News

I just got word that a couple of my recent animal photos have been accepted for a gallery show, ‘The West Through a New Lens,’ that runs Nov. 15 through Dec. 31 at the PACE Center Gallery in Parker, Colorado. The one above was taken earlier this year in the South Steens herd of wild horses in Harney County; the deer below is one of our regulars at home. I’ve been playing with using fields of color to isolate the photographic images, and kind of like the effect.

Writing in Oregon ArtsWatch, David Bates says this about the RURAL show I co-curated with Tiffany Hokanson at Umpqua Vallery Arts Center in Roseburg: “Hopefully this is just the start of a larger, uniquely Oregon, project.”

This beautiful great-horned owl at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is one of three photos that have been accepted into the New Frontiers Juried Art Show & Sale at the Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The exhibit is for work “that pushes the definition of Western Art,” and it opens Nov. 4.

My hand colored photo of a single snag standing in a burned-over landscape won the Best Photography award this evening at the opening reception for the Western Spirit show at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum in Wyoming.

Two other works of mine are in the show, which runs at the museum through April 18. You can purchase online through the exhibition website.

Yellowstone Art Auction 53, which opens January 22 and runs through March 6, will include two of my hand colored photographs, Storm at Summer Lake 2019.18 and Ponderosa in the Elkhorns 2019.14.

The auction benefits the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana. Past auctions have included works by such artists as Picasso, Calder and Dali alongside some of the leading contemporary western artists.

Here are the two photos that will be in the show:

I was delighted to learn that my photo Replanted Fir 2020.6.1 won a purchase award from the juried Art About Agriculture show that opens this fall at Oregon State University. This is the first time my work has been purchased by a university, and I feel very honored by the experience.

This follows right on the heels of other good news — my photo On the Edge Trail 2019.36 won a $500 Best in Category Award in August from the Prairie Village Arts Council in Kansas.

We’ve been enjoying cool foggy mornings the past couple weeks here in western Oregon, creating wonderful light in the woods around our house. I finished painting this 18×24 print this morning and printed a couple others to work on — like the black and white forest image below. It should make a nice framework for some subtle hand coloring of the trees and sky.

For the past few months I’ve been wondering if my art lives most comfortably in the the West — not as in ‘the Western Canon,’ but as in ‘the American West.’ That suspicion was reinforced during our recent road trip through the upper western states — Wyoming and South Dakota especially — where I got to see some pretty serious painting and sculpture in places like the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole and the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody.

Standing in the wildlife museum that afternoon in Jackson, I felt engaged and energized in a way I very seldom do while looking at “contemporary art,” which for all its earnestness often strikes me as brittle and joyless.

No, I’m not buying a cowboy hat and boots. But I have been exploring the idea of the American West with my images for years. Maybe it’s time to make that direction more explicit with the work I make — and with the venues I seek to show it in. (Plus, I’ve been wanting to treat myself to a trip to Santa Fe….)

And, no, I’m not a wildlife photographer. Don’t have the patience. But elk can be pretty easy pickings, as in this hand-colored photo I made of a pair of young bulls I found sparring at Dean Creek last month.

More on this as I figure it out.

Hand-colored photo, 18×24 inches.