The Emerald Market, 2011

It’s been almost six months since I have moved to the Seattle area.  Since I have been here, I have tried to soak in the different imagery, sites, colors, and moods of this varied west coast city, and from those inspirations, paint.  So far I have produced three paintings that I am fairly happy with.  They are three different scenes from the downtown area, esp. Pikes Market, where I often take a walk on my lunch breaks during work.

I have been a practicing Catholic for six years now, and with an art background, the field of religious painting has always been a growing interest to me.  However, because the tradition of the Icon and its use is widely misunderstood and looked over in the Western world,  my own knowledge and exposure to icons has been very minimal.

This traditional practice is done with egg tempera on panels of birchwood layered with gesso.  The process of painting an icon is a prayerful one, as icons have been expressed as “visual prayers.” 

For the past seven months I have been studying and painting icons, and I had the opportunity to observe and help contruct three huge icons being painted for my parish.  It is a much longer process than regular painting, but I hope to continue with this to see where it may lead.   I have added a new page on this blog to show some of the icons I have been working on this past fall. http://abbeyart.wordpress.com/icons/

Roseburg Commission, 2010, NFS

Stumptown, Acrylic, 2009

These are two paintings new to the site.  The watercolor is a commission I just finished for a friend.  I used an acrylic flow medium with the watercolor to get a blotchy texture found in the trees and sky.  It is a new technique I am getting used to, and I still have to gain a little more control with it, but I do like the results in this painting.

The second painting is one I finished last Fall.  It is from a sketch I did at Stumptown while having coffee there on a lunch break.  I love the old brick wall in that building.  The sketch I worked from was pretty rough, and I took some liberties with colors and the people posed in the picture.  There wasn’t a girl sitting in front of me, but the picture was missing something in that place, and I’ve always liked to make the viewer of my work feel more included as part of the picture, as if he’s really there.  Hence, if I were in a coffee shop, I’d probably be sitting across from a close friend.

To be honest, I’ve not done as much painting as I’d hoped to these past couple months.  I’ve started about 5 or 6 paintings, but they usually have ended in half painted canvases or torn up paper.  I think I’m okay with this.  Inspiration is hard to come by, and sometimes you just have to wait a bit and keep trying.  I am planning on taking an icon painting class this summer, which I am so excited about.  I’ve bought a book on the history of icons, and everywhere I look and go, I seem to see one.  I’ve been going to daily Mass at the Downtown Chapel on Burnside during my lunch breaks when I work in Portland.  They have only one piece of artwork there, which is Christ the Healer.  It is an image that has lately popped up in my life, and it is beautiful.

Jess

I finished the above painting last week just hours before I was suppose to display it in a show of mine at my friend’s yoga studio. It is an image that has always been nostalgic for me – I shot the image on my camera last year of some old home videos I was watching on TV. This image is of my third grade classroom with my teacher, Mrs. Zaccone. Some of my close classmates are running around the room with winter gear on for a relay race we had during our Christmas party. The snow outside the window is built up in piles that block any decent view, but the sun was shining so brightly off of the snow, it reflected white light into the room.

This show is located at my friend’s yoga studio, just behind the Raleigh Hills McMenamins.  We will have some refreshments and light snacks, and I am going to be showing some new and old artwork that I have been doing this past year.

Last week we did a painting marathon, where we took the 3 hour class to try to finish 20 paintings.  I only finished 11, but I was pretty happy with the results.  Each painting became easier and faster as we felt the pressure to keep up the pace.  This experience seemed to free me from getting too “tight” and controlled, allowing more free use of the right side of the brain and spontaneous reaction to the subject matter and paint itself.

I brought in some gesso’d  paper and cardboard for painting surfaces..a really cheap way to paint if canvases are economically unavailable.  I also brought in my sketchbook which is chalk full of sketches I’ve been doing around Portland these past few months, and about 70 photos ofPortland, Halfway and the drive between…pictures I’ve been wanting to paint…I don’t know if I will ever get to all 70. Here are a few of the paintings from that experiment…except for The Audience, which is a painting I have been working on the past couple weeks.

I think any big move takes some readjustments, and I feel again the culture shock I felt when I went to college, moving from a very rural setting, remind you that Halfway has a population of 300, to a city. I still live in what I call urban – West Linn – hey, anything that has a franchise or stop light within a mile’s radius is urban in my head.  I think about where I would ideally like to live, and I don’t think I can ever come up with a true answer, because once I am there, I am never completely satisfied. I will always miss Halfway, and when I am there, I miss the city.  When I am old and gray, I suppose I would prefer the slower pace of life, but right now that perspective I think helps enable me to absorb the fast pace life around me in a more personal way. Everything is new, beautiful, and raw.