October 2013 Exhibit
The Things We Leave Behind
Diane Kingzett
Diane Kingzett of Portland brings a new series of mixed medium paintings for her fifth solo exhibition at Imogen. Describing herself as a painter of emotion, Kingzett leaves preconceived ideas of content and composition to consider her own internal dialogue, allowing psyche to become muse. The Things We Leave Behind is consistent with Kingzett’s abstract style of expression but with a departure, giving pause for clarity and acceptance. The exhibition opens during Astoria’s second Saturday artwalk, October 14. Kingzett will be in attendance and available to answer questions about her work from 5 – 8 pm that evening. The show will be on view through November 6.
For Kingzett, the process of painting is a basic means of communication, a place where ideas and life experiences are gathered and utilized to distill into pictorial narrative. Within this series she considers the physical and emotional relics once so significant, which we ultimately abandon through maturity and a state of inner knowing. Through this process one may grow to understand and accept what to carry or what to put down, easing the burden of a lifetime of experiences. Through abstraction, her compositions might bring vague imprint of place which for her are personal documentations of time and memory.
With calculated use of palette, she brings exquisite blues melting into golden color fields; the warmth of vibrant, passionate pinks balancing quiet washes of grey, lending to memory of landscape while offering a sense of peace with what was.
Exploring new ideas, she has also incorporated the use of new medium. Working with flashe paint for the first time along with oil, her first love, she brings an intensity of color with a deep matte finish. Flashe paint is typically utilized on stage sets in theaters for its ability to absorb light with less reflection. For Kingzett this has granted a new-found freedom in the process of painting itself. Her painting style has always held the element of confidence, the addition of a medium new to her has enhanced that assuredness, freeing her hand and eye even further to explore her own ideas while bringing a deeper level of richness to color, texture, and finish. Consistent to her work is her ability to provide space for intuitive consideration of process through an ethereal sense of reality.
About this series she states:
These paintings address physical and emotional relics once significant to me that I ultimately had to abandon to embody maturity and a state of inner knowing. Tired attachments to places, ideals, fears and false securities become inert. The idea that abandonment, once such a detriment to us when we are young, can ultimately compel us forward into self-evolution.
While exploring a new medium in vinyl flashe paint, I found a fresh freedom of expression in the intense opacity of the paint, both as an under painting and in final layers partnered with oil paint, graphite and paper. The intensity and immediacy of the saturated color of flashe paint adds a new sensibility to intuitive painting for me coupled with a more decisive, authoritative hand. A sense of saying more with less has arisen, an old theme in contemporary art but relatively recent in my process. Painting feels more contemplative now, and paint has become a partner rather than something to conquer.
Kingzett, who has painted for well over 30 years earned her BFA at West Virginia University and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as the Vermot Studio Center. Having lived in all four corners of the country, Kingzett has taken inspiration from her experiences and utilized that towards the development of her work as a painter. She is also an accomplished silversmith, translating her love of color and texture to exquisite bezel set stone jewelry pieces, also available at Imogen.
The Things We Leave Behind
Diane Kingzett
Diane Kingzett of Portland brings a new series of mixed medium paintings for her fifth solo exhibition at Imogen. Describing herself as a painter of emotion, Kingzett leaves preconceived ideas of content and composition to consider her own internal dialogue, allowing psyche to become muse. The Things We Leave Behind is consistent with Kingzett’s abstract style of expression but with a departure, giving pause for clarity and acceptance. The exhibition opens during Astoria’s second Saturday artwalk, October 14. Kingzett will be in attendance and available to answer questions about her work from 5 – 8 pm that evening. The show will be on view through November 6.
For Kingzett, the process of painting is a basic means of communication, a place where ideas and life experiences are gathered and utilized to distill into pictorial narrative. Within this series she considers the physical and emotional relics once so significant, which we ultimately abandon through maturity and a state of inner knowing. Through this process one may grow to understand and accept what to carry or what to put down, easing the burden of a lifetime of experiences. Through abstraction, her compositions might bring vague imprint of place which for her are personal documentations of time and memory.
With calculated use of palette, she brings exquisite blues melting into golden color fields; the warmth of vibrant, passionate pinks balancing quiet washes of grey, lending to memory of landscape while offering a sense of peace with what was.
Exploring new ideas, she has also incorporated the use of new medium. Working with flashe paint for the first time along with oil, her first love, she brings an intensity of color with a deep matte finish. Flashe paint is typically utilized on stage sets in theaters for its ability to absorb light with less reflection. For Kingzett this has granted a new-found freedom in the process of painting itself. Her painting style has always held the element of confidence, the addition of a medium new to her has enhanced that assuredness, freeing her hand and eye even further to explore her own ideas while bringing a deeper level of richness to color, texture, and finish. Consistent to her work is her ability to provide space for intuitive consideration of process through an ethereal sense of reality.
About this series she states:
These paintings address physical and emotional relics once significant to me that I ultimately had to abandon to embody maturity and a state of inner knowing. Tired attachments to places, ideals, fears and false securities become inert. The idea that abandonment, once such a detriment to us when we are young, can ultimately compel us forward into self-evolution.
While exploring a new medium in vinyl flashe paint, I found a fresh freedom of expression in the intense opacity of the paint, both as an under painting and in final layers partnered with oil paint, graphite and paper. The intensity and immediacy of the saturated color of flashe paint adds a new sensibility to intuitive painting for me coupled with a more decisive, authoritative hand. A sense of saying more with less has arisen, an old theme in contemporary art but relatively recent in my process. Painting feels more contemplative now, and paint has become a partner rather than something to conquer.
Kingzett, who has painted for well over 30 years earned her BFA at West Virginia University and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as the Vermot Studio Center. Having lived in all four corners of the country, Kingzett has taken inspiration from her experiences and utilized that towards the development of her work as a painter. She is also an accomplished silversmith, translating her love of color and texture to exquisite bezel set stone jewelry pieces, also available at Imogen.
OPB's Think Out Loud interview of sculptor M.J. Anderson
Click on picture for OPB's live interview
For nearly 40 years, sculptor M.J. Anderson has been making annual trips from her home on the Oregon Coast to Carrara, Italy. She spends up to three months there, traveling along a winding road to quarries with towering walls of marble, the same kind of stone that was used to create Michelangelo’s sculpture of David and other timeless works of Renaissance art.
But Anderson isn’t interested in recreating classical, idealized representations of masculine or feminine beauty. Instead, as a recent exhibit of her work in Astoria showcased, a unifying theme of Anderson’s work is “the distillation of what it feels like to be woman.” Starting at her studio in Carrara, she uses grinders and air hammers to carve torsos evoking the female form out of massive blocks of marble, onyx and travertine. The pieces are then shipped, unfinished, to Anderson’s studio in Nehalem where she polishes them while retaining drill marks and other raw reminders of the stone’s past and its “power.” We’ll talk to Anderson about her artistic process and the themes that animate her work today.
Click on picture for OPB's live interview
For nearly 40 years, sculptor M.J. Anderson has been making annual trips from her home on the Oregon Coast to Carrara, Italy. She spends up to three months there, traveling along a winding road to quarries with towering walls of marble, the same kind of stone that was used to create Michelangelo’s sculpture of David and other timeless works of Renaissance art.
But Anderson isn’t interested in recreating classical, idealized representations of masculine or feminine beauty. Instead, as a recent exhibit of her work in Astoria showcased, a unifying theme of Anderson’s work is “the distillation of what it feels like to be woman.” Starting at her studio in Carrara, she uses grinders and air hammers to carve torsos evoking the female form out of massive blocks of marble, onyx and travertine. The pieces are then shipped, unfinished, to Anderson’s studio in Nehalem where she polishes them while retaining drill marks and other raw reminders of the stone’s past and its “power.” We’ll talk to Anderson about her artistic process and the themes that animate her work today.
Review of Darren Orange's Paracosm By Richard Speer
Darren Orange has maintained a long inquiry into the landscape of the region that nurtured him, the Pacific Northwest. (The show's title refers to an imaginary world, which Orange likens to "creating your own universe.") Born and raised in Yakima, Washington, to third-generation apple orchardists, he earned a B.A. in painting with an art-history minor at Western Washington University. Since 2000 he has lived in Astoria, Oregon, except for a two-year stint in Santa Fe. Over that quarter century Orange has transliterated the Northwest’s rivers, mountains, forests, and logging towns into the genre of abstracted landscape.
Orange’s palette has tended toward earth tones, his gestures toward natural and human-made referents such as the cut of the horizon line across the Pacific Ocean or the span of the iconic Astoria-Megler Bridge, which connects Oregon and Washington. This stylistic and thematic consistency makes his new exhibition, “Paracosm,” all the more surprising a departure.
The 33 oil paintings that comprise “Paracosm” (all from 2022 and 2023) leave concrete referents behind in favor of pure abstraction. He also trades in his customary color palette of browns, blacks, and subdued gray-periwinkles for bright, bracing, edible sherbet hues. Nothing in Orange’s prior work prepared me for the pinks and juicy oranges of the show’s centerpiece work, the 7 by 5 1/2 foot “Synesthesia,” nor the lemon-yellows and bubblegum blues in “Proclivity to Shadow the Sun,” nor the scrumptious cherry reds of “Glass Skies.” His handling of paint, however, retains the flowing, self-assured brushwork viewers will recall from previous bodies of work. In fact, arguably Orange’s most successful paintings have been those in which bravura representational passages verged on abstraction.
His current deep dive into pure gesture seems to have liberated and invigorated him. There is a newfound ferocity, a jittery kineticism in his dashes and daubs with brush, palette knife, and spatula. A powerful centrifugal force animates “Thorn of the Recalcitrant” and “Abstracta Botanica,” their crescent-shaped gestures telegraphing mass and motion hurtling outward.
He comes to abstraction not on a pointless mission to change art, but to discover himself personally and aesthetically. The works on aluminum panel, in particular, lend themselves to what Orange calls “a wild ride in slippery, wet viscosity that makes the painting action fast and loose.” The surfaces are thick with impasto, perhaps a nod to the mutant textures of Anselm Kiefer, one of his big influences.
I place Orange’s style in the company of four Northwest painters of roughly his generation: Timothy Scott Dalbow, Jason Dickason, my late partner Dorothy Goode, and Scott Wayne Indiana in his work circa 2004-2007 — assertive, intuitive, and very much in the lineage of Abstract Expressionism. Lucinda Parker and Barbara Sternberger began working in this mode a generation earlier.
Orange has reshuffled the bones of this approach into something appreciably fresher that — having ditched the woodsy hues and heavily varnished surfaces of his incipient years for a brasher, more exultant palette without varnish — evinces a hyperspace jump after two decades of a consistent aesthetic message. His abstractions look suave and commanding here, their nubby surfaces, bold gesturalism, and Pop Art palette exuding a heady confidence as they update the painter’s Northwest ethos with an agreeable jolt of flash and verve.
Although this is Orange’s fourth solo exhibition at Imogen, it’s his first in the gallery’s expanded exhibition space, which doubled in size with a remodel in late 2021/early 2022. Some background about this gallery’s location far from an urban center; it is unique in Astoria. Imogen is a light-filled white cube, warmed by rustic wooden beams holding up the ceiling. It is well suited for the large-scale paintings that Orange favors, and for sculptures such as those of M.J. Anderson, whose show preceded Orange’s. It’s hard to overestimate Imogen’s impact on the Oregon Coast art ecosystem over the past decade.
Director/founder Teri Sund opened up shop in August 2012, incorporating coast-based artists such as Anderson and Marc Boone, as well as Portlanders like Corey Arnold, Tom Cramer, and Matthew Dennison, Lauren Mantecón from Santa Fe, and Anne Grgich from Seattle. Sund has an eye for work that is regional but not regionalist. This is not the place to buy a sunset-and-sand print to cart home as a souvenir of your vacation on Cannon Beach, and while the gallery does have a section for ceramics, glass, and jewelry, the doubling of the exhibition square footage keeps the ratio of contemporary art to craft at around 85/15, which is just about right for an integral but pragmatic seaside art space.
Darren Orange has maintained a long inquiry into the landscape of the region that nurtured him, the Pacific Northwest. (The show's title refers to an imaginary world, which Orange likens to "creating your own universe.") Born and raised in Yakima, Washington, to third-generation apple orchardists, he earned a B.A. in painting with an art-history minor at Western Washington University. Since 2000 he has lived in Astoria, Oregon, except for a two-year stint in Santa Fe. Over that quarter century Orange has transliterated the Northwest’s rivers, mountains, forests, and logging towns into the genre of abstracted landscape.
Orange’s palette has tended toward earth tones, his gestures toward natural and human-made referents such as the cut of the horizon line across the Pacific Ocean or the span of the iconic Astoria-Megler Bridge, which connects Oregon and Washington. This stylistic and thematic consistency makes his new exhibition, “Paracosm,” all the more surprising a departure.
The 33 oil paintings that comprise “Paracosm” (all from 2022 and 2023) leave concrete referents behind in favor of pure abstraction. He also trades in his customary color palette of browns, blacks, and subdued gray-periwinkles for bright, bracing, edible sherbet hues. Nothing in Orange’s prior work prepared me for the pinks and juicy oranges of the show’s centerpiece work, the 7 by 5 1/2 foot “Synesthesia,” nor the lemon-yellows and bubblegum blues in “Proclivity to Shadow the Sun,” nor the scrumptious cherry reds of “Glass Skies.” His handling of paint, however, retains the flowing, self-assured brushwork viewers will recall from previous bodies of work. In fact, arguably Orange’s most successful paintings have been those in which bravura representational passages verged on abstraction.
His current deep dive into pure gesture seems to have liberated and invigorated him. There is a newfound ferocity, a jittery kineticism in his dashes and daubs with brush, palette knife, and spatula. A powerful centrifugal force animates “Thorn of the Recalcitrant” and “Abstracta Botanica,” their crescent-shaped gestures telegraphing mass and motion hurtling outward.
He comes to abstraction not on a pointless mission to change art, but to discover himself personally and aesthetically. The works on aluminum panel, in particular, lend themselves to what Orange calls “a wild ride in slippery, wet viscosity that makes the painting action fast and loose.” The surfaces are thick with impasto, perhaps a nod to the mutant textures of Anselm Kiefer, one of his big influences.
I place Orange’s style in the company of four Northwest painters of roughly his generation: Timothy Scott Dalbow, Jason Dickason, my late partner Dorothy Goode, and Scott Wayne Indiana in his work circa 2004-2007 — assertive, intuitive, and very much in the lineage of Abstract Expressionism. Lucinda Parker and Barbara Sternberger began working in this mode a generation earlier.
Orange has reshuffled the bones of this approach into something appreciably fresher that — having ditched the woodsy hues and heavily varnished surfaces of his incipient years for a brasher, more exultant palette without varnish — evinces a hyperspace jump after two decades of a consistent aesthetic message. His abstractions look suave and commanding here, their nubby surfaces, bold gesturalism, and Pop Art palette exuding a heady confidence as they update the painter’s Northwest ethos with an agreeable jolt of flash and verve.
Although this is Orange’s fourth solo exhibition at Imogen, it’s his first in the gallery’s expanded exhibition space, which doubled in size with a remodel in late 2021/early 2022. Some background about this gallery’s location far from an urban center; it is unique in Astoria. Imogen is a light-filled white cube, warmed by rustic wooden beams holding up the ceiling. It is well suited for the large-scale paintings that Orange favors, and for sculptures such as those of M.J. Anderson, whose show preceded Orange’s. It’s hard to overestimate Imogen’s impact on the Oregon Coast art ecosystem over the past decade.
Director/founder Teri Sund opened up shop in August 2012, incorporating coast-based artists such as Anderson and Marc Boone, as well as Portlanders like Corey Arnold, Tom Cramer, and Matthew Dennison, Lauren Mantecón from Santa Fe, and Anne Grgich from Seattle. Sund has an eye for work that is regional but not regionalist. This is not the place to buy a sunset-and-sand print to cart home as a souvenir of your vacation on Cannon Beach, and while the gallery does have a section for ceramics, glass, and jewelry, the doubling of the exhibition square footage keeps the ratio of contemporary art to craft at around 85/15, which is just about right for an integral but pragmatic seaside art space.
