The current painting on my easel is a view of the J & M Cafe at Dusk. The original inspiration was a snapshot taken on my DroidX cellphone. I took some additional photos a few days later, to fill in some peripheral detail.

I’ve painted the J & M many times before. The last time I painted it,  it served as a backdrop for a snowfall. It’s a saloon in the cabaret district, Seattle’s Pioneer Square. It has seen its share of barroom brawls, furtive sexual hookups and aging foot-soldiers fading into oblivion.

As I’ve said, the painting was begun with a photo taken with a DroidX, supplemented by other photos. These were modified in Photoshop, to correct parallax and perspective distortion, and to adjust the color. This work product has been transferred to an old MacBook Pro laptop with a 30″ Cinema display attached. Further adjustments to the color and perspective have been made, especially to accommodate for the overexposure of the neon signage.

Arboretum w/ Two Women, oil on canvas, 36 X 48 inches, copyright ©1990-1

I will have work in an exhibition of Eastern Washington landscapes at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center, 228 West Third Avenue Moses Lake, WA 98837. The museum’s summer hours are Monday – Saturday, 11 AM – 5 PM. The exhibition was organized by the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture (the MAC.) There are several other artists exhibiting as well. The work depicted here may or may not be in the exhibition. It is currently in inventory at the MAC’s Art @Work program, where most of the work in the exhibition will be drawn from.

This is another commissioned work, this time a painting of a tugboat, the J. E. Boyden, which plied the Puget Sound, Lake Union and Lake Washington from the last quarter of the 19th Century until about 1932. I’ll have more to say about this project soon, but in the meantime, this is the cartoon, developed from a montage of historical photos, existing landscape and my imagination.

Update: The genesis of this commission began with a project to develop a topography of the bed of Lake Union. Over the course of a few centuries, when a vessel reached end-of-life status it was disposed of by sinking it. The bed of Lake Union is covered with old vessels like the J. E. Boyden, although not necessarily as well preserved as she is.  Side scans of the lake bed and other deep water photographic efforts, have unveiled a lively maritime history of the region. There are extant photos of the J. E. Boyden towing a couple of three-masters, and of a longboat of  Makah Indians hitching a ride on the tow-line. There are also photos of the boat moored in Seattle, and passing a ferry in the Montlake Cut. I’ve chosen to depict the J. E. Boyden towing two wooden boats, with a Makah longboat and Neah Bay in the background. I’ll post more of this painting as it develops.

Update: The painting commission of the Allen Kids is finished and ready to be delivered this morning. I have a few reflections about placing a portrait commission in a landscape setting that I’ll have to put in a separate post later.

I will be adding to this slideshow over the course of developing this painting. The slides will show the progress of the painting from the lay-in to completion.

This commission is currently on the easel. The first photo represents just a few days work, a rapid lay in. I’ve begun to adjust the color somewhat, but want to keep the image fresh and bold, like the kids that the painting represents.

The background is Whidbey Island, near Langley. The kids spend a lot of time there playing on the beach, and they have their favorite logs to sit on. Like most children they have their moods, and are very conscious of the camera. It was difficult to get photographs of them looking relaxed and spontaneous.

The background has been adjusted. The point was actually out of the picture plane, but I found its shapes so interesting I pretended that I was able to see all from a different angle. I also had to paint out a large piece of driftwood in the foreground. The imagination can move mountains! I’ve been working on this even since this photo was taken, so I’ll post more as it progresses.

Fortified Wine, oil on canvas, 46X66 in, copyright ©1991

This is another Portland image, and one that touches on the appeal that the city held for me. In many ways Portland is more civically progressive than Seattle, with enlightened regional growth management legislation and concepts of public space and commons that really add to the culture. This painting, however, depicts the seedier side of Portland, that part of old town that has been left to the dives, wino bars, flop houses and adult bookstores, and the transients that populate them. This was my starting and ending point for painting subjects in Portland. Of course such images have limited commercial appeal, and so my career as a painter of the city’s attractions had some limitations. But a painter should never stray too far from where their heart is.

After working out the elaborate perspective of this scene, it was painted rather freely. Since the figures were transient, I had to make up some and paint the others from memory. I was aiming for a specific narrative of sustenance and need, of an addiction to maintaining a buzz. I suppose it could be a metaphor for the art of life, or the life of art.

Men's Furnishings, oil on canvas, 48X66 in, copyright ©1991

I spent many years showing in Portland, at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. We eventually parted company, something that I had considered doing many times during the course of our relationship. Liz has very firmly held beliefs about what constitutes “good” art, and we often differed. I eventually began to feel like the one lonely holdout, being a painter and working in a painterly style. I probably could have moved on, attached antlers to my paintings and made them bark via internal amplified mp3 players. But I still like paintings that just sit there and work their magic in silence, using the strange telepathy of visual language.

This is a group of featured works from my website. I’ve included some of my favorite paintings from the last several decades, with the intention of giving a broad survey of subject, period and style. I’m not sure if it’s possible to draw meaningful conclusions from either the work or my choices; it is perhaps a matter of personal preferences.

TREES, 102nd Ave NE, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in, work in progress, day 1

I’m currently working on two new paintings, both started in the last two days. TREES, 102nd Ave NE is a plein air piece from the woods behind our house. This is the lay-in, and represents about 3.5 hours work. The sun remains surprisingly constant during the couple of hours before and after noon, playing across the foliage but retaining the backlit character overall. The piece was massed in w/ considerable turps, as I wanted to get the canvas covered as quickly as possible. I began painting into that immediately with stiff and opaque paints, taking advantage of the way the light improvised rhythms across the leaf patterns. I was accompanied by my students Tommy and Ritsuko Taneda. Tommy was becoming increasingly frustrated w/ his painting, although it did not look bad to my eye. I tried to explain to him that, when painting a subject of such apparent complexity, one shouldn’t try to control every aspect and expect to bring each area to a state of finish at each stage. Rather one should lose one’s self in the repetitive mantra of brushstroke upon brushstroke, and let the work come into view on its own. I told him that it may appear that I know what I’m doing, but I actually don’t, and have no idea what the completed work will look like. One should be willing to take instruction from the subject itself.

J & M CAFE, 6 PM, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, work in progress, day 1

The second piece was begun a day earlier. It’s based on impromptu photos taken w/ my droidx, while waiting for Kate to pick me up. It is a subject that I’ve visited before, under different climes and times. For a cellphone camera, the droidx seems to handle low light and night scenes pretty well. Still, I’ll have to refine the image from notes and studies, as the neon and halogen lights in the subject cause bleed and exaggerate the white point. The preliminary composition was developed in photoshop from the droidx output. I corrected perspective, adjusted color and tried several cropping scenarios. The final composition required additional photos for architectural detail absent in the earlier takes. Such light effects are too fugitive for working en plein air, and one must rely on memory and such visual assistance that photos can provide.

Rather than using prints, I simply pull the image up on a computer monitor. The backlit image seems truer to the original, and I can zoom and pan, or switch easily between various photographic source material. That being said, I’m not interested in crafting a Photorealist image. For all their technical sophistication, even modern cameras create lens and color distortions, and depth of field issues that do not map easily to human perceptual modes, or to descriptive brushwork.

I’ll post more of these two images as they progress.

I’ve been looking at a selection of paintings that I’ve done over many years, of parks and gardens in the cities where I’ve lived or visited. They are public spaces intended for many different purposes, both social and recreational. Most were painted en plein air, though some were not. Few consider the behaviors that we engage in these spaces as being “productive”, but their meanings, social utility and health benefits are pretty transparent. Some social forms, such as the stroll or promenade, even painting itself, are tantamount to thinly veiled rituals. I often wish that our culture were not so materialistic and work obsessed, and capable of elevating the experiences that we share in these parks and gardens to their rightful place in our social economy.

My current exhibition at Davidson Galleries presents a somewhat disconnected group of paintings. I had been through a tumultuous couple of years, with a severe recession that set in while I was in Buenos Aires, and which persists to the present. I finished one successful commission, have worked extensively on another, moved in with a new girlfriend, designed an extremely complicated ecommerce website for a relative, have taught regular classes in painting and in karate, and on top of all that I’m getting old.

This show represents some new works, a few started after my move. Some others were begun before my previous move of five years before, then set aside because the interim studio did not permit working at the appropriate scale. In some ways the show represents a clearing of the decks, and a reflection on a receding but not yet distant past.

That being said, I was very happy with the shape taken by the exhibition. The works were almost all of substantial size, with one weighing in at just shy of nine feet wide. The exhibition has a certain coherence despite the ad hoc nature of the work itself. Much of it is about memory. The “larger narrative” of the exhibition title of course refers to life itself, and perhaps there is a sense that these works fit puzzle-like into that more inclusive envelope.