"Portland to Paris" Opens Dec. 1

I am pleased to share a new collection – “Portland to Paris” – with you this week. The collection debuts at the grand opening of my gallery, which is Dec. 1 from 5 – 8 p.m.

With this collection, I wanted to continue in the abstract landscape style that I started exploring last year. While I was fortunate to do a fair bit of traveling in 2022, my travels didn’t take me to many places that feature the type of scenery I like to paint (other than Willapa Bay). All that to say, I am feeling a little short on reference photos.

For this collection I decided to revisit some of my favorite paintings and reference photos from the past several years, but to approach the scenes in new ways. I started by sketching out ideas for the paintings while flying from Portland to Paris in September. This exercise helped me “distill” each reference photo to its key elements.

You can see 12 of the 15 sketches below. While most of the sketches are based on old references photos and paintings, some I invented entirely.

Compared to the first time I painted these scenes, the new paintings have less detail in the scenes, but more detail and intrigue in the layers and brushwork. They have fewer specifics, but bolder shapes.

In the photo montages below, you’ll see the reference photo on the left, my first painting based on the reference photo in the middle, and on the right, the painting from this new collection that’s also inspired by the reference photo.

These paintings are graphic and bright and most of them have so many layers of paint. One of my favorite techniques, which I definitely employed in this series, is to paint layers of matte medium (kind of like thick, clear paint) in-between layers of paint. This creates texture and depth in the painting.

There are 15 paintings in this collection and they range in size from 18”x24” to 36”x36.” They will be available in my gallery starting Dec. 1 and on my website starting Dec. 1.