Painting the atmosphere of the Oregon coast

There is an interesting concept in art called "lost and found edges."  This to me is the secret of how to paint atmosphere.  This concept refers to the fact that our eye will fill in, or complete, ill-defined areas in an image, and in turn our mind will label this area with a motif it recognizes.  When I was painting a southern Oregon seascape, I used this concept to paint the atmosphere of a sunset evening sky with heavy weather approaching.

In order to create the heaviness of the cloud cover, I painted the sky upside down!

This is because my mind "reads" these forms as land in this position, and this in turn influenced how I applied the paint, even when I was trying to be atmospheric.

Lost and found edges can also create the illusion of iridescence.When edges are left indistinct and each shape is shaded very gradually from the lightest color in the center area to the darkest intensity of that color at the outer edge, the affect is a sense of glowing light.

Lost and found edges also create a sensation of movement.  Each form dissolves into the next, and nothing stays fixed and certain.  Just like life.  It feels significant to me that this painting, made with lost and found edges, is titled The Longing of Memory.

Enjoy more of my paintings on www.journeyoracle.com.

Why I make art

I do not visualize images in my mind.  I make my art in order to see it.  I ask my work to teach me, knowing that nothing is only what it seems but also something else.  This poem is one of my oldest teachers. It came to me in 1972 while listening a lecture about Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language at the University of Oregon where I was completing my PhD.in Art Education.

In a painting of space

Of light and light, you paint to be alive.

Every part, and every part between the part is whole

And you are artist enough to call forth it riches.

For you there will be not past indifferent moment

There will be no forgotten place.

 I have remembered these phrases again and again across the years of my art-making.  They remain the ground upon which my choices for ways of working are made.     

  

 I moved to Cortes Island  in 1990 from Halifax, where I was teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, because one cold dark morning I was shocked to not recognize myself in the mirror—I looked so tired and stressed. I gave up money and career advancement to become an overeducated oyster farmer who paints large photo-realist images of nature, makes frame drums for shamanic journeying, and continually creates the Journey Oracle card deck.

 I compare my best painting moments to singing Opera.  I strive for making that elegantly floating line of pigment unfurling like an effortless aria, all the while knowing years of discipline and practice are supporting the voice, and the mark.

Lunch in the garden: Original chalk pastel and fine art print

It is not quite warm enough yet to sit out on the deck, cup of tea in hand, and gaze into the garden. Having lunch in the garden is one of my favorite summer moments.  Yet this chalk pastel did not have its origin in that memory, but rather in the inside of a cereal box.

One set of flaps were cut off a cardboard cereal box with a plain interior, and then all kinds of art materials were used to make marks inside the box without looking inside.  The messier the process, the more exciting and unexpected the results!

The artistic challenge, and fun, of making a creative mess--is in finding shapes and figures that tell a story in the squiggles and splashes, and then in trying to replicate exactly those marks using just one material.  Chalk pastel is a great media for this project because its nature is boldly dramatic and intensely colorful--just like the surprising collisions of form and color found inside the box.

Of course it is also important for the eye to find a place of rest in an art piece, and this is an image of "lunch in the garden" so the hand and tea cup, by their recognizable representation, become the quiet place to sit and appreciate a never-before-seen flower.

LUNCH IN THE GARDEN

Original Chalk Pastel on Matte Board

20" x 26.5 "  framed...$900.00

shipping additional

Custom fine art print on acid free velvet art paper 

with archival inks

11" x 17" unmatted...$150.00

shrink wrapped on foam core

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for more information contact Kristen at journeyoracle@gmail.com

See more shamanic art originals and prints at

www.journeyoracle.com