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Past Exhibit Highlights |
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Vanessa Enos New Works August 8 - 29, 2008 |
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Vanessa Enos’ passionate pursuit of an art career has been the result of a supportive family and one important teacher she encountered along the way. A showing of the artist’s new work will be on exhibit in the Lorenzen Board Room at the Pendleton Center for the Arts August 8 – 29, with an opening reception Friday, Aug. 8th from 5:30 - 7:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public. |
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Growing up Enos started making art at a young age. “My mom was also my Head Start teacher, and she taught me how to draw. My grandmother Cecilia Bearchum made beautiful beadwork, and many other family members were artistic,” said Enos. “I just thought it was something everyone did”. “When I was in high school, I’d never even heard of art school”, says Enos. “My art teacher, Nancy Rees Duff, thought I had talent and encouraged me to take art seriously. She advised me to go to National Portfolio Day when I was a junior at Weston-McEwen High School Athena.”
National Portfolio Day provides an opportunity for those who wish to pursue an education in the visual and related arts to meet with representatives from colleges accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It is designed to help further the artistic development of young artists by bringing together experienced college representatives to review artwork and offer feedback.
Rees Duff helped Enos prepare her portfolio, encouraging her to make more still life paintings to augment her abstract work. The advice paid off and Enos’ work attracted the attention of a representative from Moore College of Art and Design, a private women’s school in Philadelphia, PA. She was offered a coveted spot in the next fall’s freshman class and moved to the east coast shortly after high school graduation. Life at a prestigious private school was quite a change from her public education. “Almost all the other girls had been prepped for art school by attending private art-based high schools,” Enos said. “It was VERY competitive.” Enos’ talent and personal resolve carried her through and she received an Associate Degree in Illustration and made lifelong friends who work in every discipline of art and design.
Enos has now returned to Pendleton, where she is working at her art every day. Her exhibit at the Arts Center includes oil paintings, collages and monotypes. She cites Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh as major sources of inspiration and is working to find her own style and her own path. She hopes that path also includes getting more arts education. Enos is planning to attend Ft. Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where she will major in Art Business Management. |
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“My ultimate goal is to own a gallery where I can sell my own work and that of other artists,” she says. “I want to help other artists in the same way that Mrs. Rees Duff helped me”. |
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Jeremy Lilwall Internal Rhythms of Madcap Inquiries August 8 - 29, 2008 |
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Lilwall’s paintings are the final act in a multi-faceted process that begins with sculpting original objects and re-working bought or found objects. “When I am arranging items as a still life, they begin to create a narrative and once I photograph or begin to paint, that moment becomes an experience, a memory, for myself and all the characters.” This body of work, exploring a world where the rational and irrational coexist, was created in collaboration with Kynde Kiefel. |
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Lilwall was raised in Walla Walla and graduated from Whitman College in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art. He currently works as the Waxroom Supervisor at the Walla Walla Foundry.
Working at different bronze foundries over the past seven years has greatly influenced Lilwall’s work. Gaining experience using different processes have given him the technical skill to pursue a body of work that combines multiple mediums with a search for meaning.
“To me, the work is about spirituality and its confrontation with meaning. Trying to make sense of a world where the rational and irrational coexist, yet separate and divide at the same time,” said Lilwall. “Why do our minds feel contained, separate, searching for individuality yet simultaneously seeking that connection and furthermore transcendence?”
“When I am arranging them as a still life, they begin to create a narrative and once I photograph or begin to paint, that moment becomes an experience, a memory, for myself and all the characters,” he said.
His fiancé Kynde Kiefel has collaborated with him on creating the still life assemblages and he cites her as a major influence on the way he thinks about making art.
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Philip Miner Horse/Power Sept. 4 - Oct. 10, 2008 |
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Miner received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Whitman College in Walla Walla, where he studied painting under nationally recognized artist Keiko Hara. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in New York.
Returning to the west coast after finishing graduate school, Miner was intrigued with the cultural influence of the car on lifestyle. His work is influenced by the work of American painters who attempted to infuse the European avant gardist ideas into American traditions of landscape. Using vibrant colors and quasi-geometrical shapes, the paintings investigate ideas related to the automobile, historically as an icon of nostalgia, as well as the more recent political and environmental connotations. |
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The East Oregonian Gallery at the Pendleton Center for the Arts featured the first solo exhibition for Seattle artist Philip Miner Sept. 4 - October 10. The exhibit, “Horse/Power” featured large scale works loosely based on images of hot rod and big block engines combined with influences from early twentieth century painting. |
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“Much of my work is related to drawing, photographic and sculptural work that I perform as studies inform the body of work,” said Miner. “I'm also conceptually informed by recent writings on politics and images by theorist Jacques Ranciere, as well as the urbanist Paul Virilio.” |
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Catherine J. Lee: New Paintings Oct/ November 2008 in the East Oregonian Gallery
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When Catherine J. Lee set out to find a place where she could live and paint, free from the noisy distraction of city life in Sacramento, California, the wide open spaces around Condon, Oregon drew her in. Her new exhibit at the Pendleton Center for the Arts features paintings and drawings that convey her great affection for this land that she now calls home.
Lee has made art most of her life. She graduated from University of California at Davis in 1989 with a degree in Studio Arts, but like many artists who pursue higher education, her art was put on hold after graduation as she entered corporate life to help pay off her student loans. She was able to carve out pockets of time to paint, and began exhibiting work in 1994.
Her original art training had focused on the human figure but later became interested in exploring landscape imagery. She started out painting very simple landscape compositions, a single horizon line of sky and ground. She tried to paint outdoors, but was often frustrated by the noise of a nearby freeway roaring by and the creep of massive subdivisions licking at the edges of a beautiful open space.
Looking for a change of scenery she made several road trips up to the Pacific Northwest, visiting the Palouse region in Eastern Washington, northern Idaho and finally Eastern Oregon. |
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“It was the landscape of Eastern Oregon that I found most intriguing,” she says. “The vistas went on seemingly forever, vast open skies with unobstructed views of the undulating hills of wheat and deep shadowed canyons.”
She admits that the move to Condon required some adjustment. The slower pace of rural life was a change, and it took time to settle in to the community. The small, tight-knit community members wondered why Lee had arrived in town. “One person actually asked me if I was in a witness protection program,” she says. Lee found sharing her artwork to be a good way to make connections. Her neighbors appreciated her talents and obvious affection for the land.
“As I drive over it along empty country roads, the undulating hills of golden wheat and sagebrush are a marvelous and sensuous contrasts to deep canyons, shadowed in late afternoon light. It is a landscape of great presence. It is this ‘presence’ and deep quietness, stillness that I very much try to capture in my paintings. Somehow the emptiness of the landscape, with few people, cars and structures, allows the presence of the land to have greater resonance.”
Her painting technique utilizes traditional oil glazing. This approach starts with a carefully rendered two-tone grisaille or grey-white underpainting. The underpainting incorporates a deliberate stipple texture, evoking the rough surface of the land. Over this textured underpainting, she gradually applies many layers of oil paint and alkyd medium which set into a jewel-like finish. Like pieces of different colored stained glass stacked on top of one another, the many layers of translucent oil glazes create a luminous image of form and color.
“I find the oil glazing approach very meditative and by working on the same image over several weeks I’m better able to examine and explore the subtleties of this unique landscape,“ she says. “The light, especially in late afternoons, accentuates the sensuous curves that are very evocative of the human figure. The land has a life to it.”
The three years that Lee has spent in Condon have been very artistically productive. She was recognized by the Oregon Arts Commission, receiving a Career Opportunity Grant earlier this year. Her work was included in the OSU “Art About Agriculture” exhibit, a juried show that tours the state each year. She was also chosen as the first Artist in Residence at Mighty Tieton, an arts-based entrepreneurial enterprise based in the Central Washington town of Tieton, fifteen miles west of Yakima. Lee spent six weeks in a former fruit-packing building in Tieton that has become an artist studio, creating paintings that were then exhibited in the Loft Gallery.
This exhibit was made possible through the generous support of Thompson RV. |