My solo show, the second of this year, “Midsummer Sun in an Empty Room”, is now up and open to the public at SHOH Gallery in Berkeley. It runs through Saturday 9/19. Below you’ll find a link to all the work, on the gallery’s site, and some words about the work.
I hope you can come see the paintings in person, this is likely my last Bay Area show for a very long time, and i’m proud of this work—paintings are meant to be experienced in person. The gallery strictly observes all appropriate covid-era precautions, including a limited amount of visitors at a time, and masks are absolutely required.
Please feel free to contact the gallery with and questions you might have or inquiries about the availability and price of particular works.
“Midsummer Sun in an Empty Room #6”, 30x40, oil on canvas 2018-2019
https://www.shohgallery.com/midsummersuninanemptyroom-gageopden
words about these paintings: (not an artist’s statement—if that’s not the paintings, why are we even talking about it??)
These paintings are intended as a meditation on loss, grief, and time. Even when we are successful in finding shelter from the storm, inevitably that moment passes.
I’ve lost a number of dear loved ones in the last few years, and we are facing, each day, times that are tragic and deeply uncertain.
I knew that a burned house was an image I wanted to work with, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2018, in the shadow of Tahoma (Mount Rainier), that I found the place.
I can still remember like it was yesterday, the crunch of cinders under my feet, burnt and rusted bedsprings and bits of wire and glass in the floor. The small brightness of green as plants grew up through the floor, the glow as the plants outside grew in the windows—the usual sense of home and shelter inverted, life going on in all its verdant intensity and vigor outside, the sun shining, and inside, 90 shades of gray and peeled paint and charred wood, the soft flakiness of everything that had burned, the cupboards looking ransacked, but with canned food and other stores left behind.
The plum tree in the overgrown yard that still bloomed. The deer who came to eat from that tree, inside the house, the shelter still of use to other animals more honest and modest about their needs. Life going on amidst the cinders. They were so quiet, and scattered like birds in the rafters, startling me every bit as much as I’d startled them, as I came through the doorway into the house, while they were eating plums, in the shade of the remains of the house.
Like seeing photographs of trees growing out of the control boards at Chernobyl, I do take pleasure in seeing the works of man laid low, and the beautiful, inexorable, silent and perfect unfolding of the march of nature reclaiming a placed allegedly tamed…in the coastal mountain regions of the northwest everything grows so fast this balance of power is especially evident. It was very beautiful, and eloquent to me, I enjoyed digging into these images and feel sure this is a vein I will continue to mine. I found I identify with both the inhabitants of the now ruined home, driven before circumstance, time and loss, and with the green shoots, winding quickly over the charred windowsills and broken glass. And really, I don’t have to choose—I’m both, every day.
The few other paintings included here are from my ongoing series “Garland of Hours, which also deals with images and themes of time, family, love, and loss, as well as a couple from simple observation of my pandemic life in my east Oakland studio.