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!)

I Saw Her Today at the Reception...

Sure wish I knew what he was saying! (Maybe he could tell me what it's about! :^)

Above pics courtesy Michele Caron.

Me in front of A Girl's Primer with my brother Ken and sister Deb.

Terrific photo by

my daughter-in-law, Tracey Miller.

Some pics from yesterday's reception at Aucocisco. What a fantastic turnout!

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.

Breathing Room

Yesterday I cleaned my studio and rehung my new drawings so they have some space between them. They are very different from each other, so I'm not sure that I will call this trio of drawings a triptych after all! They will be shown together, so I guess I'd call them part of a series... I guess this is a matter of semantics...

I've titled the series Primers, and I'm still working on them. The Artist Studio building where I have my space will be participating in First Friday Artwalk Open Studios tomorrow night, so they will be on view. If you are in the area, c'mon downtown!

P.S. I am realllly frustrated with the spacing issue I'm having with my posts here on Blogger. I need to consult an expert!!

Trippin' With Beckmann

A few of Max Beckmann's rich, beautiful and disturbing triptychs. So visually satisfying. So powerful. (Wouldn't his iconic figures make an incredible Tarot deck!)

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. Max Beckmann

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....