Primer Prime Pics

My daughter-in-law Tracey Miller took these stellar shots of my triptych, A Girl's Primer, on the last day of the exhibit at Aucocisco Gallery. Tracey has an excellent eye and a superb camera - you can really see the details and the surface texture in these images! I'm so grateful to her for travelling to Portland to document my triptych while it was still installed at Aucocisco, which is such a beautiful space.

This group show never did get a formal review, but I received many wonderful and insightful notes, comments and e-mails about A Girl's Primer. One of my favorite remark's came from independent curator and writer Britta Konau:

Saw the Aucocisco show and was really taken by your big drawings. The following names came to my mind while looking: Dix, Klimt, and Chagall. Not bad associations, right?

(Right!)

Delivered and Installed!

Opening reception @ Aucociso today from 2 - 5 p.m.!

I'll blog more about it all later - wish me luck!

A Girl's Primer

I have been working on this trio of drawings for 9 months and I'm finally ready to march these ghosts out of my studio. My triptych, A Girl's Primer, will be in a group show at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland for the month of December. I'm thrilled to be invited to show at Aucocisco with four other artists: Michele Caron, Rachael Eastman, Tanya Fletcher, and Judy O'Donnell. I'm just about finished, still doing a bit of fine tuning, and I need to make the hanging mechanisms. They will hang unframed, and I'm planning to string wire to three boards and attach each drawing to its respective board with velcro. They will then simply hang on picture hangers. Theyre not heavy, but they're big, at 4' x 8' each.

Here is my working artist statement which still needs a tweak or two. I don't want to say too much - just a sort of lead in...

My mother’s loss of memory due to the ravages of Alzheimer’s and her recent death prompted me to create this series of drawings, a triptych populated by three major spirits: my mother, my father, and my maternal grandmother. A Girl’s Primer speaks of love, loss, dreams, desire, memory and experience, and the early forces that shaped me.

Dig It

After a month of digging in the dirt, I'm back in my studio, and I am digging into panels two and three...

A Long Strange Triptych

A Vivid Dream.

White Chalk Lessons on Black.

Music.

A Garden. Lovers.

A Picket Fence.

An Ocean.

Houses with Rooms.

Ghosts.

A Bulkhead. A Bed. A Piano.

Keys.

A Grave.

Babies.

Babies.

Babies.

Tangled Trees.

A Clawfoot Tub.

A Mother. A Father.

A Grandmother.

A Growing Girl.

Cats. Kittens. Curtains.

A Foghorn.

Fur.

Sex.

A Veil.

Seagulls. Jellyfish. Crabs.

Winter Squash. Zinnias.

Breasts.

Milk.

Fire.

And Beach Roses.

Back to the studio today to work it further....

The Fight with White

Added a bunch more white to the first panel of my triptych yesterday. Trying to layer the flowing veil and curtains, covering some things and exposing others...argh...feels like a struggle! I'll be back at it tomorrow. My cards are telling me to trust my intuition and that I may need to make some drastic changes!

The Devil's in The Details

My most recent progress on the Primaries triptych - I think that's what I will title it. Primaries.

Saturday Studio

I was in my studio from 11am - 11pm yesterday. Here are some triptych process/progress pics, not necessarily in chronological order. I can't back away from it enough to get a picture of the whole wall at once. These panels are slightly overlapping right now, but I intend for there to be space between them when they are exhibited. It's coming along. Tomorrow I will get over into that right hand panel...