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

Study for Memory/Birds Eye View - progress so far

Toe Island 2001

This image was inspired by the flooding of the Willamette River in 1996. The stretcher I used was built in 1995 at a time when I had no place to work, and it hung in the outbuilding on my property as a spirit guide and inspiration during the transformation of that space into what is now my painting studio.
Toe Island is a tiny sand bar in the Willamette River on the south west side of Ross Island. During the flooding in 1996, the shrubs were all submerged for a prolonged period of time and surprisingly survived the strong current, but were all bent downstream in the wake of the flood. This was the story I wanted to tell here, but the silhouetted trees in the foreground became the inspiration for the bar code paintings that formed the basis for the Andy Warhol Barcode Project five years later. I recently visited the friend in California who owns this painting, and was able to photograph it successfully for the first time.

Sabbatical Over

I have resumed work on the Watermelon Girl tonight and will post the finished work probably in a few weeks. In the meantime here is recent work by my studio partner and wife of 29 years, Georgeann.

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

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

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

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

East Salmon Street from the Esplanade

2004
oil on panel
8 x 10

Burnside Bridge, from the Steel Bridge pedestrian walkway

This one is owned by my friend Scott Moore. He was an organizer of the Buckman School Art Show and Sell and we made a trade. I got one of his skateboards. Check out his site, it's the Subsonic Skateboard link!

Also, check back to the May 5 post for the full installation view of the Alpine Lake Triptych!

ciao

Downtown Portland

This view from just south of Riverplace and the Hawthorn Bridge is no longer possible as a high rise condominium has gone up in the spot where I stood to take the photograph from which this sketch was painted. The boardwalk at Riverplace is one of my favourite places to hang out with a beer or glass of red wine on warm sunny Portland Summer afternoons.

2004
oil on panel
10 x 20

Portland Bridges

This oil on masonite sketch looks south on the Willamette River at the Morrison, Hawthorn, and Marquam bridges.

2004
oil on panel
8 x 10

East Side Esplanade

Returning to the group of paintings that I did for the Buckman Elementary School Art Sale, this was on of the better ones in my opinion but I failed to get a picture of it so I asked it's current owner to email me an image. It's a small file so doesn't enlarge so well but you can get the gist here.

10 x 12
oil on panel

Herb

Before I met any of the people here in my neighborhood where I live and work, I met this character, a good natured lab named Herb. As he was getting on in dog years I realised that I wanted to document him in his domain while I still had the chance, so I made this spirit trap to remember him by. His home was on our street where he developed relationships with all the neighbors, and monitored the coming and going of all who had buisness on our street. It was common on winter nights, when I came home from work after dark, for Herb to be standing in the middle of the street in my headlights lit up like an apparition in the dark. This is how I will always remember him. Rest in peace old fella.

oil on canvas
48 x 45

$1,200 through Rake Art Gallery

The Reflecting Pool

Excerpt from "Flow" at aproximately 200'

Freshly completed in late April and now hanging at Rake, this painting displays the full range of my representational and conceptual cross-polination. The rock composition appeared first as innocuous background in a photo taken by a friend, at the Kern River along it's forested lower elevation shore on the western slope of the High Sierra. I interpreteed these river boulders into a section of the 200' scroll, giving them a new setting and scale as rock hopping stones in my alpine stream. For this painting, I re-interpreted them yet again as stones breaking the surface in the shallows along the shore of an alpine lake in "The Reflecting Pool"

2008
oil on canvas
72 x 45
$3,500.00
contact Rake Art for purchasing information

Alpine Lake Triptych

Detail of one of the three canvases that form this triptych of nearly identical paintings.

Installation photographs by Shawn Long

2008
25 x 40
oil on canvas

available individually from Rake Art Gallery

$1,200.00