These portraits were commissioned as a Christmas present to the subjects’ Dad.



Atti, acrylic on canvas, 2009 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.

Would you like to have a portrait made of yourself or a loved one? Download my pricing sheet here.

He’s, I don’t know, maybe medium-sized, you know, average height, with short brown hair. I think he wears glasses. Eyes? Maybe bluish-brownish. Kinda dark, but, you know, not like dark dark. He was kinda funny-lookin’.

Whatcher is available at aka gallery in Oklahoma City. Detail views here and here.

Lots of good stuff happening on the Paseo tonight.

aka gallery is featuring Fear Not The Needle, hand-sewn photographs by romy owens. I have new work in aka’s back space, including the one pictured above.

Josh Heilaman’s lush, fantastical paintings are on display at Art of Yoga. Treat yourself.

JRB Art at the Elms is showing the work of Jim Keffer and John Wolfe, along with their annual Small Works exhibit. Each 8×8″ piece in this show is priced at a mere $180! Get ‘em while they’re hot. Here’s my piece, a little piece o’ me.

Don’t forget the Girlie Show! (As if you could.) Hit the Paseo at 6:00, see the Girlie Show after 8:00, or go back to either on Saturday afternoon. You can do it all!

* I first heard the terms honne and tatemae in this NPR story about translating the untranslatable. Author Christopher J. Moore, in his 2004 book In Other Words, describes these concepts this-a-way:

Tatemae: A term often translated as “form,” but it also has the specific cultural meaning of “the reality that everyone professes to be true, even though they may not privately believe it.” For privately held views, the Japanese have a different term, honne, meaning, “the reality that you hold inwardly to be true, even though you would never admit it publicly.” The British civil servant muttering the reproach “bad form, old boy” over a drink in the club, may be expressing something very close to the quality of tatamae.

See detail views of Margaret VIII here, here and here. See shots of the board in progress: stage one, two, three, four and five.

Join us the following Saturday, October 24 at 611 Creative for the Third Annual Ghouls Gone Wild Parade!

I’ve been using Found on Flickr as an ongoing visual diary, so I’ll make monthly galleries for awhile and see how it goes.

Here is my Visual Diary for September 2009.

I can’t include the following in my Flickr gallery, but they are also what I’m looking at these days:

Esra Roise, My hands are cold but my heart is on fire. Click image to view source.

Cat Panel Diptych by Dara Engler.

I’m exploring the possibility that a lot of Americans “relax” by entering a zombie-like state of hibernation. We choose diversions that allow us to zone out and ignore things in the world that are difficult. I paint secluded, vacant, zombie-like figures who have relaxed in their habits until they have lost time. … They are sluggish, jaundiced, and so lacking muscle tone that they hang over their chairs and defy anatomy. — Dara Engler, from her Artist Statement

Beverly McIver, Dear God 3. Click image to view source.



Hiroshi Watanabe, Baba, Ena Bunraku. Click image to view source. (What are bunraku?)

12×12 Art Show & Sale 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009, 7pm

Fred Jones Industries Building
900 W. Main, downtown OKC (map link)

Featuring 150 of Oklahoma’s finest artists, delectable food from 26 area restaurants, panoramic views of the OKC skyline, live music and cash bar.

The 12×12 Art Show & Sale is the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s only fundraiser, with proceeds benefiting the organization’s many programs to support visual artists in the state of Oklahoma.

Music from The Stringents, a rock string quartet, and the Millwood Drum Line.

A preview of artwork is online now and images will be added weekly. You can also view some of the artwork during a preview exhibition in the Lobby of Leadership Square, 211 N Robinson in OKC, September 1-20.

Click here to read more about this fabulous event and purchase tickets.

My friend and colleague romy owens will be bringing her Photobooth to this event. It’s not to be missed!

Edmond “Mundy” Tulsa was born to a man who was hoping for a boy. Everyone calls her Mundy. She is a prodigious baker, and wins many bake-offs and Opteemah County Fair ribbons.



Young Mundy Tulsa, first underpainting.

The Tulsa family’s money went down with Penn Square Bank when the bottom dropped out. But Grampa Dewright Tulsa had placed gold and silver coins inside sections of pipe and buried them in the backyard. One day Mundy undertakes to dig a vegetable garden and discovers the coins. This becomes the startup capital for Miz Mundy Cookies, and later Mundy Buns.



Young Mundy Tulsa, second underpainting.

Mundy Buns grows so successful that Mundy gets a buyout offer from Nabisco. She declines on account of her personal integrity. Soon after, she strikes a deal with Dobbin Wynn to be the exclusive concessions distributor for the Dobbin & Dixie Family Film Fest.



Young Mundy Tulsa, third underpainting.

The Mundy Buns plant remains the economic heart of Normal. Mundy hires Katie Hennepin to help her branch out into organic baked goods.




Normal, OK: Young Mundy Tulsa, graphite and acrylic on paper, 2009

Mundy is seen here at the Opteemah County Fair in 1944, with the blue ribbon she won for her Sweet ‘n’ Spicy Blackberry Pie.

Back To Normal: Normal, OK Revisited is on display at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City through September 19th.

I would like to thank everyone who attended my talk at the show last Saturday, I had a wonderful time. Please join us for the closing reception on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 5 pm.

via Right Some Good.

The Hi Fructose blog is featuring an exclusing interview with contemporary pop baroque painter Carrie Ann Baade. Reading Baade’s description of her working process, I found that she uses collage as a sketching method, just like I do! Quote:

The spark of the muse that could be called intuition is present when I make the collage for my work. I begin this process by covering the first floor of my house in photos and ripped out pages from books. After the floor is covered I walk around looking for images that fell on top of each other in an interesting manner…this is similar to reading tealeaves. Often I will have a question in mind while diving into the piles of picture images, such as, “What can I say about the horrors of dating in Tallahassee.” This process reminds me of reading tarot cards and getting an answer through the cards that can sometimes be uncannily accurate. Looking for the divine spark to speak to me through these images, I collect and adhere together with cellophane tape to paint later. I know something is really working if I involuntarily laugh aloud at the juxtaposition.

I feel the same intuitive connectivity when I’m making collage sketches. Sometimes the best compositions happen by accident, because I left two scraps in the same pile. I look over and realize, with a little rush of adrenaline, “Of course those go together!”

Ostrich, collage sketch, 2007 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.

I like how Baade allows the collage aesthetic to show through in her finished paintings, without her images appearing slapped-together. She does an excellent job of creating integrated compostitions from a variety of sources. The world is a vast grab-bag of information, and our job as artists is to interpret, reinterpret, and dis-cover meaning through our medium. Although Baade has been told that “paint was an inadequate media to display the complexity of [her] ideas,” her intricate creations overflow with narrative and emotion. You can explore more of Carrie Ann Baade’s work here.

As I was reading this interview on the Hi Fructose blog, I felt an eerie similarity between Baade’s collage process and my own. This feeling was redoubled when I saw the previous blog post about the release of Isabel Samaras’ new monograph by Chronicle books. The gent on the cover bears an uncanny resemblance to this guy here. The similarity is a coincidence.

This post is part of NaBloPoMo for July 2009.

Leigh, by Paho, by Sarah. Acrylic on found fabric, 6.5 x 7 inches, 2009.05.14
Click the image to visit it on Flickr.

Being a gallery artist means scheduling shows months or even years ahead of time, which means I am more or less under deadline all the time (even if that deadline is a long way off). That’s good for me, I work well with a fixed timeline. But sometimes I get bogged down in the middle of a series and need to change gears.

That’s where Leigh came from. In a fit of frustration the other day, I pulled out some small canvases and went to work getting wet paint all over them. This painting is from a photo of Leigh Merrill taken by Paho Mann (two friends of mine from college).

9:02 (central panel from Three Minutes in American History) by Eric Humphries. Learn more at Paintedatrocities.com.

From the press release:

Oklahoma City based artist Eric Humphries is known for his cartoonish renditions of true life historical atrocities and in honor of the 14th anniversary of the OKC Bombing, Humphries will be unveiling a series of three paintings memorializing this tragic event entitled Three Minutes in American History.

“This is the first time I have tackled a subject so close to home,” says Humphries. “I am definitely much more anxious about this series than usual. Everyone in Oklahoma felt the bombing in one way or another.”

To prepare for the project, Humphries visited the Bombing Memorial several times and took some 200 photos of the site. He also spent weeks researching each element of the bombing, as well as the roles of the real life people involved. “ I tried to incorporate all the major parts into the composition. They are all so important to the over all experience of visiting the Memorial and I wanted the series to reflect that. It’s been an emotional experience,” admits Humphries. “But I am very glad to do my part in memorializing the victims of this horrible act.”

Each large, forty by forty eight inch, canvas is framed with its own Gate of Time, a concept central to the actual Bombing Memorial, and in turn tells it’s own story. The 9:01 canvas represents the time before the bombing and depicts the burning of the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas where McVeigh first became incensed about the federal government. The 9:02 canvas shows the actual explosion of the Ryder truck used by McVeigh in the attack. And the 9:03 canvas depicts the Field of Empty Chairs and Survivor Tree complete with ghostly spirits ascending to god‘s outstretched hands.

“Three Minutes in American History“ can be see at the aka gallery in the historic Paseo Arts District in OKC from April 3rd through May 1st. Humphries, himself, will be in attendance April 3rd for the opening. For more info please call 850-0175.