Deborah Dewit Marchant

Rest, 2005. Pastel, 18 x 24"

The Evening Paper, 2006. Pastel 16 x 24"

Friday Nights, 2006. Pastel 23 x 27"

A great Portland, OR area artist (I believe she lives in West Linn), Deborah DeWit Marchant works mostly in pastel but also does a lot of oil painting. She is also an accomplished photographer. I discovered her art cards at Annie Bloom's Books in Portland but actually met her in person some years back at the Sausalito Art Festival, it was such a pleasure! About 2 years ago I went to her show at Gallery Fraga in Winslow on Bainbridge Island, WA. It was a lovely show and so nice to finally see her work up close in a well-lit gallery setting.

"Born in 1956, Deborah DeWit Marchant is a 5th generation artist, a descendant of Dutch illustrators and painters. As a child, her father's career in the international grain business took her family to live on 4 continents and in 6 different states, instilling in her curiosity, wanderlust and a zest for knowledge. She started taking photographs at 16 but entered Cornell University as an Agronomy major. After 2 years her interest in photography and art led her astray and she took to the road in search of imagery and experience, traveling extensively in her 20's. Self-taught, she has been making images since that time, beginning with photographs - both black and white and color- and moving later into pastel and oils. Her work resides in private, public and museum collections across the country, and has been used on the covers of books and magazines, in calendars and on cards. She is also the author of Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life, a photo-illustrated written chronicle of her young years as a photographer and developing artist. Deborah and her husband Robert live with their 3 cats in an old red house in a suburb of Portland, Oregon."

(Taken from the back flap of the book, Deborah DeWit Marchant In the Presence of Books, intro and text by Kim Stafford. William, James & Co., 2007.)

Joan Brown

After the Alcatraz Swim #3, 1976.

The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim, 1975

I love Joan Brown!!! She's such an inspiration

"I strive for that delicate balance between reason and feeling, knowing that sometimes the pictures will lean one way or the other. I'm constantly trying to pull out new information from my intuitive self, which results in the surprises that I discover in my work, and which keeps me ever stimulated." Joan Brown.

Book reference: Karen Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Baas: The Art of Joan Brown 1998.

I'm going to do another post with her bio and more paintings some time in the coming weeks!

***I was featured on Friday, June 20th at http://www.dif-fraction.blogspot.com/ ... for ways to better your Etsy photography skills! There are a lot of good ideas I will try and lots of compliments too. Thanks, dif-fraction!***

Stoichedon

Stoichedon inscribed in stone

Arrangement of letters aligned vertically as well as horizontally. Common in Athenian inscriptions c 400 BC. (Rose Folsom)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Paganini, 1819. Pencil drawing, 12 x 8 1/2 in. Louvre, Paris

Princess de Broglie, 1853. Oil on canvas, 47 x 35 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Ingres: (pronounced 'Ang') 1780-1867. French painter, a student of David and leading exponent of the Neo-Classical style. He studied and worked in Rome about 1807-20, where he began the Odalisque series of sensuous female nudes, then went to Florence, and returned to France 1824. His portraits painted in the 1840's-50's are meticulously detailed and highly polished.

Ingre's style developed in opposition to Romanticism. Early works include portraits of Napoleon. Later he painted huge ceilings for the Louvre and for Autun Cathedral. (Brockhampton)

Pantomime

The Parting of Lot and Abraham, mosaic in the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome - 432-440.

Pantomime: A method of representation used in Early Christian and and medieval times which simplifies all meaning into body attitude and gesture. - For example: ' The wide eyes, turned in their sockets; the broad gestures of enlarged hands; the opposed movements of the groups all remind us of some silent, expressive chorus that documents only by gesture on the action of the drama. ' (Gardner)

Evening Star V, 1917. Watercolor, 9 x 12 in.

'...The evening star would be high in the sunset sky when it was still broad daylight. That evening star fascinated me. It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as w walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. ' - Georgia O'Keeffe.

Quote taken from the book: Georgia O'Keeffe, (1976) published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.

Exedra

Stoa of Attalos, Athens, 150 B.C. This photo depicts the style of a Hellenistic civic building.

(from Greek ex, 'out' plus hedra, 'seat') A seat with a high back, curved in a semicircle; also a semicircular roofed recess in a building with seats or a curved bench. (Leland M. Roth)

Unfortunately, I did not have an image of an exedra but, this public building from the same period as the exedra's origin may have had them built inside or outside. (the building was refurbished in the 1950's).