A new post at long last!

It's not that I haven't been working...  Here are several paintings in various states of progress (forgive some of the glare - lighting in the studio is difficult).
Top to bottom:
A house in Brentwood just after Christmas.  Not sure if you can see the icicle lights in this photo.  40"x50"
Some power plants in the east bay.  Shot the same day as the house.  34"x56"
A tank in the east bay.  28"x50"
Black Crater update.  This is from Lava Beds National Monument.  A crazy place.  50"x40"
Orchard update.  This one's almost done.  34x50"
A refinery in the east bay.  Lots of work to do on this one. 34"x50"
A seascape.  We were at North Beach at Point Reyes on a very foggy day.  This combined with some messed up printer settings made for an atmospheric reference image.  Approx. 30"x40"

Work in progress

Top to bottom: Fossil Beds 28"x50", another orchard 34"x50", some plants approx. 40"x56", Black Crater approx. 40"x56".  The bottom two are big experiments and will probably change quite a bit from these images, but it's always nice to see where things start.

Another one finished

Seascape
28"x34" (I think)
oil on canvas

Finished!

Orchard 2
oil on camvas
28"x50"

New

House

Self Portrait

Three painting sessions on this self portrait. I have been experimenting with dark under painting, and yields dramatic results. Also lots of fun to do. 34"x50".

Strange Experiment

Here's the beginning of a new painting painted on top of an old painting. It's a complete experiment, and I'm trying keep it loose. We'll see how it goes, but right now it kind of feels like I'm painting it out of the corner of my eye.

Seascape

One more seascape. This one is from a reference image shot with my phone. The painting is 36"x60". Not quite finished, but it's getting close.

More progress

Two paintings in progress. The top one is closest to being finished. The bottom one has lots of work to be done. Both are experiments is new ways of working the paint.

New work in progress

Now that open studios is over, it's time to get back to work! These are just two of the several paintings I started this week. More to come soon...

Mission Open Studios

This summer has flown by, and it's already time for fall open studios. Please join me in my studio this weekend for lots of new paintings, prints, and photographs. Details below. Hope to see you there.

Mission Open Studios

1890 Bryant (btwn 17th and Mariposa)

Studio 212

Friday, September 30, 6-9PM

Saturday, October 1, 11AM-6PM

Sunday, October 2, 11AM-6PM

Reviews

This month's Art Ltd. has a lovely review of my recent show at Artzone 461. The text, by Dewitt Cheng, is below.

Photography and Impressionism came of age together in mid-19th century Paris, sharing an interest in the new world as a compelling spectacle requiring no moral or allegorical justification. The staged tableaux of the classical tradition gave way to realism, nicely exemplified in Stendhal's description of the novel as a mirror carried down a road. With their oddly cropped compositions, blurred focus, and embrace of the fugitive and transient, the slice-of-life works of Degas, Manet, Monet, and Renoir paradoxically foreshadow Kodak. (Other painters took photographic roads not chosen by the Impressionists, of course.) Painter Heidi McDowell updates this symbiosis, exploiting the "quick, cheap and easy nature of digital cameras" and the auto's mobility to scan for images worthy of transcription into her chosen medium. McDowell: "Oil painting has its own 'artifacts' and unpredictable process-related effects... Rough painterly marks are often enough to indicate detail, and each medium mixed with the paint adds its own unique texture to the painting's surface." She includes in her finished works, however, the "digital artifacts, dust on the sensor, reflections in the car window and other 'aberrations' found in photographic source material."

McDowell's two dozen paintings from 2010 and 2011 in Road Trip are unsentimental and unfussy--no waiting for the photographic golden hour here--yet, despite their modest size, dramatic. Faraway views like Silo 2, Red Hill, Radar, and Reservoir are so suffused with light and atmosphere that their ostensible subjects, shrunk and faded by distance, seem, initially, almost irrelevant; once seen, however, they become surrogates for the passing viewer--silent sentinels. The askew horizons, close-up views, and tight cropping in Tank 2, Yosemite Landscape, Tank Reflection, Refinery 3 and House on Stilts commemorate the landmarks of the passing scene while recapitulating compositional devices employed by modernist painters and photographers alike. Her paintings of riders in passing cars (Duster, Fastback) add social observation, while the twin water towers in Victorville add deadpan humor. Such is the yield from a memory chip driven along a superhighway by a sharp-eyed driver/painter.

KQED also has a very nice review, Road Trips: Two Shows, Three Artists and Many Possible Paths, here.

The show came down in August, but I will have some work up at open studios in two weeks.

Back to work

Started the first five paintings over the past few weeks. The seascape has been around longer.