It has been a busy month already and I am grateful for the chance to soak in this glorious season. If I hadn't been immersed in a challenging commission this past week, I would have already started a new canvas inspired by this beautiful day (above). Watch for it; I'm looking forward to getting started. Anne
September featured artists
at HOOD AVENUE ART
Blue Like That, 12x20 acrylic on canvas, ready-to-hang in a hand-finished hemlock float frame
Hood Avenue Art will feature Anne Gibson, Bill Lind, and Layne Cook at the September 22nd Fourth Friday Artwalk in Sisters from 4–7 pm.
Anne Gibson’s acrylic paintings evoke the feelings experienced in favorite places. Her motifs often encompass water and the rocks it flows over or has sculpted and reshaped over eons. Many of her recent paintings depict the beauty of trees in varying stages of growth and decay. She hopes her paintings will remind you to treasure and protect the places we have left.
Winter Sun – Metolius River, acrylic on canvas, 24x36, $1465
Commission work:
el CAMINO DE SANTIAGO
Several years ago, after enthusiastically showing me his Camino de Santiago slide show, an old friend asked me to do a painting for him that would capture his experience. At the time, I bluntly told him no: I paint my experiences and feelings and wouldn't know how to evoke an experience that wasn't mine.
Over breakfast the following summer, he asked me again. spreading across the dish-strewn diner table photos of the features he wanted incorporated. Again my answer was no. Finally this past June, after touring the museum together where I worked in Massachusetts almost four decades ago, he asked me again. By this time, his experience had worked its way into my imagination, and I agreed to give it a try.
I returned to Bend with a stack of source photos and began making sketches. The challenge was to incorporate the iconic features and memorable vistas from his weeks-long journey all on one canvas. Here was the list:
traveler, walking, with backpack, scallop shell (an ancient symbol of the pilgrim)
trail marker
stone wall
vineyard
poppies
stork nest on church, edge of village
stone bridge
rows of poplars
fields of yellow rapeseed
that rolling, mountainous landscape
This is probably the most difficult painting I've ever worked on, but in the end I am glad I took it on and delighted to have solved the challenge. I took these dozen or so disparate images and created an imaginary landscape with a path that zigzags up the canvas past rolling fields and villages with one last distant town in the distance. My client has seen only an initial charcoal sketch and some details, so that's all I can show you for now, but he seems thrilled.
A Premonition:
at TUMALO ART CO
Last month for the very first time, I began a painting without knowing where I was headed with it. I'd come to the end of a roll of canvas with just a 15x66 inch strip left – actually quite a swath of fabric. I couldn't throw it away.
I had also accumulated a stack of painted canvas corners. Last summer, when I began stapling my canvas directly to the soft homosote studio walls at my residency, I realized that when it came time to stretch these paintings I had to cut out the corners to create a smooth, finished fold. This left me with dozens of pieces that I could not throw away. After all they were parts of my paintings.
So I decided to collage them using acrylic matte medium as glue and overpainting and threads to create movement and direction. The composition evolved. It went through stages of looking like blossoms in a tree, then water flowing.Then I started to see a figure in the negative shapes and enhanced that. She was firmly grounded with her head in the clouds, I kept thinking.
A couple weeks later I was out kayaking with family. We paused to watch a woman chase after a paper bag caught in a gust of wind. You know that awful feeling when every time you reach down to grab it, the wind snatches it away? But then the bag rose up, up, up, until it was higher than the trees. Watching, I tilted my neck to the sky. Suddenly I was engulfed in the water spout (what a dust devil becomes over water), refreshingly sprayed, and my kayak turned halfway around by the force. Talk about surprises. Exhilarating. A nearby power boat retrieved the trash when it landed in the middle of the lake.
And I found my title for this piece.
A Premonition, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60x12 inches, ready to hang in a hand-finished hemlock float frame, $1425
If you've made it this far, thanks for your interest. I've already had several engaging conversations with Tumalo Art Co. customers asking about this piece, so I thought I'd share some of this process with you. Though I am prone to speak through my landscapes of my love of this earth, I enjoyed this process, so I imagine there will be more. It makes sense to me really, being a former gluey – that was the name for graphic designers and paste-up artists back in the days before computers – going back to my roots with a new visual language.