And in closing this week's newsletter, we leave you with Plus Gallery artist Gabriel Liston's latest news from his studio, intact as we received it. We have long revered reading everything that comes from Gabe's pen (and we do mean pen, he still sends postcards written in cursive handwriting!) as much as everything that he paints. He is a true original and one of the most exquisitely gifted artists and gentlemen on the planet:
Yesterday's painting is still too juicy to scan.
But it's what I was thinking about this morning before crawling out of bed. It's not another image of skinny dipping in the Missouri, it's just a canoe on the river with some hills and clouds. It's one small panel, but I wound up working on it over several days, adding and removing paint, scraping and dumping and dragging. It should all work properly now, but I still wouldn't trust me alone in the greenhouse with it.
"Painting is a black and bottomless pit." That was my thought this morning. You choose a composition and dig a hole and tumble in. Every painting. There's no mastering any medium, perfecting any skill, finishing any picture: you just huck yourself a little sideways into the next hole. That's the attraction: every composition is on the lip of vertigo. You're falling towards light and falling towards history. You're falling towards weight and you're falling towards touch. And you're wrecking it almost every step of the way.
A few weeks back I decided I would write the book (however short) on Lafe Pence's activities in Portland 1905 - 1908 before I got to deep in the actual canvasses of his Tualatin Ridge ditch. I went deep in the research (am still there) and began sketching out the illustrations. I tried brush and ink. I tried pen and ink. I tried brush and pen together. They were all right. Sort of. But they weren't it. I chose to knock them out in grisaille on small panels instead. Oil. Black and white. It'll be much better. I can arrange them like an old black photo album now. Or something like that. There are details, like publishing, yet to solve. As well as painting all the illustrations - my outline calls for 30 or so.
Now with a palette loaded for grayscale, I can also paint black and white snapshots of the trip down the Missouri and the school trip to Not-Crater-Lake. It's hard (see bottomless pit above) but it works. I only have to pretend I know what's going on in all the blank space in the notebook sketches. And not run out of money or paint or time while I do it.
I'm also mid-way through a mid-size pink commission. We can shoot and share that later.
This weekend Seth Nehil and I will select work to hang in Providence Portland Medical Center for three months, December - March. It will be an overview of the working process rather than paintings from any single show. Although the temptation is strong, I will not be doing any new skeleton pics for this installation.
Froelick Gallery's Fire exhibit opens 18 December and will include that campfire panel from the Signal Fire expedition.
If you're in Colorado, any holiday traffic we can channel through Plus Gallery's stacks will only increase the odds of them helping me paint up Lafe Pence projects in Colorado (Rico and Breckenridge) once I finish cataloging his riparian (and human) damage here in Portland.
Gosh. I hope that's everything. It's certainly enough for now. I'll close with the first of the Lafe Pence illustrations. Lafe Pence and Mr. Huber are standing on Government Island in Guild's Lake about a month before the Lewis and Clark Exposition opens looking across to the ridge with all its water and real estate potential. Painting isn't the only way to leap into a bottomless pit.
Yours,
Gabriel
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