Autumn twilight

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Victoria

This is my latest painting and I’m not sure if it’s finished. Another day or two will tell. Dusk has been spectacular here in southeastern PA. The light changes quickly at the end of the day now, but just before it vanishes completely we get an alizarin/cadmium orange glow behind the tops of the trees. Juxtaposed next to the olive green, the colors sing. 

 

Twilight, oil on canvas panel 12″x12″ 2009.

 

The Group of Seven influenced my palette and this painting of a Jack Pine by Tom Thomson is a favorite. He had no fear of color.

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Holiday sale

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Victoria

I’m offering some new limited edition prints of paintings available from now until the end of December. My professional printer uses a giclée printing process with archival inks guaranteed to be fade resistant for up to 200 years. These vibrant reproductions are printed on heavyweight Hahnemule German Etching paper. Each print is signed and numbered in an edition of 50.

If you’re not in the US, please contact me and I’ll set a shipping rate for your country.

November II, 10″ x 8″ edition: 50. Price:$75 (purchase in Eshop)

 

Azalea and Forsythia 8″ x 10″ edition: 50. Price:$75 (purchase in Eshop)

 

The following two works are from my Italy residency in 2007.

Montecastello Noon 8″ x 10″ edition: 50. Price:$75 (purchase in Eshop)

 

Tiber Bridge 8″ x 10″ edition: 50. Price:$75 (purchase in Eshop)

 

One happy patron:

“LOVE LOVE LOVE my print….beautifully done & high quality…A+

My Swiss collector offers eloquent compliments: 

“this painting is sumptuous and has surpassed our already high expectations…

Perugia in perspective – an alluring alleyway off the piazza – hazy blue and purple lighting – could be dusk, or dawn, could even be midday in a secluded ill-lit corner of the town, rust coloured paint peeling away as you look longingly down along where the painting languidly leads – a private apartment, a dead end, a furniture repair shop, a trattoria, the sounds of domesticity as Nonna calls the bambini in for lunch and Fulvio laments Lazio’s lack of form this week – wonderful”

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Post Thanksgiving

Posted on November 27, 2009 by Victoria

Buddy the cat got the raw liver from my free range turkey (courtesy township/volunteer work) and gobbled it up. He then conked out for the rest of the day on my woodpile. This caught my eye today as I browsed the blog entries- functional and attractive, I could use one just like it. Lloyd Kahn always offers interesting structures and the following were lifted from his recent posts.

a 40 year old wheelbarrow, repurposed for hauling firewood.

 

Tiny 10’x10′ beach houses off the coast of England, for day trips. Pretty nifty.

 

 

free form earth structure from Colombia. You can see a gallery of this architect’s designs here.

 

I love these cob and straw houses. They’re warm and inviting and don’t cost much to build. More great shots here.

 

this fantastic place, a Disney world for grownup artists, is Peter’s Garden, off the coast of Spain. Built over the past 15 years by German artist Peter Buch.

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Late November paintings

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Victoria

The light is inspiring this time of year. Golden afternoons and crisp evenings. Alizarin, oranges and ochres combine to make stunning contrasts. The foxes live in the border between my property and the houses beyond. I hear them calling each other in the middle of the night, usually in early spring.

foxbarking1

 

Brandywine. Oil on canvas panel 12″x12″, 2009. 

 

Border. Oil on canvas panel 9″x12″, 2009

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Asparagus Bed

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Victoria

The newest painting of the asparagus bed gone to seed in my garden. The afternoon light makes the fern-like fronds of the asparagus a brilliant deep yellow. This golden light is particular to this time of year- autumn- and since we’ve had a lot of rainy days all year, it’s especially welcome.

If I’m close to the bed, the tiny red seedpods are evident and I wonder if the birds like to eat them. It’s a beautiful plant in every stage.

Asparagus Bed, oil on canvas panel 22″x30″ 2009.

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Sam Gilliam on what it means to be an artist

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Victoria

Gilliam juried my work into an exhibit last spring at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Museum of Art and I love that he says success for an artist is in just ‘doing it’, more than anything else. And that change is a routine part of the job.

”Art is the best position (to have) in any country….it’s the best thing that could ever happen. Except that there’s no one way, it changes all the time and you’re constantly redefining yourself… In a certain sense there is no real success.’

Two video interviews;

From Eye Level, a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, August 2008:

Swing is a Color Field painting set loose from its stretcher. Gilliam folded, squeezed, and suspended enormous sheets of canvas while the paint was wet, and the title reflects that intense physical movement as well as the swagged shape. Swing also evokes Gilliam’s desire to “just work and let things go” like John Coltrane and other jazz musicians he listened to in his studio.

Gilliam is an African American who moved from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s. He created Swing when the city was torn by racial and political protests, but Gilliam resisted the pressure to make his art about his black identity. He thought of himself as an abstract expressionist, and believed that good art had a power greater than any obvious political theme. Today, he remains a vital figure on the national scene, and sustains the commitment to abstract form that he inherited from his mentors decades ago.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Photo of Sam and Olivia, courtesy Carol Harrison.


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New paintings and a salon for storytellers

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Victoria

A series of new fall paintings.

October. Oil on canvas panel 8″x10″ 2009. (sold)

 

November. Oil on canvas panel 8″x10″ 2009.

 

November II. Oil on canvas panel 8″x10″ 2009.

Last night I went over to a friend’s 1732 farmhouse for an evening of storytelling. I hung a few of my paintings in his diningroom and then we gathered in the parlor to listen to about a dozen people recite 5 minutes (timed) of often personal and hilarious stories. I wish I had the audio from some of these entertaining tales.

I hadn’t been aware of the storytelling phenomenon that seems to be sweeping the country, but I had known about poetry slams from my friend, musician and poet Kodac Harrison in Atlanta. He’s known in the city for single handedly reinvigorating the genre and holds a similar monthly open mic salon, Java Monkey Speaks at the coffee house in  Decatur.  

On my drive home last night, I heard excerpts from the Moth Story Slams  that piqued my interest.  An organization founded by another native Georgia poet, the not for profit has grown into a celebrity studded word of mouth event.

I’d recently been invited by a journalist acquaintance to attend the Brandywine Valley Writer‘s Group monthly meeting, and plan to go to their next one. I have nothing to contribute – except visual stimuli – but it’s inspiring and just plain fun to listen to these inventive and working writers.

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To conjecture and not to test is the mark of a savage

Posted on November 2, 2009 by Victoria

That’s from George Polya, who was Professor Emeritus at Stanford and a mathematician who wrote the 1968 book I’m reading on math; ‘Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume II – Patterns of Plausible Inference’. The father of problem solving. I like the way he thinks. 

Interesting stuff, opposite to Aristotle’s suggestion two thousand years ago that all reasoning conforms to certain patterns. Polya argues that there are practical limits to impersonal, universal and self sufficient reasoning.
 
The basis for difference: your own background, judgement and intuition affects any outcome. ‘It cannot escape being provisional…. The direction is impersonal, the strength may be personal.’
Inferred = forgeddabout the genes already (which jibes with the new science of genetically identical bacteria wildly diverging and mutating). The relevancy of life and how one is formed by it, determines reasoning and style. 

Polya: “…Demonstrative reasoning appears as ‘machinelike’, definite, final, while plausible reasoning appears as vague, provisional, specifically ‘human’. ….the ‘strength’ or the ‘weight’ of the conclusion may depend not only on clarified grounds such as those expressed in the premises, but also on unclarified, unexpressed grounds somewhere in the background of the person who draws the conclusion. A person has a background, a machine has not. Indeed, you can build a machine to draw demonstrative conclusions for you, but I think you can never build a machine that will draw plausible inferences.”

So maybe I’ll crack the math codes after all.
“My method to overcome a difficulty is to go around it.” G Polya           

UCTV is my current favorite TV channel. I always find interesting programming there, and last night on Conversations with History, Stanford Professor Lucy Shapiro, spoke about having come from an artist’s and musician’s sensibilities into the world of microbiology. It’s fascinating to listen to her trajectory. She found herself confident enough to try anything after having studied the fine arts. ‘Thinking differently is critical’.

 

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Portraits

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Victoria

Portraits. Suddenly they’re the rage. Every art critic/blogger seems to be showcasing someone’s new portrait of a hip-hop celebrity, or a museum’s retrospective of a newly discovered, been around a long time, figurative painter. The National Gallery held a portrait competition last summer and these are the finalists. Not many loosely painted or expressionist works. Of course I live near the figurative capital of the world; Philadelphia.

Peter Schjeldahl was one of the jurors and while I don’t agree with all the choices, in this interview he has a thoughtful take on how to look at art: ‘I think the most sensitive, intelligent, cultivated, exciting people I know in their interest to art do not register on the public level. I mean, they’re not part of institutional structures. They wouldn’t be caught dead in it.’

and this gem: ‘the only education that matters in aesthetics is self-education.’

 

The following portraits are all from 1981-82 and are of friends, models – anyone who would sit long enough for me to paint them. Fond memories, gentler times.

Rosa in blue shirt. Oil on canvas, 35″x25″ 1982

 

Teddy. Oil on canvas, 17″x15″ 1981

 

Malcolm and Louise. Oil on canvas 30″x32″, 1982

 

Neill. Oil on canvas, 34″x27″ 1981

 

Bill. Oil on masonite, 28″x24″ 1982

 

Girl with yellow background. Oil on canvas 30″x25″ 1982

 

Rosa, nude. Oil on canvas, 37″x30″ 1982

 

Self portrait. Oil on masonite, 25″x24″ 1982

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Exhibit – Wayne Art Center

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Victoria

A 2009 spring painting, Ariettes Oublieés, will be shown at the Wayne Art Center’s members exhibit, juried by Michael Gallagher, a professor and painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The exhibit runs from October 25th to November 21st, 2009.

I’m happy to show this piece, it’s one of my recent favorites. While I titled it after a Claude Debussy song set to a Paul Verlaine poem, it really began with a dream. The dream had something to do with fractured light, or falling water in light or something of that sort. I was so struck by it that the next day I tried to paint what I had seen in the dream. I also see the work as a turning point stylistically; looser and somewhat less rigid than previous work, with a more modulated palette.

It also had something to with the beautiful tulip magnolia in my front yard that drops its petals in early spring.

 

Quita Brodhead founded Wayne Art Center in 1930. Born into privilege in 1901, she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Arthur Carles. Exhibiting widely during her life, I saw her work at the Woodmere Museum of Art when I exhibited there this past spring. She lived to be 101 and never stopped painting. 

One of her teachers at the academy told her to ‘go home and wash dishes’. She says ‘I don’t know what made me stick it out….I just didn’t want to admit defeat.’

I love her laughing at her own abstractions. Enjoy this clip of her talking about her work and early days at the academy.


Quita Brodhead – Awesome video clips here

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