OPUS VII presents a solo exhibition of Jenny Gray’s new work for the month of March. Her latest series of architecturally inspired paintings is entitled “Structure.”
Category Archives: Painting
Jerry Dame, Sr., Painter
Jerry Dame was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1944. Grew up in Southern California. Has had an interest in art as long as he can remember. Jerry began painting in his teens. His early work focused on oil paintings of the ocean, surfers and antique cars as well as watercolor landscapes. Continue reading
Meet Your Maker Interview with Jenny Gray
Jenny Gray is an oil painter that has sold work at a couple Meet Your Maker shows. You can find her online here.
David Campbell
David Campbell
I have been an inveterate drawer from the beginnings of my time…
Thanks to my parents I was encouraged to do this.
I have had further encouragement from three teachers:
Clarence Bates, my high-school art teacher;
Elden Humphrey, the Corvallis sign painter, for whom I worked as an apprentice while in high school;
Max Nixon, mentor and colleague at the U of O, who first gave me the idea to stop avoiding being a painter.
I am also thankful to my employer through most of 25 years, John Brombaugh, for giving me the opportunity to design and carve ornaments for the pipe organs that he designed and I helped build in his Glenwood shop.
My goal from now on is to continue this curtailment of avoidance of painting and in doing so produce something of value and high quality.
Sidonie Caron
Sidonie Caron
“As you look through the different bodies of work displayed here you will see that I am an eclectic painter. I respond to life’s influences, my travels and my environment by making work that reflects all this.
Materials and paint have always interested me and my curiosity has always impelled me not only to try new things but also to tackle new subject matter.
Sometimes this has been triggered by commissions, both public and private, that have encouraged me to continue with a theme, but also sometimes a prolonged involvement in a particular theme has been the impetus to then paint something completely different.”
Sidonie was recently featured on Oregon Art Beat, a service of OPB.
Jerry Dame, Sr.
Jerry Dame, Sr.
To lift the spirit, encourage the soul, to give joy to life, is as much the responsibility of the oil painter as it is the doctor or preacher.
Color, mood, subtle message, or vibrant declarations are the instruments in the oil painter’s medicine bag.
The oil painter’s responsibility, then, is to use these instruments with understanding and skill for the blessing of the viewer. Continue reading
Marcio Diaz
Marcio Diaz
“In the brush strokes of a painter, lies the history of his people” – Marcio Díaz
I was born in Murra, a small farming town in northern Nicaragua. I loved my home, but soon realized that my talent lay not in working the land, but in painting. Eager to develop my skill, I left the countryside in 1994 to enroll at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Managua. I gradually widened the focus of my education and graduated with a BA in architecture paying my way through college by teaching painting and art history. Although I worked as an architect for several years, eventually my love for the act of creation led me to return to my painting. Now I devote myself exclusively to that.
Growing up in a rural environment gave me a special awareness for the intensity and variety of colors I found around me. As a result, all the colors I paint with can be found on Nature’s spectrum, whether it’s the blazing red of an Amapola flower, the iridescent sheen of the Guardabarranco’s feathers, or the ecstatic rainbow of a folkloric dress. At harvest time, the fields and forests of my homeland are saturated with all the hues of imagination; these are just a few of the memories that inspire my palette . . .
As you can see, I am passionate about using rich and vibrant colors in my paintings. Some painters start with a sketch, but when I begin a piece, I rush a gamut of pigments directly onto the empty canvas. (Only when I see a canvas with something already happening on it can I sketch in a background.) Next I apply successive layers of color to the drawing by dipping my brush into the paint and letting drip onto the canvas. Using a special technique, I heat the canvas and then—when the pigments are almost dry—I wipe it down. To finish the piece, I add a neutral color that acts as a perceptual net linking one spot of color to another, followed by many smaller circles of color to reinforce and harmonize the whole composition. I know I am done painting when I can look at a piece and relive my feelings coursing through each brush stroke.
Spirituality bubbles up from my canvasses, swirls around, then melts back into the scenery. Children can sense this. In fact, the first time I exhibited this technique in public, children were especially taken with it. They spontaneously started calling it “bubble painting.” So, following their lead, I decided to call my style bubblism.
I am constantly studying art around the world and adapting what I like most to my own style. Currently, I am developing my vision of the bubble technique as a new concept within contemporary art, but my dream for the long-term future is to build and fund an art school for underprivileged young artists in my hometown in Nicaragua.
Ellen Dittebrandt
Ellen Dittebrandt
I have been drawing and painting since I was big enough to hold a pencil. My first pictures were sold when I was ten years old. Drawing has been my way to communicate what I see and feel.
I study a scene, imagining how to draw it effectively. How does one draw a moving wave to make it look real? How can I show the color and reflections on water?
The play of light is fascinating. Light dances across the land, reflecting and changing all the time; changing from light to dark, changing colors in shadows. There’s evening light with its golden colors and the pure light of morning. Water and snow each affect light in their own special ways.
I discovered pastels in high school, learning to use them by trial and error. I enjoy pastels because they are so much like oils. I studied art for two and a half years at Pacific Northwest College of Art. For the last five years, I’ve been painting a portrait of Oregon, and have traveled all over the state finding new places to record.
The immense variety in nature excites my artistic response. My work includes many examples of the way lights and shapes intertwine. A landscape provides endless opportunities for lifting shapes and colors in interesting detail. Each section of the drawing has its own life, but together they make a landscape.
Some of my favorite artists are Claude Monet, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Benson, N. C. Wyeth, Georges Noyes, John Singer Sargent and modern painter Michael Fergus. I admire the way these artists handle color and technique.
Jenny Gray
Jenny Gray
I often abstract known subjects such as landscapes, machinery and graphic images—exploring ideas and emotions with paint rather than rendering the subjects specifically. I start with a sketch but the painting quickly becomes about emotion, paint, freedom, line, composition and layers. Continue reading
Anne Teigen
Anne Teigen in her studio
“Mozart said the reason he spent so many hours each day at the piano was if the muse came he wanted to be there. Me too! That’s why I work every day. I don’t wait to be in the mood.”
Jeff White
Within nature there are forceful, intelligent elements that coexist beside and in spite of humanity. They can not be reasoned with or controlled and have always survived and outlived mankind. Mystically, they often mirror man’s own walk through life.
Throughout life’s spiritual journey, we encounter rivers, valleys, shadows, daybreaks, storms and beautiful clearings. We face horizons that move us from a calm serenity through turbulent storms only to return back to a peaceful state with a deeper understanding of ourselves.
My paintings reflect these moments as expressed by nature. I attempt to convey a resonance of the paradoxical relationship between the external and internal forces. My work represents a spiritual journey and the balance found in the harmonies I see between the environment and man as a voyeur passing through time. Using oil and pastels, I focus on capturing the colors, shapes and moods of the land and the sky. I use thin glazes and layers of transparent pigments to emulate the atmospheric conditions that exist in the natural world. Much of my inspiration comes from the Columbia Gorge and the Northwest coastal regions, mountains and rivers.
Jeff was featured on Oregon Art Beat, a service of OPB
Linda Womack
Linda Womack in her studio
The fragility of life has long been a recurring theme in my work; exploring how we grow, develop and cease to exist in our current forms and what evidence remains of our existence when we are gone.
Influenced by my childhood in Hawai’i, my paintings incorporate abstractions of nature and how they alter the world around us with the passage of time. Images of the bits you might flick off your coast or crunch beneath your shoes symbolize the humanity both transforming and being transformed by natural processes. Searching for pockets of meaning in the chaos, I freeze these moments where the past, present and future are suspended as if between sleep and waking – that fleeting instant where anything is possible.
My work pairs modern materials with the ancient technique of encaustic painting, where beeswax, resin and pigment are layered to produce a luminous surface of that captures and reflects light. The translucency of the wax creates layers of information, like the sediment of time, while stirring the senses of sight, smell, and touch.
Artist Biography
Embracing Encaustic
Linda Womack is a nationally recognized artist, art instructor and the author of Embracing Encaustic: Learning to Paint with Beeswax. In 2010 she was the curator for Luminous Layers: Exploring Contemporary Encaustic, a wide ranging exhibit in Oregon featuring 65 artists and more than 160 pieces of art. Linda is often a featured speaker and instructor at the National Encaustic Conference and her work has been published in American Art Collector and Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility.
