Slowing down
Art as a window to knowing
Right Back to It
I’m settling back into the studio after a season focused on teaching and public art logistics and install preparation. I hope to pick up this newsletter practice more regularly as time opens up this summer.
In June, I head to the Tides Institute & Museum of Art for two weeks at the StudioWorks Artist-in-Residence Program. I’m excited to do some printmaking, explore the museum’s collections, and learn about the terrain and history of the region as I develop a new body of work exploring “landscapes of care” and my collaboration through time with Derek Jarman’s gardens.
I’ve learned and challenged myself this spring, really this whole past year, to shift toward a more open and spacious mindset. Taking in so much in the way of “inputs” through teaching and art history has brought me to a place teeming with blurry visions of possible “outputs,” but nothing is ever really known for me until images begin to take form through materials and paint. This upcoming season of making feels rich with potential and freedom.
Auction ends tonight
Thank you to those who placed bids on my piece, Pink Moon #1, in the Winterhaven Spring Auction. Bidding closes tonight at 9pm PST. The link to bid is live.
This is a great way to acquire a work at a discount while knowing you are supporting public education in Portland. Funds raised will go to classroom grants for teachers, educational enrichment opportunities, field trips, buying essential textbooks and library books, hosting events that create community, and bridging funding gaps.
Pink Moon #1
2022
Acrylic, ink, collage, colored pencil, and cut out paper
15 x 15 inches
Framed: 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 x 2 inches
Retail value: $3000
Winterhaven Spring Auction 2024
Looking at, listening to, and reading
“For Matisse, cutting was not a simple technique — though it may have started that way — but provided a system for thinking about and expanding the possibilities of shape and composition. Distinguishing this operation from painting, Matisse explains:
It is no longer the brush that slips and slides over the canvas, it is the scissors that cut into the paper and into the colour. The conditions of the journey are 100 percent different. The contour of the figure springs from the discovery of the scissors that give it the movement of circulating life. This tool doesn’t modulate, it doesn’t brush on, but it incises in, underline this as well, because the criteria of observation will be different.
— Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (Buchberg, Cullinan, Hauptman, Serota)
In gratitude —
Val
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