Downtown Medford, Oregon

Well I have been very busy painting and working, I’m still finishing up the Smithfields series, I promise there will be some sort of splash involved.  I will invite you all to the opening, and then once the pieces are “unveiled” I will show them here.  In the mean time, I’ve just scanned some images of pieces I painted last summer.   As you know, lately I prefer to paint depressing semi-urban scenes, and because the traffic and pedestrians move too quickly, they can’t be included, so the pieces have this nice isolation with all the buildings and the sun, making it look like suddenly there are no people in the world.

Downtown Medford, Oregon

This painting available is for sale here.

The weather is now nice enough to head out doors, I’m looking forward to traveling to Klamath Falls, Oregon, a town a couple of hours drive over the mountains.  It’s high desert, lots of distance between trees, which I think makes for better paintings.  I just have to plan it.

I’ve been taking photography classes from Ezra Marcos as well.  I’m not trying to become a photographer, but I would like to have better photos for my Etsy shop and this blog.  Check out Ezra’s work, it’s fantastic, very fun.

Bear Skeleton

I’m entering pretty gory territory here.  Sorry if you’re squeamish or hate hunting or meat eating or anything like that.  My friend Gilbert is a hunter and recently killed a bear, which he removed the meat from and gave me the fresh skeleton, (minus the skull which he has buried in his backyard so that bugs will clean all the nooks and crannies of, so he can dig it up later and have a nice clean creepy and interesting object).  Anyway, Smithfields wants intensity and I think this will deliver – no?  The back ground elements will all be painted in grisaille, heightening the red and gold of the meat.  I have finished the previous painting for Smithfields, although I’m not showing them publicly until they’re all assembled in the restaurant and we can have a smashing unveiling.  : )  So, enjoy.

Bear Skeleton in Progress - By Sarah F Burns

Bear Skeleton Painting in Progress with the Actual Bear Skeleton

Ashland Painters Union

I’ve been exceptionally busy this year, working on the Smithfields paintings, working my day job and then I added a pet project with a group of painters  – Ashland Painters Union – we found a great space and simply wanted to put on shows that were curated by the artists.  Clean, gift free space to show art.

March 2012 Ashland Painters Union Opening

My Sister, Claire Clooney with her portrait, at the opening of Ashland Painters Union - Painting by Sarah F Burns

We had a lot to do, had a lot of fun at the opening, and everything was going well… until Monday March 19

Fire in the Stairwell directly under our gallery - set by homeless mentally ill arsonist.

In the cold light of day, we discover that our gallery has extensive smoke damage (although all the art work is okay – smells smokey, but not ruined) and worse, the support beams have been damaged, leaving us unable to safely occupy the space until repairs are done, which may take two months.

Ashland Painters Union Entrance After the Fire

There are some very informative articles you can read on our website – www.ashlandpaintersunion.com, plus take a tour of the show.

So I find myself with my usual busy schedule, waiting until we know more…

Day Four or Five, I’m Losing Track..

I thought I wasn’t going to do full color, but it seems to be headed that way.  Or maybe 80% full color.  I plan to do the meat in hyper-color to really make it grab you. 

Today I worked the area around the pitcher.

At a certain point I am going to stop sharing the progress in order to make the unveiling party more exciting.  You will all get an invite. 

Day 4

Day 3

I’m still feeling out the composition – it’s tricky because the main focus – the raw meat – will actually come later – I”m leaving space for the hunks of meat to be displayed because I can’t really put them in until I’m ready to spend a good amount of time with them since they are so perishable.  So I’m forced to just hold them in my mind and paint in the back ground.

I haven’t established the whole value story of the back ground either yet.  It’s still in a drawing stage now.  I need to get a more complete value picture before committing to the composition.  I plan to use very, very minimal amounts of color in the back ground – like almost gray scale, but with a tiny bit of hue included – and this sounds fun -  so I allowed my self to jump into that stage a little bit today.  I did go into the fuller value story as well, but ran out of time.

The days are so stinking short right now that I feel like I just barely get started and then my light is gone.  Grr.  So much work to do and I’m so eager to do it, I had hoped to get like four of these done by February, but I can tell right now that idea was beyond delusional.  For one thing thing, there isn’t that much day light between now and then – even if  I were able to use every minute of it.

End of day 2

Finally at Work

The beginning and the ending of a painting are the most challenging.  In the beginning, there is planning, prepping canvas, lots of measuring, setting chunks of drawing and value up.  Then it starts being fun, exploration of stuff, then as it ticks on to the end, I start feeling insecure.  Am I over working? Should I have worked more on proportion earlier?  Is is fresh still?  …. That will come, but for now, I’m a just few hours in to the first piece in my Smithfields series. 

Smithfields Project Inspirations

So, I have been doing construction on my studio for the past several months, we put in a wall and window in place of one garage door, (better insulated and better light), we put in the best light set up ever – I can see what I’m doing when I want to and can totally control it.  Yay!  Anyway, I haven’t been painting since September – except for a couple small landscapes.  Anyway – I have my studio in near-working order and I have a job and my batch of canvases have been stretched.  My brother in law owns a great restaurant in Ashland, OR called Smithfields.  He’s a Brit and Smithfields was an ancient meat-market in the London, making it a great name for his meat-centric menu.  He uses local produce and meats – utilizing as much of the animal as possible.  Pig Cheeks were actually a popular and tasty (if somewhat fatty) item for a while.  Anyway.  so I’m painting a group of canvases for the restaurant – subject matter is big raw hunks of meat.   The themes will be the reality of meat – which means something dies for us to eat is, which reminds us that we also die.  I’m going to include traditional Vanitas items like clocks, flowers, skulls, snuffed candles to parallel that theme.  The back ground elements will be very tonal – kind of black, grey, umber, little bits of other smokey hues and the meat will be spotlit in full fleshy gut wrenching color.  If I can pull this off, people will take notice, but won’t lose their appetites.  Kind of a delicate balance.  Below are some of the artists and pieces I will be inspired by/ripping off…

Francis Bacon John Deakin Vogue 1962 - Isn't this a fun one? Obviously the famous painting is the story here, but we've all seen it and it's burned into our memories.

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas - Dutch Still Life Paintings are awesome - I caught a great show last summer in SF, mucho inspirations.

Skinned Rabbit by Michael Grimaldi - This man is a contemporary rock star painter - my favorite teacher ever.

Edwin Dickinson - Cello Player - This piece is exactly the kind of cluttered tonal feel I want for the background elements.

Antonio Lopez Garcia - My favorite painter alive today. I can't even put into words the things I love about this piece.

New Refridgerator by Anonio Lopez Garcia - Modern and Timeless.

So, we shall see, I’ll keep you posted…

Way Back Machine

I’m  ALWAYS tempted to get rid of everything I’m not using RIGHT NOW, but I’m sure glad I can control that sometimes.  While moving my studio I ran across these little pieces of personal history.

We’ll begin at the beginning.  I’m pretty sure I drew this before I started school…?  It’s me and my dad feeding the sheep.

I don’t remember going to this circus.  I do remember Mrs. Jones and her wonderful handwriting – See the “Very Good”?  She was really a dream of a teacher.  I loved her.

I thought Jr. High would stop being embarrassing to me by age 35.  Nope.   This is from 8th grade, I think.  I don’t remember the teacher’s name, but I do remember thinking her glamorous – she had bleached blond hair with a hair style after all.  This project was a scratch board.  I think we used crayons to cover the paper, then painted it with india ink, let it dry and doodled away…

I’d forgotten about “ROY”  – it was the name on a bowling shirt my hoodlum friend Annemarie had?  It seemed so cool at the time to me.  Annemarie – what was the story there?

Fast forward to high school.  I don’t know where my school stuff went – much went to friends and family – thank goodness!  (I painted huge paintings during those years.  What a hassle to keep around!)  Anyway, I went over to take Life Drawing classes in the evenings at the local college (now SOU).  This shows the influence of both the teachers I studied with – Bob Alston always wanted us to sit down and look waaaaay up at the model who would be on a really tall pedestal.  Later I saw his paintings at an art show and they were all of sky scrapers seen from the street.  The other teacher was Jim Muhs who had a zen approach – he wanted us to be convinced our brush and ink were actually on the flesh of the model and would travel over and around it.  His paintings were large and distorted but interesting.

After high school I went to Pacific Northwest College of Art for two years, until I dropped out to have my dear little daughter.   I have many fond and embarrassing memories of college.  The embarrassing ones I blame on the fact that I was gearing up for a nervous breakdown.  Anyway – I imagine I’ll regret all this spillage – but the recent studio move and a friend’s addiction problem is causing me to drop normal barriers today.  Here are some Life Drawings – this one is of Ed C H King – another student at PNCA.  He, our friend Jacq and I modeled for each other to make up for some classes we missed.  Look up their art on the links I posted – they are fantastic.

Here are some quick sketches where the model came wearing some striped long underwear and Tom Fawkes, our teacher, asked her to keep them on so we could draw them.  I borrowed this exercise when teaching kids at the Ashland Academy of Art.

This whole post kind of started – in a round about fashion this morning when I saw that I had written “Notan” on a file folder on the kitchen counter.  I’m pretty sure that was something Steve LaRose told me to look up because something I’d done at Life Drawing recently reminded him of  or something ?  -  (why is my memory so bad?)  Anyway – I looked up Notan and then went to go organize the stacks of old art work I had to deal with when I ran across this – an exercise from like Design 101 or something – I guess this was a Notan exercise.  I think the teacher was Christy Wycoff.

So PNCA was big on printmaking – and during my last semester in school I made this wild thing – I was feeling exactly like this at that time.

And finally here is a self portrait I did at home – but during the time I was in college at PNCA,  I think it was right before I spun out of control.  It would be many, many years before I seriously took up painting again.  (Well, many years for someone who is 20.  Really I guess it was only 5 or 6.) I look like a boy in this piece – and that’s not the first or last time that my self portraits look masculine. weird.

Fast forward – This painting was something I made looking back at the time I’m referring to.  It’s supposed to be serious and sarcastic – painful and angry and funny.  It’s how it feels to know people are “worried” about you and how it feels to be grieving, how it felt to me to have embarrassing things get public.  Believe it or not, Judy Garland was an inspiration for this piece as well.  I painted this in like 2008 or something, not long after finishing four years in the Gulag.

OK!  Enough about me!  Share a memory or two in the comments.   Was adolescence embarrassing for you too?  And if you were there for some of the events above – please chime in.   oxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

PS – And the Gulag thing is a joke – and not as mean-spirited as it probably seems.  I learned a lot at that institution and I respect the instructor and classmates.  There was some unnecessary art-police brutality though.  That’s all.