Retrospective: Templed Hills

Retrospective:  Columbia River Templed Hills

I thought I’d do a retrospective of the art (and other projects) I have featured on my website .  This will take awhile; there is a lot.   I have a couple of galleries of pictures (Paintings, Fashion) with no stories to accompany them.  Yet.

I’m still painting, though not as often as I’d like.   Because.  I’m parenting, lovering, gardening, sewing, wistfully wishing to decorate.  Oh, and still training a puppy.  And attempting to stay connected with my goats (they distanced themselves over the winter, partly because we were all less sociable in the cold, but mostly, I believe, because they are jealous of the puppy).

While I’m a little sheepish about my lack of focus, cousin Marissa sweetly tells me that I’m expansive.  A wonderful thought…I remind myself often.  Expansive.  Yes.

I sold this oil on canvas a couple of years ago to a local art director.  Though I’d sold (or traded) several paintings before, I still doubt constantly that I am.  So this transaction was validating (she loved the painting), as each sale is.  The painting is large; about  4′ X 4′.

It was an experiment.  Oil on canvas (I stretched my own on a frame Frank built…a real money saver).  I was trying to paint actual architecture; a myopic view of the Columbia River Temple, local to where I lived at the time.  It wasn’t going well…looking more and more awkward, wanky, self-conscious.  And I wasn’t enjoying painting it at all.   Frustrated, I wiped most of the painting out.  And I thought of poplars, not the tall skinny ones but the spreading ones that grow near rivers and lakes in the desert west (and the midwest, come to think of it…maybe everywhere).  I recalled my love for the desert’s yellowing hills of the Columbia Basin (sometimes wheat fields, sometimes ripening native grass).  They feel like home to me (they always will).  My painting became more simple, minimalist… and I started to fall in love with it, though my confidence that it would actually be good to anyone else was still in the basement.   The arches of tree branches became my architecture, the gentle hill swells communicated the tranquillity and peace I’d been reaching for.  A different sort of temple.

I held on to the painting for a couple of years, gradually feeling more and more confident that it was good, before I showed it at an art show in Utah.   After the art show, I was invited to show again at a community gallery, and the art director didn’t want to part with my painting when the show ended.

So I don’t have it anymore.  Sometimes I wish I did.  But I’m glad I have a memory, anyway.