Love Affair by Karen Silve  42×46″  Acrylic on Canvas

Karen Silve. FABULOUS abstract paintings. Wonderful movement, depth and interest. I’m loving the white areas in this paintings as well as the pinks… OH! The pinks are fabulous! This painting is soft and romantic while being tumultuous at the same time. Very cool!

Read a bit about Karen, from her website:

“Silve was born in Springfield IL. Her mother, who is the daughter of an artist and a French chef, exposed Silve and her three siblings to art through visits to museums and classes. Silve’s family moved a number of times during her childhood, finally settling in Tuscaloosa AL. She was involved with art through high school and went on to receive a BFA from the University of Alabama, whose painting faculty, including the Italian artist Alvin Sella, had a strong abstract orientation. A formative experience, especially for her color sense, was the summer Silve spent painting the landscape in France at the Leo Marchutz School in Aix-in-Provence. She currently maintains studios both in Portland and in the south of France.

As an undergraduate, Silve developed an interest in Post-Impressionist and Fauvist painting, and they informed her early figurative abstractions. She studied in the graduate painting and design programs at the University of Denver, creating abstract work that was inspired by the landscape, and by the color lessons she learned in France. Later, the Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, and the German artist Gerhard Richter became important influences on her work.

In 1993, Silve moved to Portland, Oregon, worked in graphic design and began to explore painterly process in a series of meditative paintings. In the late 1990s, she created two extended groups of paintings, first the Musician Series, and then the Cellist Series. Both series focused on players with their instrument, and on a feeling for music expressed through abstracting the human figure, gestural brush strokes and vibrant color.

Silve has acknowledged the role of personal experience in shaping her work. In 2006, the death of a pet and the illness of a friend both moved her to find a new mode to express her own inner reality through painting. The work that emerged involved rhythmic, calligraphic brush strokes and drips of paint. Evolving from this period is the ongoing series of abstract paintings that Silve continues to create. Crucial to these paintings is their physical immediacy and their connection with the natural world. Silve expresses this as being “within nature”, and includes the sights, smells and memories that an encounter in the world can generate. The artist’s involvement with nature extends to her activities as a gardener, hiker and biker. Some of her current paintings draw upon the markets she encountered during a recent trip to Mexico.

In 2008, while working on a series of green paintings inspired by the forests of Oregon, Silve found a way to “create the dynamism of the moment” by turning to the computer to aid her in restructuring a painting in progress. She has also used Photoshop to create digital collages, using element of existing paintings, to serve as a studies for a new canvases.

Silve has exhibited her work extensively in solo exhibitions including at the Portland Performing Arts Center, the Forsyth Center Gallery at Texas A&M University, the Visual Art Center of Northwest Florida, the Tuscaloosa Performing Arts Center and the West Linn Public Library in Oregon. Group exhibitions include those at The Institute for American Universities, Aix-in-Provence, France, the Jemison-Carnegie Heritage Hall, Talledega AL, and the Art in Embassies Program, Doha, Qatar.”

All images via KarenSilve.com, used with permission…

Images are not for reproduction, they are property of the artist.

Catch you back here tomorrow!

Sill Cove by Nat Dickinson  24×32″  Acrylic

Nat Dickinson. Wonderful painter. Love his trees in this painting and oh, can you just feel the distance in this painting? Just wonderful!

Evening on the Point by Nat Dickinson  24×18″  Acrylic

Like I said, LOVE Nat’s tree’s! These trees look majestic and happy, perhaps it’s the vantage point from which they were painted. A wonderful sky – be sure to check out Nat’s paintings, they are a treat for the eye!

Read a bit about Nat, from his website:

“My love of painting landscapes was instilled by my grandfather, an enthusiastic amateur painter.  As a child, I would paint with my grandfather on the back porch studio of his summer house in Maine overlooking the Penobscot Bay.  Maine remains a key subject of my work, along with my home in Asheville, North Carolina.

My paintings explore those mindful moments when we stop to see the extraordinary transformations of very familiar surroundings.  In my daily walks the changes in light, atmosphere, perspective, and color can make the most ordinary scenes become captivating.  As Edward Hopper said, there is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.

My work is shown in juried shows and galleries in Washington, D.C, North Carolina, and Maine.”  Read more here…

All images via NatDickinson.com, used with permission…

Images are not for reproduction, they are property of the artist.

Catch you back here tomorrow!

Thunderhead Riders by Mark Maggiori  24×30″  Oil

Mark Maggiori. Dramatic Western scenes. Each so stunningly captivating it’s hard to take your eyes off of these paintings. The light in the clouds in this painting is mind boggling. I love the light on the second horse and rider. Be sure to check Mark’s work out, you won’t believe what you see!

Read a bit about Mark, from his website:

“Mark Maggiori, b. 1977. Live in Los Angeles, California

Mark Maggiori’s first views of America were framed within the front windshield of a car making its way from New York to San Francisco. That month-long trip, filled with majestic views of the national parks and timeless glimpses of the West, was made when Mark was only 15 years old and on vacation far from his home in France, but its impact would ripple throughout his life and set into motion his great fascination with the West.

Years later, back in Paris, he would enroll at the famous Academie Julian, where Western greats Ernest L. Blumenschein, Burt Geer Phillips and Joseph Henry Sharp had also studied before they helped form the Taos Society of Artists. After being formally trained in academic drawing, Mark’s life would take an important detour through music after he formed a successful band that led to many opportunities in Europe, including into other artistic disciplines such as animation, photography and filmmaking—each one informing his artistic creativity in unique ways.

After great success in the music industry, Mark was lured back to the United States thanks to his muse, creative equal and wife Petecia Lefawnhawk. They journeyed through the West and their trips immediately took him back to that original road trip two decades earlier, the trip that opened his eyes to the beauty of American West. It was then, at the age of 36, he made the decision to paint Western art. They staked temporary claims in out-of-the-way places such as Chloride and Kingman, Arizona, where the desert offered its stunning inspiration and where Mark quickly began to produce some of the most audacious Western paintings of a new generation—audacious because Mark was still brand new to the Western art world, and also because he was an outsider, a Frenchman, with a profoundly unique view of the American cowboy. In the space of just a few short years Mark rose through the ranks to become one of the premier Western artists working today.

His work brought many new opportunities, including important solo and group shows, and a significant showing at the 2016Night of Artists at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, where he won the Patron’s Choice award. He also began to expand more artistically: he started to work more in plein air; he spent time on ranches, with cowboys and on horseback to acquaint himself more with the Western way of life; he painted for a month in Taos, New Mexico; and began adding additional figures to his works and new kinds of compositions to his growing arsenal.

Like Henry Farny, another Frenchman who made his way to the Southwest to paint its interesting inhabitants, Mark has carved a unique place for himself within Western art, a place where his work—part Frank Tenney Johnson, part Herbert “Buck” Dunton, with shades of Tom Ryan and Bill Owen—continues to provoke the minds of young and old Western collectors alike.” Continue reading HERE…

All images via MarkMaggiori.com, used with permission…

Images are not for reproduction, they are property of the artist.

Catch you back here tomorrow!

Boat for Sale with Motor by Carl Bretzke  11×14″  Oil

Carl Bretzke! Wow! I ran across his work via LPAPA Laguna Plein Air Painters Association (LPAPA), and was I ever thrilled! What wonderful paintings. I love how Carl doesn’t paint the entire canvas, he leaves bits showing through, that intrigues me, adds interest. His nocturnes (I am a fan!) are wonderful – too difficult to choose, so be sure to check out his website!

Stonington Overlook by Carl Bretzke 16×20″  Oil

Another fabulous painting – I love the vantage point. Beautiful light and shadows. Love the homes, the power lines, the water… oh! Everything about it… One thing about Carl’s paintings – he paints a wide variety of subjects. You have to see to believe!

Check out Carl’s 2017 Events as well as his paintings. You will love them!

Read a bit about Carl, from his website:

“Carl Bretzke is a representational oil painter who specializes in urban scenes and plein air landscapes. 

Carl’s work has been described in the Washington Post as “simultaneously intimate and detached…The artist’s unadorned style recalls Edward Hopper and The Ashcan school.”

Carl holds an MD degree from the University of Minnesota Medical School. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Colorado, where he also received a minor in Fine Art. Carl has also trained extensively under Plein Air Painters of America signature artist Joseph Paquet.”

All images via CarlBretzke.com, used with permission…

Images are not for reproduction, they are property of the artist.