October Color

Bend in the River 16x20 oil

We have had an amazing string of beautiful fall days here in Oregon, very unlike our normal October which is usually the transition into the dark and grey half of the year.  If this is a result of global climate change, I have to say, sorry about all your hurricanes, but I'll take what we have been getting!

This above painting is a work in progress, or perhaps I will simply start over, because it does not carry the impact I felt when I first saw this scene.  

In the meantime, I continue my practice of portraiture as a means of learning to draw, working for resemblance at the expense of painterliness, though not without wondering if I am putting the cart before the horse.

Changing of the Season

11 x 14 oil

The days are cooler, the river is low now, but that won't last with the coming rains, and it's less appealing to get out to paint, so I find myself in the studio dabbling on this and that.  I was drawn to the very abstract nature of this above, which is much more true to life than it leads one to believe.

12 x 12 oil

I love the look of stone under water, and I liked the raking light across Oswego Creek, but this one didn't seem headed toward resolution so I left it as a sketch of a possibility.

Sometimes Nature is so magnificently lush that a photo does what a painting cannot do.  This is along the Columbia River in the Gorge.

I have also been working at portraits lately, again.  For me it is continually a struggle of focusing on finding a likeness and realizing I'm not really making a good painting.  I guess that's why I still consider it practice, a part of the long road of self-education I face.  On the plus side, it is getting easier to quickly get at a likeness, no matter which method I use to begin, so it gives me courage to continue.  One day I hope I will slow down and pay more attention to the painting process itself.

Copy of a John Singer Sargent

Jack Kerouac

Yesterday I joined Instagram for the first time (I am really reluctant to sign into all these services that mine me for personal information) and I realize that what other painters use Instagram for is what I have been doing with this blog.  It may or may not prove to be more useful to me, but at least I am able to follow some great images from others that I would otherwise miss.

Sometimes a Great Notion

Ken Kesey (1935 -2001)

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal 
Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tribu- 
taries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . 

The first little washes Bashing like thick rushing winds ^ 
through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, 
sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through 
bearberr}' and salmonberry', blueberry and blackberry, the 
branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the 
foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark 
and silver spruce— and the green and blue mosaic of 
Douglas Hr— the actual river falls five hundred feet . . . 
and look: opens out upon the Helds. 

Metallic at Hrst, seen from the highway down through 
the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy 
moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water 
with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, 
foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it Battens into a 
river. Hat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. 
Flat as a rain-textured street even during Hood season 
because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no 
shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the 
surface . . . nothing to indicate movement except the 
swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the 
wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut 
and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum. 

A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel Hle- 
edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming 
surface. 

The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges fol- 
low its southern. No bridges span its Hrst ten miles. And 
yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story 
wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of 
wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird 
with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. 
Look . . .