I love making art that brings the outdoor world indoors to where people are at work. This scene, along with four other images from my “Shaped by Water” paintings, appears August 2019 printed on aluminum & installed at the Alameda County Department of Environmental Health, along with the work of three other Bay Area artists. Commissioned by Alameda County Arts Commission.

Peace. The word drifts through. No boundary, peace touches everything. Absolute, maybe, yet absolutely mutable. A yearning. Peace according to… self, universe, where we’ve landed among others living lives. Not sure why this painting comes to mind. Long ago sold, it lives in my head. A real place pictured, now an idea. Peace is in here, the work, the flow.

Women Power

Pleased to have artwork in two collective expressions of women power opening in Chicago. Refreshing Feminism, an exhibition of 39 artists, opens Feb 22, 2019, 6-8pm, at Woman Made Gallery, ends March 16. Trauma, with 25 artists, opens at Oliva Gallery March 8, International Women’s Day, 5-10pm, and extends to March 31. Both are inventive new takes on Feminism and on the relationship of trauma to building a woman’s sense of agency. 

The painting above, Huna Tlingit (previously titled Muir Inlet), oil & graphite on panel, 40”x40”, is not in either show but at the moment says everything to me about Women Power.

This Is Only the Beginning

This begins notes from my studio–images and words on what moves me to create art. What’s especially new is a new website presenting works from more than fifty years of making art and connecting it to human rights and the long work toward racial, gender, economic equity. Enough with ranting, I want to show how art is life, vibrating in all of us. In showing mine, I anticipate connection with others. Special thanks to designers Amelia Nardinelli and her team at Con Todo Creative.

This Is Not a Photograph

It is a digital creation containing photography, a step removed from paint on canvas. There is no sculpture, no “original” of which this is a two-dimensional representation. The image IS the art, rendered tangible by inkjet printer, ink on paper.

There is a photo in there. The eye searches for and finds it, propelled by expectation when we look at flat art that we know is not painting, drawing, collage. 

There is a painting in there too, in fact, three. These are not “painted in Photoshop;” these are oil and graphite paintings on wood panel–my paintings–translated into the digital world by photography. 

Together the digital materials are subjected to the same principles of esthetic practice employed by artists making things from the beginining of time: exploration, design, building, removing, reflection,  revisit, at some point it’s done.

My series Tin House Cut Outs are prints on paper, entirely two-dimensional. In related series are certain Tin House Cut Out images printed on flat aluminum: not sculptural, a flat object, with the same origins as the images on paper. 

This Saturday July 14, 4 to 6pm, at the Petaluma Arts Center, 230 Lakeville Street, Petaluma, is an opening reception for “Digital Mixed Media: Bay Area Artists Take Digital Photography to a New Level.”  I’m pleased to have a piece in this stunning exploration of the work of Bay Area artists who alter photographs and combine images with mediums from metal sculpture to tapestry. The exhibition runs June 29 through September 9, 2012. petalumaartscenter.org

Chance/A Floating Mind

I wanted to give chance a larger role in my digital image-making, so I printed a large aggregate of Tin House images onto 32 flat aluminum abstract shapes to be grouped in myriad combinations as a sort of sculptural intervention through space, carrying forward a sense of transparency that is everything about how I apply transparent paint to panel, canvas, paper, wall.

I am interested in the intersection of chance and deliberation in artmaking. Developed through careful methodology, Tin House and Tin House Cut Outs are two series of digital pigment prints on paper that draw on experience in the natural world interpreted in images of unkempt photography and abstract paintings seen together. They are layered, built, erased in a process that spans time and underscores its passage. Onto paper, imagery of molten destruction reconfigures and alights as ink patterns.

Chance is a step away from paper onto aluminum. Created from bringing together merged photographic and painted imagery from the Tin House series into one image and printing it onto thirty-two abstract flat aluminum shapes, chance places the images on each piece. As it is unknown exactly where the large image prints on each shape, each piece is one-of-a-kind, each capturing a portion of the larger image, which itself contains the essence of the project’s origin in painted and photographed landscape. Some pieces perform alone, others in combinations.

Chance scattered Tin House over 32 pieces of aluminum. With artist’s eye and hand, deliberation joins chance in arranging them in dimensional space.

Chance = digital print on aluminum shapes

Tin House = digital prints on paper (digital imagery, not photo of object)

Tin House Cut Out = digital prints on paper (digital imagery, not photo of object)