Rhymes With Jenny, Smells Like Saturday, acrylic on unstretched canvas, 22 x 22 inches, 2011. Some rights reserved.
At the opening reception for You're Pretty at the Leslie Powell Foundation Gallery in 2011, some ladies approached me and said, "Okay, we want to know. What rhymes with Jenny and smells like Saturday?"
I had to tell them that I didn't know. The phrase was in my head when I woke up one morning. This happens with delightful regularity.
Choos, oil on canvas, 2005 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.
In all my years of art school, nobody told me that mixing brown and white would make blue. Cool.
This still life painting is of one of my beloved pairs of Vans Sk8-Hi Tops. The details are scratched out using an X-Acto knife.
Painted under the instruction of Robert Heischman at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Landlocked: Still Life with Sushi, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches, 2011 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.
Composition is about choices
When composing an image, the artists chooses where each element is placed in order to produce certain effects. The desired effect could be motion, tension, calm, strength, quiet, noise, and so on.
Lately I'm revisiting Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings and studying his compositions. I'm wild about the way he pushes those divisions of space almost to the edges of the canvas in a conscious step away from the traditional Western pyramid. As my former painting teacher Martin Facey (himself a student of Diebenkorn's) would say, the middle of this painting is full of "nothing," as in no thing.
Painting no thing
In exploring still life painting, I find that composition is queen. A solid composition is complemented, not overshadowed, by color and paint handling. I enjoy playing on the notion that the most important business of a painting happens in the middle.
For Landlocked, above, I wanted to try pushing all the action to the first half of the hour, so to speak. I frequently employ the circle-within-a-square layout, and I like how the oddish placement of the sushi plays against the static underpinnings of the image.
My original photos of these leftovers included a teacup with soy sauce in it, a very dark element dominating the upper left quadrant of the composition. I decided against including it in the painting, choosing instead to fill that half of the plate with no thing. I also changed the color of the plate from green to a more neutral grey to turn its personality down a few notches, letting the sushi pop (better than putting it in the frying pan, no?).
Landlocked was created for the 2012 Small Works exhibit at JRB Art Gallery at the Elms.
Try Not to Think About Hats, acrylic and graphite on found wood, 7 x 14 inches, 2011. Some rights reserved.
Some paintings just come out right the first time. This was done in a day.
Garage 283, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, 2010 by Sarah Atlee.
Garage 283 is my entry for the invitational exhibit Heart and Soul of the Great Plains. The show opens November 6, 2010 in Lawton and Chickasha, OK. My painting will be in the group on display at Leslie Powell Foundation Gallery in Lawton.
This show is presented in conjunction with the Museum of the Great Plains and the Comanche National Museum. Contemporary art will be presented in the Leslie Powell Gallery, naturalistic art in the Museum of the Great Plains and Comanche art in the Comanche National Museum.
Special guests for opening night will be Buffalofitz, an acoustic band with a highly entertaining brand of music, humor and storytelling.
Since moving to Oklahoma in 2006, I've been enchanted with our particular landscape. Not in a romantic way; I'm piqued by the jumble of decaying billboards, squat beige warehouses, freeway overpasses, prairie, McMansions, and expansive sky. Upon being invitied to participate in this show, I decided to construct a visual quilt composed of abstract snippets of my semi-urban surroundings.
Photo collage for Garage 283, 2010 by Sarah Atlee
This became my reference tool for creating the painting.
Garage 283, detail (landscape view), 2010 by Sarah Atlee
After finishing this experimental piece (first in an open-ended series), I realize that the color palette is about five times brighter than I would have liked. Interestingly, as a beginning painter, I had to fight the urge to cover everything with white glazes. Now, I'm fighting to resist the siren song of Indian yellow, veridian, quinacradone violet, red oxide, and cobalt blue.
Garage 283, detail view, 2010 by Sarah Atlee
