kate mcgee art

Philomath Open Studio Tour is this weekend and the next! Yesterday, Harold Wood and I set up our show at Spindrift Winery in Philomath.  Our studios are too far from town to engage the public so we are depending on the kindness of Matt and Tabitha at the winery.  Tonight the artists tour all the locations together and eat at each.  I still have some tasks to finish up to get it all ready but we are pretty good to go.  Harold’s bright, bold, digital work contrasts with my dark grey nuanced palette but the work looks surprisingly okay together.  Hope we have lots of visitors and meet new folks.  We will have some maps to get you round the whole tour. The weather looks like it won’t be too bad either.  Here is some new work that will be available at the show.  And the wonderful postcard/poster that Harold designed.  It just makes me smile—Michelangelo’s God image reaching down to choose sushi from a plate holding work by many of the participating artists.  Laura Berman’s felted box makes a particularly interesting bite of sushi.

The workshop with Erik Sandgren was great: mixing my edges from hard to soft, my forms from warm to cool, designing the picture plane as well as the painting composition and, most importantly, making space on paper.  He advised that I work harder to draw relationships, scale and objects more carefully.  Slow down a bit and consider, don’t just plough through!  Also had some ideas about tying the horizontality of landscapes together with vertical color changes.

This is my first plen aire painting with Vineyards and Vistas after the workshop.  Loved the striped smokestack and the one of a kind enormous deodar cedar.  I didn’t really have a plan beyond painting those and trying to incorporate my new arsenal of painting ideas. Looking at it now, I wish the smoke stack was more vertical.  Mike Bergen Wonkiness creeps in.  It is hanging at my first Corvallis show–at the Chamber of Commerce through July.

Machine in the Garden

The Corvallis Art Guild Clothesline sale is on August 6th.  I am treating it as a dry run for the Art in the High Desert Festival at the end of August.  I have had photos taken by Scott Huette in Eugene for the Giclees that will be printed by Richard Armstrong in Bend.

Found this little painting in the Color Songs series that hadn’t been posted.  I was supposed to paint one every day but it has been awhile.  Today would be a challenge to paint the field of oxeye daisies below me.

June 21