Below are twelve 4″ x 4″ abstract paintings. They are all part of the Scheme. The scheme was to paint a painting, relatively representational, and then break it into these 12 abstracts.

Above is the batch of little abstracts, pulled apart, drying. They are all acrylic paint on silk and canvas.

So, if you are up for a bit of fun, look at the 12 abstracts below and try to figure out what they might represent when put together as a 12 x 16″ rectangle. I’ve numbered them, but they are not in any particular order. The answer (ie the photo of the Whole) is in the continuation.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

My apologies for the abysmal photos. I took them lying flat on the table and the focus is dreadful. I shall get better ones soon.

The answer is beyond the fold of the post but no fair peeking. –June

Purple Vase, 16 x 12″, with individual pieces being 4″ x 4″, acrylic on silk and canvas, 2012

So how did you do? And were there any of the little paintings that you detested? or loved? Let me know — curious minds need to know these things………………………….

[The keyholing of the camera lens made for other kinds of photography messes; as judges you get to deduct for that.]

It was a week or so ago. I got an email from Patricia-in-New-York with images of art (Marsden Hartley, Renaissance painting)  that she’d been visiting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I graciously thanked her (of course I was gracious!), but needed to add a bit of reality into her coddled lifestyle:

Just to make you feel really really guilty –
whilst you were gallivanting about the Met I was in day surgery, having a hysteroscopy (a D&C to those of us in advanced age).

And, upon hearing of my venturing out at 5 AM in the sleet/snow/slush of a Portland storm, my daughter, irreverently 47 years old,  ignored the trauma and said the only D&C’s she had ever heard being done were for abortive purposes. As her almost-70 year old mother, I had to draw myself up and ask her why she was laughing! The question, even when delivered with a Loud Sniff, had no effect. She continued to laugh hysterically.

And all the while, you were gazing at Marsden Hartley paintings, eh? Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. I lay this guilt upon you, with full Loud Sniffs.

Patricia’s response was equally galling and lacking in gentility as well as ignoring the tender feelings of the recently hospitalized:

Nah.  I wasn’t given the guilt gene especially when it comes to ladies who were hanging around places not her own with her legs spread for strangers.  Tsk tsk.  What a visual to give me so close to bedtime.  Hmm .  Cartoon?  Hmmm. Nah.

Maybe all the snow will stay on the wrong coast (fingers and toes tightly crossed).

I thought I restrained myself admirably:

DON’T YOU DARE VISUALIZE –  No, NO, NOOOOOOO.

Oops, too late.

Anyway, stay away from iPat, y’hear?

I’m breathing hard toward the east, just for you.

I should have known better: the New York iPat machine started itself up.

And then, she had the nerve to add:

And remember: I have the power to make the door disappear! Or at least bang open all the way!

Well, in the interests of civility and humility and generosity, I emailed:

UNCLE

But iPat was relentless:

And when I remonstrated with her, she pushed the envelope further:

The moral of my sad and woeful tale is a bit murkier than iPat’s. Perhaps we on the left coast should breathe in and not out when the weather is unsightly.  Perhaps we should draw our manikins at the Store Fixtures building and be content with our limited circumstances and humble surrounds.  Or perhaps we should bow to the grandeur that is New York,  and, as Portlanders, raise our eyes only to emulate Wichita.

Personally, I vow not to be drinking coffee when I open Patricia-of-New-York’s emails.  Too utterly . –June

Patricia-in-New_York’s public adventures, as recorded for the most part on her iPad, can be found here;  her private correspondence to yours truly will be revealed only when revenge, or penance, is called for.

[The Artists Refuge Studio where I immersed myself in painting, first floor of the Hewitt Bank Building, Basin, Montana, January 2008.  The set of paintings, Basin in Winter, is on the back wall.]

Yes, it is winter in Montana, perhaps extra wintry in Basin, Montana, 6000 feet above sea level.

And, it is also winter in Helena, Montana, that city with its beautiful Historical Society Museum as well as slippery black ice on its hilly sidewalks.

Jer and I spent December and January 2007-’08 in Basin, Montana and visited beautiful slippery Helena a couple of times.

So it is appropriate that Basin in Winter, a set of nine paintings done in Basin (150 or so population) should be delivered in January back to the state, to Helena.

Through a fortuitous set of circumstances, the Montana Historical Society Museum now has Basin in Winter in its art collection. When I had my Open Studio exhibit in January 2008 in Basin, Janet Sperry, a museum consultant in Helena, told me that if I ever wanted to part with Basin in Winter, to contact her. In 2011, as I was tweaking the paintings for an exhibit at Full Circle, I remembered her and somewhat to my surprise, had kept her business card. And so, after some negotiation and discussion, the paintings have been shipped and delivered to the Museum.

[This is a closer look at the set in 2008, which in this view includes a painting I ultimately took out (bottom middle) as not delivering useful information, painterly, visually, or socially. But the rest of the  set, with some reworking in 2011,  is pretty much the same.]

Basin is a mining town, so rocks, flung up from the bowels of the earth, were irresistible. And while I was there, I ran across a Japanese concept, the “obo,” which is a cairn-like stack of rocks, carefully selected and placed, signifying “I was here.” I loved the concept, since my interest is in being in a particular space and place. So two of the paintings are obos: I was here.

And with the “I was here” theme comes the map of where I was — a personal map, of course, not merely because it was winter and our travels mostly restricted to what we could manage on foot, but also because we were only in Basin for two months, scarcely enough time to start on our acquaintance.

This is the “map” that contains the town, with the Artist’s Refuge to scale as it appears in my mind, with Interstate 15 and the Boulder River whooshing past it. The map is more than 5 feet (66″) long so its details are lost in this web presentation. And it’s definitely a personal rendition of where we walked those icy mid-days, visiting our friends Mariah and Eli (home-schooled children who often came out to join us) and talking to the town dogs and characters. We visited mine openings, head frames, compounds of local residents, art studios, the church, many homes, and a big flume up a side hill which proved to me that I could still scramble through unprepossessing snow-covered slopes.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) our blog entries from this time were lost when we changed our blog service to WordPress (some blog posts done at the time, on the Art and Perception site still exist: links included below.) However, what stands out for me about that time and this set of paintings today is two-fold.

First, this was a most intense, complete immersion in painting I’ve ever had, and it worked perfectly for my artistic needs at the time. The apartment we lived in was in back of the studio; the studio faced the main street of Basin. I started painting in the studio around nine AM, stayed there except for meals, and often worked until 10 or 11 at night. Aside from our short wintry walks, I painted, and painted, and painted. I learned that painting tree-covered mountains or wintry abstracts differed from painting trucks and differed again from painting small town architecture and dogs. I learned that whatever kind of project I might mentally propose to do would be changed by local conditions — space and place. I learned I could figure out how to do what I dreaded and could bring myself to love the challenge.

This is the studio, or at least one version of the studio, where I worked, from the outside:

Those big windows in front were my view of the town; the dog was always referred to as the town’s mayor. Our apartment was through the gate in the very back of the long building.

The second thing I learned is that I have a need to do more than single paintings to express space and place.  I did not consciously know this as I worked in Basin, but Basin in Winter is an obvious example of my unconscious already directing the nature of my work.  I couldn’t be satisfied with one painting or even 22 paintings which didn’t somehow cohere into a whole. I did about 70–80 paintings in those two months, counting discards and abstracts, but it is Basin in Winter that encapsulated my experience of the place.  It is more magical realism than straight landscape or abstract painting.  Since being in Basin I continue to start  with reportage, doing plein air paintings, but then I proceed to take the seeds that I harvest from my single paintings and produce something that  goes beyond the literal land- or city-scape.

The Artists Refuge had to cease operations this fall, done in by the cost of heat and the recession.  A Google search will lead you to an article in the Billings paper. For some reason, I can’t link directly to it from this blog.

And for more information on Basin, Montana, a good source is Basin, Montana, in Wikipedia. The big brick building on the left in the first photo in the Wikipedia article is the Hewitt Building in which I did my residency.

My favorite painting from this set is this one:

The High Note, the espresso bar behind the dogs, was another of the projects of the women who began and ran the Artists Refuge for so many years.

The closing of the Refuge makes me doubly grateful that my snitch of experiences, as captured in Basin in Winter will have a permanent place in its collection. Thank you Janet Sperry, Jennifer Bottomly-O’Looney, and Amanda Street Trum for helping to make that happen. And of course, even more gratitude to the Artists Refuge founders and workers, M. J Williams, Debbie Sheehan, and their many colleagues, who provided a refuge for so many of us so we could continue to grow and learn as artists and human beings. –June

For more Basin paintings,in particular the single hamlet-scapes that led to the larger set, you can check out this page on my website (click on the thumbnails for larger photos).  The “Portal” paintings, shown as thumbnails on this page, were done in Basin as well.

Some observations written during my time in Basin can be found on Art and Perception: here  ,   here,   here,  here,  and here. The last link has full photos of all the 2008 paintings . The comments in Art and Perception are, I think, as valuable as the posts.

In the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument – Jer

Jou  Barn Dreams, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2011

I keep wondering why I am giving up the fiber art, but the truth is, my passion is for painting. I got the last piece of exhibited fiber art back from Kansas in December, rolled it up, and put it away. One of these days, I may even have a grand sale, freeing up storage space for paintings.

Here’s the last textile piece I did:

JOU, The House of the Rising Sun, something like 36 x 48 (my database is incomplete), pieced and fused fabric and batting, sheers, machine stitched,  2011.

The House of the Rising Sun is typical of the late textile works I made. None of them are pretty or even decorative. They use quilting techniques, but they are about something entirely other than textiles or stitching or quilting.

JOU, Les Jeux Sont Faits, about 7′ x 8′, fabric paint and stencils, cotton, machine stitched, 2009(??)

The late textile pieces tend to be painterly. For good reason. Since 2006 I have been slithering, sliding, sneaking, and finally trotting toward oil painting as my primary medium.  I would have given up the quilted art earlier but for my membership in the Kansas Art Quilters organization and in the SAQA – Oregon group. Both groups were run by people I admired, whom I felt were friends, and to whom I felt a sense of professional obligation. So these last few years, I’ve struggled to put together a couple of pieces for exhibiting with these groups.

But it became clearer and clearer that without practice, I struggled with the stitching processes. And I struggled with impatience.

I am never impatient when I paint. Frustrated, yes. Exhausted, yes. Needing to work on multiple pieces at once, yes. But not impatient.

I am not a natural stitcher. I didn’t learn to sew at my mother’s knee (my mother made homemade clothing, things we wore because we had to and because we knew she struggled, generally unsuccessfully, to sew something that didn’t look homemade. Early on, I resolved never to make homemade “things.”).

I learned to quilt in the late 1980s, got a sewing machine (which I had to learn to use) in about 1992, found I loved the mechanics of the machine, adored designing with the fabric and thrilled at watching the quilting stitches become designs — but I never liked piecing or tweaking or doing the finicky stuff that fine sewing requires. I absolutely hated doing the finish work, but I never could find anyone who did it the way I wanted it done. Even I didn’t do it the way I wanted it done.

And so December marked the end of an era in my artistic life. RIP.

January marks another beginning, auspiciously, I think, with the Trinity exhibit.

Installation view, Inside Out: Fragmented Landscapes, Kempton Hall, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral

The exhibit consists primarily of four sets of pieces, each set having one large, somewhat surreal (or at least wacky), painting, hung between “conventional” plein air landscapes. What pleases me about these “sets” is that they talk to one another, providing something of the context that I experienced as I painted them. I’m hoping people will understand more about the space and place I found as I painted.

When painting plein air, I am totally immersed in the scene visually and chronologically — time, people, cars, wind, odors, and life pass as I work. A single plein air scene, regardless of how well it’s painted, doesn’t capture any of the roving views that I take in or the way the light and perspective shifts as time and I move around. So the sets of 3 or 5 pieces grab a bit more of time, space, and place.

Here’s one of the sets that’s hanging at Trinity: the first four pieces are 12 x 16″, the last is 34 x 36″.

JOU, Inside Out, 34 x 36″, Dye, acrylic, & oil on silk and canvas, 2011

Every end is a beginning — every beginning marks an ending. And so it is with this exhibit.

If you are in the neighborhood, come on by Friday night. The Trinity art committee has been great to work with and rumor has it that the comestibles will be a delight. I’ll be there. –June

For a bit of text about the exhibit, see the continuation.

Inside Out: Fractured Landscapes by June O. Underwood

                                                                               Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, January and February 2012

June Underwood goes out and paints what she sees. Then she comes back in to her studio, thinks about the place and her time in it, and she paints again. Outside she sticks to a single area, creating different versions of the place. Inside, the scenes are collaged into surreal landscapes, tied to but different from the calmer open air paintings.

In January and February 2012, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in NW Portland, Underwood will be showing clusters of her landscape paintings. The exhibit will bring together her fractured landscapes surrounded by her realistic depictions of the same places.

“When I’m confronted with a painting possibility, I immerse myself in its peculiarities. I do research. I sit and watch the space. I see stuff that people who are more casually connected have no time to see. I know when the lawn sprinklers come on in Cathedral Park. I draw the different barn types in eastern Oregon. I can recite names of geological formations in the John Day Fossil Beds. I understand how the time of day dictates the styles of people walking around SE Alder and 6^th Avenue in Portland.

“I paint plein air in clusters and over time because it takes more than one visit and one painting to show what I see and feel about a space. Then I revisit, mentally, those open air scenes in my studio, trying to capture a different mental extract of my experience.”

Underwood’s twenty-three paintings represent three weeks at Cathedral Park; six days at SE Alder and 6^th Avenue in Portland; and months off and on in eastern Oregon. Even a street scene, such as January Skies, comes from living and walking near SE Salmon for 15 years.

“My work is about place, place and space, but it’s also about being present, over time, in a particular space and place. It’s essential that I paint multiple versions of any single scene. It’s essential that I go back to a place, physically and mentally, over time. One visit, one view, simply isn’t enough.

Underwood’s renderings, representational and otherwise, will be on display in Kempton Hall at the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 147 NW 19^th Avenue, January and February 2012. The opening reception is Friday, January 6, 5 –7 PM. The paintings can be accessed at other times by calling 503-222-9811