Guardians

In a sad stroke of synchronicity yesterday, my phone rang while I was working on these pieces in my studio. It was Lisbeth's one-on-one helper calling to tell me that Lisbeth had just had another bad fall during a seizure. I quickly yanked off my painting apron and told them I'd meet them at the emergency room. Evidently Lis had one of her "no warning" grand mal seizures where she goes down like a felled tree. These are the worst - no bending at the knees, no initial crying out, just BOOM. Straight down. She and her helper were in the kitchen about to make some banana bread, when Lis crashed into the refrigerator door, face first.

She's banged up but OK. Breaks my heart what she endures.

After getting Lisbeth back home and comfortable, I headed back to my studio and worked on these paintings even more prayerfully.

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!)

Mad About Maya

Maya Bloch. Her work brings to mind R.B. Kitaj, Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, De Kooning...

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...

Deepening Details

Rain rain and more rain, so lots of time in the studio this week. I'll let the pictures tell the story.