IN THE STUDIO WITH...

“I mix paint a lot. I even save my palettes when I really like color combinations.”

Painter Renée Hartig has worked hard on her skill for color, and it shows in every painting. Her landscapes have a kind of electric buzz, the result of 17 years spent experimenting with how to mix paint for various effects. A Michigan native, she moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2008. Since then she’s been exploring and depicting every sandy cove and snowy mountain the great Pacific Northwest has to offer.

I visited her studio before Christmas 2023. We talked about her artistic process, of course, as well as some of the lesser known sides of painting life.

Find her work here.

“I’m starting off spontaneously, and then things emerge.”

Roberta Aylward paints abstract artworks using a big range of colors, tools and textures. What may start as an array of stainless steel washers may get the cut-paper stencil treatment, then a wash of acrylic paint before a squeegee rearranges the whole.

I visited Aylward’s Portland, Oregon, studio this fall where we talked about why she views her work as documentary in nature, why the hardware store is sometimes better than the art supply store, and what she’s looking for as she pushes and pulls her work between the abstract and the familiar.

Find her work here.

Sigfrido Oliva has been a fixture in the Italian art community since the late 1960s. At nearly 82 years old, he’s still painting, etching, drawing, writing and teaching. A native of Messina, Sicily, he took a boat to Rome in his teens, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, put down roots in the city center and never left.

I had a great time studying under him a few years ago—he’s never one to let a joke go untold—and finally, post-pandemic, I got to visit him again. As usual in these interviews, I had specific questions about his practice and his past as an artist, but he had his own ideas about what’s important in a studio tour. So I followed him around in my stumbly Italian and enjoyed the chance to laugh with him again. (I’m sure I’m missing things in my ham-fisted translation.)

Find his work here.

“Technical accidents are the best part of my art practice. They’re what I’m there for.” Portland painter Tatyana Ostapenko seems really curious about the rules we make for ourselves as artists. She’s always asking which rules matter—in a practical, aesthetic or other sense—or how she can pull new methods into her practice.

She was born and raised in Ukraine, and her work reflects an ongoing deep dialogue with the country and its traditions. Soon after the full scale invasion of the country last year, she began a fundraiser that has so far collected more than $70,000 for humanitarian relief.

We talked about the relative advantages in acrylic vs. oil painting, why she often uses unstretched canvases, the uses of contemporary technology to support a painter’s practice, and plenty more.

Find her work here.

“This is where I find a lot of magic: in the ghost.”

Printmaker Nanette Wallace specializes in monotypes. She paints in ink on a plexiglass plate, runs a single print, then uses the leftover image—the ghost—as a springboard to the next composition, and the next, until she finds an artistically satisfying composition. It’s a practice rooted in spontaneity rather than planning.

Wallace showed me around her Portland, Oregon, studio this spring and explained the ways she combines impeccable figure drawing technique, inspiration and chance to make beautiful scenes of people and the natural world.

Find her work here.

“There’s no replacement for just painting,” says William Park. “If it works, great. Go on and paint. If it doesn’t, great. Go on and paint.” Park has been a fixture in Portland’s visual art scene for three decades. A prolific, intuitive painter, he uses unrehearsed abstract brushstrokes to trigger unexpected moments on canvas that he compliments with a master draftsman’s skill. His paintings and prints echo the real world of human figures, crashing ocean waves, bowls, birds and more, while at the same time flowing with spontaneity.

In this interview, we toured his beautiful studio and talked about big things—from what he does when he’s stuck on a painting to a major life-altering event from which he is still recovering.

Park’s next solo show opens April 6, 2023, at Laura Vincent Design and Gallery, Portland. Find his work here and here.

Leah Kohlenberg is not just the president of Portland Open Studios (and therefore an invaluable advocate for the visual arts throughout our weird city) and she's not just a former world-traveling journalist with great stories to tell. She’s mainly a bold painter of cityscapes, portraits, flora and fauna. (Take note of the drippy ferns and flowers throughout this video.) For the past 11 years, she’s also been teaching painting at The Roaming Studio (find it on YouTube). And she wrote a book about how to draw faces called, fittingly, “The Roaming Studio’s Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing Faces.”

Find her work here: https://www.leahkohlenberg.com

Steve Mumford caught my attention as a combat painter during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars beginning in 2003. He was following in a rich tradition of artists risking their lives to depict the drama of war. (I wrote a whole chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation about his work.) Since then, Mumford has been a regular contributor to Harper’s magazine, traveling to cover a range of stories in “places where human emotions really come into play.” He has depicted the BP oil spill in Louisiana, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, rallies for then-candidate Donald Trump, the lives of wounded combat veterans and plenty more.

In May, 2022, I visited his studio in lower Manhattan where we talked about his two current lines of artistic exploration. I expected to see the first such body of work, his latest on-scene ink-and-watercolor drawings depicting the COVID response in New York, protests for racial justice in Portland, and the like. I didn’t expect to see studies for a series borne from his practice as a Catholic. It led to a great discussion. “I don’t think that you can go back to any kind of pure faith if you’ve grown up in a modernist atmosphere,” he said, “But I think it is possible to go to church and get some very powerful experience from it, even if you don’t subscribe to the whole mythology.”

Mumford’s work can be found at Postmasters Gallery, where he has been represented for many years. (https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/6e35b37f6c6080de555602/)

Practical advice for painters: “It shouldn’t feel like reinventing the wheel every morning,” Kevin Adams said when I visited his studio this past winter in the picturesque village of Washington, Virginia.

Adams has a well honed eye for depicting a scene, and he has used it all over the world, painting arctic glaciers, Cuban skies, national parks, a changing Chilean river, Russian cities, and many breathtaking views of the forests, farms, mountains and beaches of the American East Coast where lately he splits his time between Virginia and Massachusetts.

He served as a Marine Corps combat painter, which sparked my friendship with him more than a decade ago. (I was writing a dissertation on combat art.) The U.S. State Department has shown his work around the world, and he has been commissioned multiple times by the Department of the Interior and National River Conservation to document some of the most amazing landscapes in the Americas.

Find his work here: http://www.kevinhadams.com

“I use a lot of stories in my art to try to psychologically understand myself and my relationships with other people, which can get rather messy sometimes.” A she-wolf, a murder mystery, a hermaphrodite and more: Portland artist Jen Brown paints people—allegories, portraits and ancient myths—using a glazing technique inspired by the old masters (the likes of Titian and Caravaggio).

In this interview, we talk about her influences, her daily practice, the power of art—and a controversy involving Instagram and too many DMs.

Her solo show, Love, Sex and War, opens March 3, 2022, at Figure Ground Gallery, Seattle.

Find her work here: https://www.brownjen.com

One of the most prolific artists I know, Christine Joy paints the glorious Pacific Northwest from her rustic studio in Oregon wine country. Since meeting her at an art fair in 2018, I’ve loved and respected Christine’s jubilant daily devotion to craft—and her work pays off: the paintings just keep getting stronger.

During our visit in fall 2021, she showed me her essential equipment for painting indoors and out, showed us evidence of her killer chops in the brushworks, reminded me that painting first thing in the morning is a fabulous way to live, and explained how she uses flowers to experiment with new techniques. (And—bonus!—we discovered she borrowed a favorite art book from me way back in the beforetimes.)

Find her work here: https://www.christinejoypaintings.me