I write this on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. How can a sculptor memorialize a great person without sinking into cliche or banality?. . .
Read David’s Art Letter essays, The wrong way/the right way: Memorializing Martin Luther King, Jr, and Farmers in the lumber room, featured in Oregon ArtsWatch
Artists have the right to own what they create. But all art, to one degree or another, is derived from the creative work that came before and the visual influences of the prevailing culture. . .
Driving through Portland, I often pull over to look at street art, much of which strikes me as powerful creative expression or potent social commentary—or both. . .
Read David’s Art Letter essay, Graffiti: The good, the bad, and the ugly, featured in Oregon ArtsWatch
In the final moments of Goethe’s Faust, as angels lift the soul of the repentant scholar to heaven, a celestial chorus chants: “Everything ephemeral is but an allegory”. . .
Read David’s Art Letter essay, In defense of nonsense: John Vitale at Stephanie Chefas Projects, featured in Oregon ArtsWatch
Born and raised in Northeast Portland, photojournalist Bev Grant long ago moved to New York where, while Portland slept, the world was happening. . .
Read David’s Art Letter essay, Art from Tumult: Bev Grant’s Photographic Record of Radicalized New York, published by Oregon ArtsWatch
Why do Sherrie Wolf’s still lifes of flowers, fruit, vases and other commonplace objects, now on exhibit at Russo Lee Gallery and the Jordon Schnitzer Family Foundation warehouse, somehow satisfy more deeply than the real thing? . .
Read David Slader’s visual art review, Sherrie Wolf at Russo Lee: Wrong in just the right way, published by Oregon ArtsWatch
I know, I know: I just had an exhibit at the Ford of my most recent work, but this is different. Half of the paintings in that show have run off to new homes, and gallery space formerly graced by the work of other artists was offered to me. . .
My show at The Ford Gallery of Art opens this Saturday. I will be showing this painting, “flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing,” along with a selection of other work from the last few years. . .
I crave beauty. The fragrance of a heritage rose. The cry of a newborn. The reflection of late afternoon sunlight on the underside of breeze-bounced cottonwood leaves.
When this painting was little more than a colored sketch, she and I were listening in my studio to KMHD Radio play tracks from the 1957 Blue Note album, “Blowing in from Chicago.” The painting liked the music and chose it as her name (paintings do that kind of thing).