In anticipation of moving sometime within a year, I have been preoccupied, like many middle-aged people, with the familiar lament of how to winnow out possessions. Artists’ studios tend to fill up with not only finished and in-process artworks and art supplies of all types, but random inspirational objects and detritus that “may” come of use someday. With the current mania for minimalist lifestyles and Marie Kondo-style organizing in the zeitgeist, one can feel inclined to get rid of it all and return to the purity of the blank canvas. The hard part comes in finding new homes for objects and avoiding adding to the waste stream.
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Last year a friend told me about a Seattle organization called The Art of Saving Humanity  that collects donated art supplies for the use of local immigrant and refugee artists. They have also mounted exhibits of the artists’ works. I was able to pass on to them many art supplies, used and unused, including a large set of pastels that had belonged to my grandmother. They also took a big batch of canvas-stretcher bars, frames, a folding easel and other items. I used to exhibit prints and other works on paper that had frames with sheets of glass, some quite large. I dismantled them and was thrilled to find a frame shop that took the glass, as it can’t go in the recycling bin. I posted a notice on Kelly’s Art List and gave away an antique French easel that had also belonged to my grandmother—feeling sad to do so, but glad someone else would use it, as I wasn’t.

Even though I work slowly and have never been prolific, I find I have quite a few paintings in storage. I have been going through them with a critical eye and discarding those that don’t come up to my current standards. I keep representative drawings from different life stages, or those that have some special quality that makes me hesitate. It is still difficult to destroy a failed piece after spending an inordinate amount of time laboring on it. I remember being horrified as a freshman in college when an instructor described destroying an unsatisfactory drawing he had just spent eight hours working on (that seemed an awful lot of effort to me, then) and another telling the story of burning an entire year’s worth of work. To my younger self trying to build up a body of work, this was hard to imagine. Nowadays qualitative evaluation is easier, at least a few years after creation. If a large work on canvas is worth keeping, it can be taken off the stretcher bars and rolled for more compact storage. But some I have cut up and discarded, maybe keeping a few square inches of a well-executed portion as a memento. A few have found new life as backgrounds in my shadow-box assemblage pieces.

I do have plenty of paintings in inventory that I am proud of, that didn’t sell when exhibited for whatever reason. Some are finding an enthusiastic audience and buyer at fund-raising auctions for art organizations and other worthy causes. A few others are finding homes after being offered for purchase to acquaintances in a targeted manner. I am not much good at business and marketing, having left sales to art galleries most of my career, but it is satisfying to match an artwork with an individual. (If anyone who happens to read this has been harboring a desire for a painting they saw in years past and wonders if it is still available, let me know!)

The concept of having too much stuff brings up a painful issue—the dilemma of creating more unnecessary stuff (for art may be essential to an evolved society but not to sustain life) in a world that seems to have too much of everything and is running out of space to put it. I am a creative person and by nature feel compelled to make objects with my hands. Artists are advised to make lots of art, both to perfect their craft and to have plenty to bring to market. I have not gone overboard with this advice, but still sometimes fear I am contributing to an environmental crisis, and I worry that making more stuff is unethical. A few months ago, I brought up this doubt while attending a panel discussion on the habits of successful artists. Perhaps I didn’t phrase my question gracefully (I believe I used the word “crap” to refer to surplus art) but the artists sitting on the panel responded with something akin to outrage, as if even the topic was taboo, and quickly moved on. I guess as driven, self-confident artists this had never occurred to them. But at least one audience member came up to me afterward and told me of having the same concerns. Her solution had been to stop painting altogether and put her creative energies into writing. Many other artists are making art out of consumer discards, and exhibits devoted to recycling are becoming frequent. Then there are well-known artists like Andy Goldsworthy and John Grade whose sculptures are composed of, and degrade back into, the natural environment.

It takes creativity to repurpose and to dispose of things in a thoughtful manner. Going forward I intend to be as mindful of avoiding waste in my studio as in my home, and try to make every mark on that blank canvas count.

I am excited to be exhibiting my new type of artwork at Fountainhead Gallery in Seattle for the month of June. I will be exhibiting along with three other artists June 7 through 30, with an opening reception Saturday evening June 9 from 5 to 7 p.m.
​These new shadowbox artworks evolved from my desire to make something with my collection of natural objects. The eroded seashells, corals, limestone deposits and bits of driftwood that I pick up on the beach have such pleasing sculptural forms that I consider them works of art on their own. I was tempted to present them on pedestals with no artistic intervention. Removing the object from its original environment puts it into a new context and can generate appreciation for its abstract form, curiosity about what it is, and what its symbolic meaning is. In arranging and juxtaposing the objects I soon started to see them as players in a mysterious drama.
My late mother was an accomplished artist who created paintings, sculptures, theatrical works and children’s books. Having studied at the acclaimed experimental art school Black Mountain College, she was constantly trying new techniques, despite the limitations of living in a small Southern town. Puppetry was a medium she had a love for since childhood, with which she could combine the skills of building the puppets and sets along with writing the plays. She eventually formed a troupe which traveled regionally, presenting her original works. As a teen I was prevailed upon one summer to perform one of her plays.
While I admired my mother’s expressive style and have painted my own versions of one of her motifs, the broken conch shell, my own artistic temperament is more restrained and classically inclined than hers. Having thought of myself as a creator of two-dimensional art, I was surprised to find myself making constructions that could be seen as small theaters, with found and crafted objects acting as setting and characters. It felt entirely natural to sculpt small heads to include, and I recalled making puppets with the other children in a workshop my mother taught.
The disembodied heads are not making their first appearance in my work. In the 1990s I was painting surrealistic scenes in which the egg-shaped, disembodied head represented the subconscious or dream state. It has a pleasing form and introduces a human element into a composition. In these new works, it represents a meditative state or a place to which the mind has traveled.
In addition to the sculptural, natural and found elements, I am incorporating landscape painting as a backdrop in some of the constructions. I have primarily exhibited landscape paintings for several years. In the interest of recycling, in a few shadowboxes I use sections of older paintings. Creative re-use and a reluctance to add to the waste stream are growing concerns of mine. These works evolved organically into scenes from stories without words, involving the cycle of life, nature and psychic states. I will be interested to see what my audience thinks of them!

Juror Jody Bento, Director of SAM Gallery, selected my assemblage/sculpture piece "Orbit" for inclusion in the 2018 Center on Contemporary Art Members' Show, Creativity Persists. The show will be on display in CoCA's Pioneer Square gallery (114 Third Avenue South, Seattle, WA) from April 26 to May 26. It will open with a celebration during the Pioneer Square Art Walk on May 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. This will be a big show, chock-full of artwork in all disciplines from the Pacific NW and across the globe. Viewers will be able to vote for their favorites to be given one of two People's Choice awards. A printed catalog representing all CoCA members will be available for purchase. Click here to learn more about CoCA and the exhibit.

I decided to delve further into this socially-connected 21st century and join the many artists and regular folks posting photos on Instagram. It's a fun place for a visually-oriented person, with many thousands of members from all over the world viewing and sharing images, sorted by a system about which I am still learning. I am looking forward to perusing images posted by museums and galleries as well as by friends, artists I admire and art lovers. As for myself, I intend to share works in progress, studio views, glimpses of my working process, tools,  inspirations and freshly finished artworks. Since I still lack a smartphone, you aren't likely to be confronted by pictures of my food or face. Follow me here: Instagram.

My small oil and metal leaf painting "Flood" is included in a curated show at the Kirkland Art Center, and the image was used in promotional material. Show description: "Featuring artworks from the Pacific Northwest and across the country, the Kirkland Arts Center is proud to present the juried, group exhibition Re:Acclimating. Examining the topic of climate change through the lens of 23 artists working in a variety of media, Re:Acclimating addresses humanity’s impact on the environment." 
​The art center is located at 620 Market St., Kirkland, Washington, and the exhibit will be up until February 17.

I am pleased to have a painting selected by guest juror Deborah Paine for the annual Center on Contemporary Art members' show. CoCA's exhibits are always lively and progressive, and usually include something you've not seen the likes of before. While the Seattle organization has been around for years, it has had to move its physical space around a lot, and I have been impressed at its tenacity in presenting ambitious exhibits in difficult economic times. The new gallery space is in the Toshiro Kaplan building (114 3rd Ave. S.) in Pioneer Square and has been freshly renovated. There will be an opening reception during the monthly artwalk, Thursday April 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. The show will be up until Saturday, April 29. For more information, see the webpage at CoCA Members' Show .
At left: Flood, oil and aluminum leaf on panel, 14" x 14"

Each December the Fountainhead Gallery hosts a group show of gallery artists, with an inspirational theme. This year the theme is "Celebrating the Poetic Heart," and artists were asked to submit works that were inspired by a poem. I admire poetry, but don't read much of it. While painting, I often fixate on music and the poetry and creativity in a lyric, and I happened to have a new piece I made while thinking about a song by the Pixies. I will be exhibiting it and a few other new tiny works, which are a departure from the paintings in my recent exhibits. These combine oil painting with metal leaf in silver, gold or aluminum. I have been experimenting with both translucent paint on top of the leaf, and with the more traditional method of gilding only the background. For subject matter, I am continuing to be drawn to the surface of the sea and also to sea creatures and birds.

​The exhibit will run December 1 - 23, and there will be an opening reception with music, refreshments and poetry readings on Saturday, December 3 from 5 to 7 p.m. All are welcome. For more information, call 206-285-4467, or go to Fountainhead Gallery.

​During the past year I spent some months experimenting with media such as metal leaf, pondering making sculptural constructions, and painting the figure model. But when it came time to settle down and choose a theme for my next show at Fountainhead Gallery, I was pulled back to painting sea, sky and rock. As I point out in my artist’s statement, this subject matter, while representational, is contemplative and lends itself to minimalism, manipulations of composition and experimentation with color.
​     I have admired the work of Vija Celmins, whose highly rendered drawings of the surface of the sea are impressive technically and conceptually. I was challenged to do my version, the result being “Deep Blue”, 30” x 40”, with a large sea surface and a high horizon line. As a companion, I composed “Traversing the Unknown”, a seascape with a low horizon line and a massive cloud picking up varied colors of the setting sun. I don’t like to repeat myself; I tend to proceed in a theme and variation manner when composing new works.

​At short pose sessions, poses range from less than a minute to 20 minutes. Quick drawings are called “gesture drawings” and the goal is to capture the flow of the pose, the feeling of the weight and pull of the model’s muscles, in a few lines. The artist should almost become the model. These are valuable to train the eye and hand to respond intuitively to the subject. In the longer poses one can spend more time measuring proportions and angles, and then adding details and shading, but I believe the initial gesture sketch is still the most important element in capturing the gestalt of the person before you.

Sometimes an art school or group of artists will hire a model to repeat a pose for an extended number of sessions so they can complete a more resolved study. I have attended a few of these, and use the sessions to try out various approaches to painting form—systematic classical processes like drawing first, proceeding with monochrome paint, then layering of color, etc.; or direct processes such as alla prima, with brush drawing and using full color from the start. Often I find myself diverging from my initial plan as the painting evolves, from lack of patience or changing goals.
Painting with a group of other artists and responding to the figure in front of you is different from working alone in one’s studio. There is the camaraderie of the other artists, with whom you can share painting tips, and there is the personality of the model. Some are more talkative and open about their lives, and others are strictly business. I think of him or her as an actor on stage, and for a successful painting, I must imply a mood or a bit of a story to make the scene interesting. A painting or drawing of a figure model “just” standing or sitting there can be a fine thing if skillfully rendered, but it needs something special to transcend being an exercise in anatomy and to draw in the viewer if it is going to be exhibited. Some artists are able to do it with beautiful marks with the pencil or paint, or an interesting perspective; others can find something special in the expressiveness of the face or pose.