June 16 - July 21, 2023
Artist Reception: Friday June 16, 2023 from 4:30 to 6:30pm.
Dee Sidwell: Painting has been an important part of my life since I was 16 years old and my Great-aunt kindly offered to teach me to paint. Aunt Sally was a semi-professional artist who had attended art school and I feel very lucky to have apprenticed with someone who had a strong academic background.
When I attended college a few years later, I majored in chemistry and had an art minor. With five children at home and working as a research chemist, I rarely had time to paint for many years. For the last 20 years or so, however, I’ve been painting more and more until now it’s a daily practice. I work in oils and acrylics, and have a slightly different approach depending on the medium. When using acrylics, I like to use lots of transparent or semi-transparent layers, creating depth and luminosity. I really enjoy the drama that comes from this approach and the opportunities to create texture using different tools while the paint is wet. I find acrylics to be the perfect medium for landscape or floral painting. I really enjoy taking them out in the field for Plein-air work and then bringing the painting back to the studio to refine it. I rarely use photographs but do occasionally refer to a short video, just to take me back to the place in my head. Sometimes though, I like to get out the oil paints and palette knives and go to town with them. I tend to use oil paint when I’m doing figurative work or when I want to spend more time getting an aspect just right. I also like to use oil when texture is going to be an important part of the work. The paintings for this show were completed using both methods. The first painting I did for the show is Nehalem Evening and it was painted with oil paint and palette knife. Doing this painting first was therapeutic, because it’s a wild and wooly process so it was liberating. I hadn’t been able to paint for several weeks due to a couple of family crises, so I needed to get comfortable in the studio again. The next painting was the mixed media of the coast trail at Cape Arago which started out as an acrylic painting but I added texture and opacity with a thick application of oil paint. The other four paintings are acrylic and were all painted pretty much simultaneously from a single palette, at this point I felt comfortable working fast which acrylic paint requires. Since the theme for the show is Utopia, I tried to imagine what exemplifies a perfect place to me. I had a rough idea on each of them, but they each evolved around a common feeling. The feeling was being drawn toward light in an emotional and intuitive way, like a sunflower. Last winter and spring was a time of loss for me, so I wasn’t sure how these paintings would turn out. When looking at them now, I think they all look hopeful and thankfully, that’s how I feel.
Rachel Speakman: Speakman’s work focuses primarily on the animal form in sculpture, painting, and illustration. The environment of the Oregon coast is a main driver of her work. She aims to challenge our relationship to ‘nature’ and mental proximity to the animal. Her ongoing research in ecology, natural sciences and human-animal studies help to inform her artistic practice. This is further influenced by her personal history with commercial fishing, working in fish hatcheries, studying marine biology and engaging in environmental activism.
Our relationship with the natural world has become increasingly complicated, where we seem to define ourselves as human by being separate from 'nature'. We see animals as lesser beings, while also aspiring to them as symbolic characters. Her work aims to navigate these semiotics, investigating the representation of 'nature' in Western society and her own indoctrination into the modern approach towards animality.
Scott Johnson: Although Scott C. Johnson’s landscape studies are rooted in plein air painting, early-on he began to add the little touches that rouse the imagination—the faint treetops that indicate a valley beyond the hill, or the tiny glint of water that tantalizes over a grassy dune. These hints at an unseen landscape beyond the one we see, were an introduction to his dream world.
Scott developed the soft washes of the Japanese tradition, as well as the refined linework of the Persian miniature. As he grew more confident with the brush, he also became more involved in meditational techniques, and the painting became more concerned with recording a process, a trance state, a finding of the happy accident, and less with a specific reality.
He is a developed sensual being, with an appreciation for music, dance and garden design. Scott’s love of nature, refreshed by frequent trips and hikes, is evident in his work, but its mood, often portrayed by impending weather, dominates the objects in the landscape. There are subtle references to change in the clouds and stronger references to death and loneliness in the leafless trees of his latest work, yet the mood is never hopeless, but lets us know that the next season, bringing the tiny leaves of Spring, is just beyond and approaching.
Heidi Petersen: A fabulous wall of 19th Century cast sheet iron weathervanes, at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, sparked my renewed interest in American Folk art. Beyond the weathervane’s function, the singular forms and their wisp of whimsy intrigued me and I began to think about how to achieve a similar clarity in my own artwork. Since that museum visit, I’ve spent time looking at American Folk Art paintings, quilts, embroideries, clothing, furniture, and store signs from that time period and this body of work reflects that visual endeavor. I like the familiarity of using common materials well worn by time and use. Rather than transcribing or illustrating something, a new meaning comes from each encounter between the viewer and the art. The sign to Utopia fell beside a road I never traveled; however, I hope to offer a vision of wonder along the way for anyone who spends time looking here.
Give unto them beauty for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning, the
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
~ from The Prophet Isaiah
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