Apple Pie opens tomorrow. The party is from 5 to 7:30 and there will be nine different kinds of apple pie to celebrate!
Inara Verzemnieks is amazing. As the only other portrait artist in town who’s done my portrait--so far!--she has shown me a lot about myself. And that’s only part of the reason why I asked her to write the essay for the book I’ve published about Apple Pie (here pictured with my friend).
I’m not talking about allegorical portraiture, the super genre, again...! This time, I’m referring to Tai Chi Chuan (literally translated to “supreme ultimate fist” or “big energy boxing"), which, as I see it, is more about art than physical fitness.
I’m sure someone has already made the observation, but deadlines might more aptly be called lifelines.
On a recent gallery hopping expedition, I came upon this work by artist Heather Watkins. It didn’t immediately spark my interest, and, as such, I wouldn’t normally have investigated further, except that I happened to notice that Watkins sees this work as portraiture.
Sometimes I think I became a portrait painter because I’m socially inept. You might think I would become a landscape painter or some other kind of artist who is not, by definition, required to meet people, but the hole in my social skills is in a very specific place. I enjoy meeting people, but not in that chit-chatty networking kind of way. I like asking the more personal questions. I like learning about another individual and really getting to know her-him, even if it’s only for the space of an hour.
Americans love their own faces and have done so from the very beginning, as is witnessed by this early American portrait.
Louise Bourgeois and Rene Magritte, the authors of these works, are two very different artists, but it’s their similarities that never cease to inform the way I make art.
Apple Pie opens 28 August at the Interstate Firehouse here in Portland and travels on to Eugene next year, and, though I’ve been working on the series for a few years now, I have two paintings that are as yet unfinished!
Experts don’t know why households in the $40,000 to $80,000 annual income range are reticent about buying art, but the subject of this portrait does. And so do I.
The story of how my right thumb came to be non-compulsory to my painting process actually starts four years ago in a small black box theater in SE Portland, and not last month on my kitchen floor as I try to stop myself from fainting after slicing my digit to the bone on a can top!
Some people would argue that, like physics, art is a complex human endeavor that requires rigorous training, and, as such, it is justifiably obscure and difficult to understand at times. I think those people are making a silly and rather useless comparison...I wonder if Sandra Rice, the artist behind these figures, would too.