and paint supplies would be in storage. It took me until 2002 to get it all back.

The Realm
oil on canvas
60 x 72

The Drowned Man 1986

This painting from 1986 was the beginning of my current approach to making pictures. I had made some technical discoveries in terms of working in oil paints, and applied them to a narrative imagery in a way that was totally new for me. I think of these works as poetic narratives. Though I am reluctant to put that kind of label on my own work and it is really for others to decide if my work can be called "poetic", outside of any public discussion of my work, this label has served me in private to define the quality of these paintings within the context of my own portfolio. For most of the last six years I have primarily relied on landscape paintings to re-establish my skills with the brush, use of colors, and the tactile qualities of the paints and mediums. Occasionally I have dipped into the narrative realm and cross-bred the landscape work with conceptual ideas and my poetic narrative ideals, but my current drive and interest is to launch full bore into the wacky world of story telling with pictures. The Watermelon Girl is part of this. Stay tuned!

1986
oil on canvas
67 3/8 x 37

Drawings from the Southern Range of Light

Over New Army Pass at 12,000+ feet to Sky Blue Lake. Some selections from my sketch book.

Gone to California

Time to hang out with friends, re-charge my battery and collect some new inspirations. Back in August

Frame Update (Watermelon Girl later!)

Done with this.

As A Framer...

So, this is still a busy time and I haven't worked on my painting for awhile, but since I do mention in my profile that I make beautiful picture frames, I've decided to share a bit of the work that I offer to collectors and other artists in the Northwest as a fine craftsman in the service of Katayama Framing in Portland Oregon.
This finely crafted woodwork is soon to be Water guilded in 12K gold for a 50 x 50 inch beveled mirror. You can go to the website www.katayamaframing.com to see other examples of work and services that I and many other fine staff people do for the art community here in Portland and beyond!

Picket Fence

Well, I have been putting up a friend in my studio for a week and therefore have not had an opportunity to work on my Watermelon girl so I will continue here with another of my word based series from 1980. Finally the complexity of the real landscape of Santa Barbara county had crept into my work, and though this painting is primarily conceptual in nature, I was beginning to have fun with the representation of real things.

1980
acrylic and painted wood
35 x 45

Santa Barbara Landscape 1979

In league with my word based work from this time, I strove to use assemblage to connect my subject matter here to the real world in as many ways as I could think of at the time. I collected sand and flotsam from the Santa Barbara shoreline, leaves twigs and dirt from inland areas and used cotton fluff and cellophane for things like water and clouds since I couldn't get the real thing. This picture was badly stored for many years and much of the original collage work was lost, including the cellophane and cotton stuffing. I restored this work in 2004 from an old photograph, with materials collected here in Portland

50 x 60
Mixed media on canvas
1979

Santa Barbara 1979

Santa Barbara Landscape #2 Horizon Line

Continuing with word work, I did this early in my 17 month stay in Santa barbara. Huntington Beach had given relatively simple landforms with a basic straight line horizon and only trees and the walls of the subdivisions to break this up. This was especially true in the case of the ocean. The mountains around Santa Barbara come in close to the city and the ocean, and rise up all around crisp and clear. This complexity crept into this painting a bit but I did not yet have enough experience with this perspective for it to fully intrude into my painting. It might have been a more successful painting had I made it four months earlier, in the presence of a truely dominating horizon, looming through a hazy atmosphere.

Acrylic on two stretched canvass'
63 x 28

Watermelon Girl 7/1/08

He, He He!!!

Watermelon Girl 6/28/08

Continuing to update this work in progress. It's a bit scary right now but don't declair me a madman just yet!!

oil on canvas
50 x 60

Hang Glider Painting 1980

A pair of wedge shaped canvass' put together to form this 2' x 8' wedge. It is an illustration of the rate of descent of the two basic types of hang gliders in use in 1980. Paragliding had yet to be invented1

Watermelon Girl 6/25/08

Watermelon Girl continues...............

More Word Painting from the Archives

GAME PLAN (Ping Pong Green) 1978
Using paint color from a can called "Ping Pong Green" which was really the inspiration for this piece, I constructed stretchers that created a window into the canvas where I ran a small section of ping pong table netting for this painting abvout games and rules and strategy in competition.

40 x 48
rubberized playing table paint, acrylic and spray paint on canvas
1979

Watermelon Girl 6/22/08

Now she's coming along!

oil on canvas in progress
60 x 50

Gimmik Painting 1979

Title says it all!
This image doesn't adequatly show the rotation of the dayglow paint color flags attached to an electric clock motor that rotate every 15 seconds or so.
Other gimickery includes painting on the reverse side of multiple layers of plexiglass with irredescent paints, and of course the phonetic spelling of the word gimmick itself (though perhaps I should have used only one M in that case) At the time of this piece I had a philosophical opposition to any kind of illusion in my work as well and included a nod towards perspective as another gimmick in this piece. As a final gesture to throw this piece over the top, I signed it in the lower right corner "Art" Sadly the electric motor no longer works. I do not know if that can be restored

Road Test 1979

Second of several paintngs that explored language, the first being the previously posted "Surface Painting" These involved single point conceptual ideas with every possible link that I could think of wrapped into the excution. Road Test was a study of the asphalt and how it's used and what I actually found there. The canvas is stretched on bars in the shape of a road in perspective with related text and items actually found in the street fixed to the canvas, including dirt.

Watermelon Girl 6/16/08

A new work just begun. Just sticks so far! I share my studio with my artist wife, Georgeann. Those are her canvass' on the wall in the background.

50 x 60
no oil or canvas yet!

Magic 8 Ball Fortune Telling Game, and Santiam Classic Fancy Cut Green Beans

The idea here was a burned out stand of trees

45 x 50
oil on canvas
2007

Brian Eno : Before and After Science

ground

Creating an image of a clear cut forest and living here in the Northwest proved to be an educational experience for me. I envisioned a painting of a road cutting through my UPC trees and was half finished before even taking on the idea of what the background ought to be. I thought first of painting in a forest backdrop into which the bar code trees would simply melt, but soon realised that in the real world here in Northwestern Oregon there is a setting where it is quite common for a treeline to flank both sides of the roadway in an otherwise barren landscape. This is how the land has been traditionally clearcut here, stripped of all vegetation except along the sides of the roads, so that the tourists passing through don't get too upset by the devastation, and go home to write their congressman with environmental concearns. While I was simply seeking a logical visual solution for the background of my painting, I stumbled upon a politically charged image, and many viewers of this painting were more interested in my political stance than in my compositional concerns. In the end the painting was purchased by a collector who was most interested in it's connection to Brian Eno's record from 1978, which had provided me with both a bar code for the composition of my lovely stand of trees, and the seemingly random set of numbers across the bottom of the composition.


45 x 60
oil on canvas
2006

Beggar Dog Bisquits!!

Well, in the beginning at least, my crafting of landscapes from the compositional outlines presented from UPC codes seemed to evoke a sense of humor and absurdity in my work and in this piece I strove to pursue that to a kind of extreme. My favourite restaurent in Los Angeles was a mexican food establishment famous for its hip late night clientele, brown sauce that I was warned to avoid, and dangerous margueritas. They also had a wonderful collection of paintings of Mexican villages rendered on black velvet and little electric lights lighting up all the tiny cottages represented therein. With this painting I tried to capture some of that over the top yet sincere kitsch that I found in those paintings. Abandoning my usual bag of tricks in the pursuit of the perfect brush stroke, I went shopping at the local Michaels craft store, and the nearby fabric store for a full pallete of iredescent fabrics, puff balls, sequins, plastic pearls and puffy paint, and working on a beautifully stretched piece of black velvet with gold metal leaf, this image was born. My friend Vanessa did not approve! Perhaps one day she will reconsider.

The Portrait Of Door E (In Grey)

Another example of my early object based pieces. A bad pun I'm afraid. I enjoy putting these out there. Hope I'm not the only one!

1978
acrylic on canvas with brass letter "E" and knob
32 x 80

Freemont Bridge at Dawn

Here is my final work so far involving the archetecture of infrastructure in the city of Portland. I realized that I've finished up with the series of paintings that I did for the Buckman School Art Show and Sell, but along the lines of the Show and Sell, this painting was made specifically for a fundraiser - a failed attempt by the Portland Art Center (PAC), to raise enough extra cash to keep it's doors open. The show was called "PDX Panels" The Art Center passed out 300 30 x 30 plywood panels to area artists to work with however they wanted. I followed the basic formula that I used for the Show and Sell, choosing to work from a photo of a familiar Portland landmark. I gave myself no time limitation for this painting, and therefore allowed myself to give it a more polished finish and plenty of artistic license in the sky, which was purely creative fabrication. A friend noted the similarity in the sky to Munch's painting "The Scream" Not intentional, but perhaps subconciously, my knowlege of art history leaks into my work occaisonally?

2007
oil on plywood
30 x 30

Under I-5

The archetecture of the freeway structure on the east side approach to the Marquam Bridge created some interesting compositional elements. This view is looking north from somewhere near Salmon Street on the east bank of the Willamette River.

8 x 10
oil on panel
2004

The Man in the Malt 1977

This is where it all started. As a teenager in the 1970's painting held a less than prestigious place in my conciousness. I learned about what was cool from my peers in high school. This would have been airbrushed artwork on the sides of vans and post hippie album artwork by illustrators like Roger Dean and his numerous psudo surreal album covers and caligraphy for the prog-rock band Yes. I also learned that Dali was cool but neither me nor my friends knew anything about any other surrealists, or art history. The only other major modern artist who's name was familiar to me was Pablo Picasso, and he was not understood, and therefore reviled among my peer group and family members. I had little interest in art as I knew it then. Through an inspired painting teacher at the age of 17 who gave us a taste of the history of modernism through painting exercises in the style of the modern masters, from Monet and Impressionism, through Picasso and abstraction, I learned the language of paint and found that I was powerfully drawn to learn to speak it. One and a half years later I had learned enough to concieve and execute this painting which was completed in the first week of January, 1977. This was my first major work of art and the beginning of my self awarness as an artist. The assignment was open ended exploratoin into photo realism, as the final for a life painting class. My subject was my close friend, life long companion in the High Sierra, and spirit guide, Don Flaherty, who had shocked us all in 1975 or 1976 by, for health reasons, eliminating sugar and processed foods from his diet. I chose this painting as a humerous and ironic way to do his portrait. I learned much about the spirit in painting and the magic of the touch of the brush to the canvas, and about color and form and contrast in the following 31 years, but I've never made a better work of art!

oil on canvas
48 x 72

Steel Bridge, Portland OR

2004
oil on panel
9 x 12

East Salmon Street from the Esplanade

2004
oil on panel
8 x 10