Paintings currently in the exhibition Free Air Life at BC Gallery in Portland

Still Night

A scratch drawing and oil on inked gesso. Night time in the zone above timberline in the Sierra is a special experience. The chill night air drives one into a sleeping bag early in the evening, but the visual delicacy of a landscape illuminated by stars lingers in the memory, drawing one back to the high mountains year after year.

Upcoming show

22k gold and oil on gessoed canvas panel

New work

Upcoming show

22k and black ink on gesso canvas panel

Upcoming show

Small work, 22k gold and oil on canvas gesso panel

Red Rock 2015

This Body of Water

Developing a body of work for a new show later this month. Racing the clock

Flying Homeward

OK, this is the final image for this painting. Minor final details were incomplete at the last posting, and it has a real title - "Flying Homeward" It is an essay in dichotomy. Similar but different perspectives on home, navigation, and technology in my art. Home. I have been living in Portland Oregon for twenty years now but still feel a powerful connection to the city of Los Angeles, its neighborhoods and lifestyle. Navigation. In this image there is an arial view of downtown Portland where Burnside Street crosses the Willamette River as a rendered birds eye view. Overlaid on top of this image of an area in Los Angeles where the 110 freeway passes through the Highland Park neighborhood. The arial view is representational of the iconic dream of flying and embodies that subconscious yearning for freedom and migration and a place to call home. Like the migration of geese. The map book has long been one of my most important navigational tools for learning new places. Portland has been rendered from digital images captured from Google Earth aerial photos, whereas the map overlay is a graphic rendering of the streets and other cartographic information from the Thomas Guide map book

After laying fallow for four years, here is the finished version of this painting last seen in progress in 2010

So here is a new painting to chew on. It goes along with this show http://e2.ma/webview/5a7pe/8e558a3dda1b9578914f69ac11c55c44 that features many of the drawings posted here last December

Oh Blogspot... I have left you idle for so long. Well, here are some drawings that I made in August that I finally photographed today. They come from the alpine back country in Sequoia National Park

Dusk 2011

Oil on canvas 16 x 20

California Dreaming 2011

oil on canvas 12 x 16

NIght Driving

oil on canvas 16 x 20 2011

New work

Here is the same image from my wood block print re-imagined in oil

Night Light

Continuing with the imagery of a light in the dark, this 30 x 30 canvas is the execution of an idea I've been mulling over for a while now!

Cats

It occasionally crosses my mind to make pictures of my pets. Here are a couple of my favorite feline room mates. Thumper and His Toys 36" x 40" was executed in acrylic and assemblage in 1983 when Thumper was a small kitten, and includes a number of objects attached to the painting that were retrieved from under the stove where he lost them. He often brought objects into the kitchen because they were much more fun to bat about on the linoleum than on the living room carpet. Thumpers Dream 1986 is 45" x 60" and combines heavy matte impasto acrylic surfaces with one of my earliest experiments with oil paint. It is one of the early transitional paintings from the symbolic icon approach of my early work, to the the naturalism that I now employ in search of a more poetic visual language. Princess Cid 2010 final version 30" x 40" is oil glazes from start to finish