Tamara Stephas

I’ve been reading a few pages at a time of Mitch Albala’s new book, Landscape Painting. Very clear and well written.

His approach is very analytic and his generalizations are illustrated by specifics.  It seems clear enough for beginners, and addresses many basics that apply to any subject.  But it also has plenty of meat for more advanced painters.  There are reminders of many considerations we learned long ago but often forget in the heat of the forge, along with helpful tips on site selection, plein-aire tricks, changing light, simplification, and other issues important to landscapists.  The illustrations alone are worth the price of admission: an extremely varied, thoughtful selection of works by many artists, reproduced beautifully.
I don’t want the feast to end.

Every so often I like to take a break and relax in the studio. Stop worrying about series and concepts, and just paint.  I’ve been spinning out some little studies of fruit, inspired by the amazing variety and beauty of the produce at our local farmer’s markets.

Red Pear, December, oil on canvas, 6″x8″.

Artist Trust has selected my painting Dry Farm for their benefit auction on February 20th.  I am delighted to support them: Artist Trust is a wonderful nonprofit which supports Washington state artists directly with informational resources, biz education workshops, and grants.

Dry Farm, oil, acrylic, and graphite on panel, 11″x19″

Dry Farm (detail)

Whew.  Lecture series are over for the term.  I have no shows coming up any time soon to prepare for.  Summer visiting season is over, and holiday visiting season has not yet begun. The weather is becoming grimmer.  Time to concentrate on new work and play with new ideas.  Freedom!

University House, the location of the “Faces and Figures” show, is a large retirement community hanging off the side of the Issaquah plateau.  Yesterday about four of us accepted the invitation to talk about our work to the residents.  I enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal from the other artists.  Each of us happened to address a different aspect of our work – technical, process, inspiration, sources.

Presenting a talk at a retirement home has its own challenges.  They had a very nice sound system set up, despite the moderate size of the room.  And the curator passed example works around the room for the audience to see; I blush to say I wouldn’t have thought of that myself, but she has extensive experience curating for them.

The talks were well received. I had to run afterward, but I understand the discussion afterward was quite lively, and some of the artists were invited to residents’ apartments to see art they had collected and continue the discussion.

I have a few pieces of work in a large show at University House, Issaquah.

Maybe We’ll Get Some Rain, oil on panel, 24″ x 18″.

Took the train down to Centralia for the opening reception of the “Other Worlds” show last night. That’s definitely the way to travel.

The show was terrific. I loved the work of the other three artists in the show, Melissa Weiss-Steele, Alison Carey, and Brooke Weston.  Carey makes black and white photographs of models which look like otherworldly geology; the work is exquisite and haunting.  Weston’s work is simply amazing: dollhouse-like miniature stage settings constructed inside of taxidermied animal trophies. I was delighted to show with them.

I will exhibit new work in the show “Other Worlds” at the Jupiter Art Center Gallery, Centralia Washington, October 7-31 2009.

These small paintings are based on old photographs from my family, with the characters changed and rearranged to reflect family dynamics and the fragility of memory.

Discontinuous Function, oil, acrylic and graphite on panel, 7.5″ x 10.5″.

Graduating after two years of full-time study in the Drawing and Painting Atelier at Gage Academy of Art.  It’s exciting.  It’s scary.  It’s past time.  It’s way too soon.  It’s one thing to win palmares in school where the rules are defined, another to live up to them in real life.

I’ve learned so much in the past two years.  Developing my artistic technique was only a small part of it: it has changed even the way I look at art.

I am showing work in the exhibit Questioning Silence through June 21 at ArtsWest in West Seattle, with Andrew Hare and Stephen Rock. The gallery show accompanies ArtsWest’s current theater play, I Am My Own Wife. I look forward to seeing the play, it sounds fascinating.