Gallery Calapooia Newsletter

Seventy Second Edition of the Gallery Calapooia Newsletter

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Gallery Calapooia Newsletter
October 2019

Featured Artists for October
Susan Bourdet and Pat Spark

Susan Bourdet

New Fall Collection by Susan Bourdet

Susan, a well-known watercolorist, combines realistically detailed birds and animals with soft-edged, impressionistic backgrounds, a technique she has developed over 30 years of painting. Her highly collectible Lang calendars and limited edition prints are distributed worldwide, and her two Northlight instructional books have found their way into many studios.
For this new show at Gallery Calapooia, Susan has focused on the moods and colors of autumn, featuring animals and raptors as well as songbirds. All of the paintings are new work. Each painting captures a subject that Susan experienced in the field - a young raccoon peering down from the branches of a tall oak, a fox kit in a meadow of wildflowers, a heron stalking along a riverbank. Her love of nature shines through in the the way she combines accurately rendered botanical elements and settings with each subject, so that every painting has a story to tell.

Susan feels that watercolor, with its inherent fluidity, seems to take on a life of its own. Her backgrounds are painted on very wet paper and the colors, laid gently on the wet paper with a large brush, flow together in a way that is never predictable. The soft edges and complex color blends that happen as a result of this fluid movement are still exciting to Bourdet, even after years of painting. “ It is the background of the painting that sets the mood for me, whether dark and dramatic or soft and misty. Once I’ve chosen the colors and considered their placement, the rest is up to chance - the surface of the paper reacts with the water and colors in ways I can never totally control. There’s a sense of adventure with every painting, probably generated by the fact that it could all go terribly wrong at any moment.”

In this new collection of paintings, Bourdet has delighted in capturing the softness of fur and feathers, the textures of bark and rock and the details of leaves and grasses. She considers light to be the magic that transforms an ordinary scene into something magical, evoking the viewer’s imagination. For her, light - shining through fur or glancing off feathers and leaves - takes the painting to another level by giving a feeling of immediacy. Beyond being a simple portrait of a bird or an animal, Bourdet wants her paintings to feel like a moment in time - a moment when her subject is observed, wild and unaware, and the viewer is part of that moment.

These new paintings will be on display at Gallery Calapooia October 1 through 26, with a First Friday reception on October 4. Susan will be there to sign the new 2020 calendars. Live music by Rose and Thistle will enliven the evening and, as usual, refreshments, beer and wine will be served.

Pat Spark

Pat’s New Work, 2019

For those of you who know me, you understand that I love to learn. I often take workshops in my field – sometimes to learn new things, sometimes to meet the teacher, sometimes to support a teacher that I know. For the last few years, I have typically taken these workshops in the summer and these workshops give me fuel for new ideas that I can bring to the Gallery.

This summer, I concentrated on a workshop from a wonderful textile designer, Jane Dunnewold. In her workshop we used plants to print onto paper, instead of the cloth I use as my usual medium. We then built up visual images on these prints, making them more complex with overprinting, painting and drawing techniques. They were wonderful. I envisioned making a whole exhibit of these new techniques and having a series of new wall pieces to show during my time as one of the Featured Artists at Gallery Calapooia in October. I bought the equipment I needed and set it up on my front porch, where I typically do my dyeing in the summer so I don’t bring the heat into the house. I purchased the new materials I would need and set to work. I experimented and tried many, many prints. After a month of work, I never felt like I got anything that was really successful. Because now the time was short before my exhibit, I had to abandon this idea until a future time when I could work out the problems. I am not ready to abandon it all together and will return when I don’t feel the pressure of an exhibit looming over me.

However, I did get excited about printing onto cloth. As a young student in the 60’s, I took a lot of textile dyeing classes including silk screen printing yardage. I then taught this when I was a new teacher at Oregon State University. (Until I convinced the Art Dept. Administration that working in a basement with no ventilation was not a good idea when the screens had to be cleaned with lacquer thinner! Since we had no place to move the screen printing it was abandoned and the basement area became the weaving studio.) Plus I had already experimented last summer with printing images with natural dyes in combination with my usual type of botanical printing.

So the printing we were doing in Jane’s class spurred me on to do some more. Some of the scarves I printed were successful and some were not but I decided to print onto partially made felt and combine it with the felting techniques I have been working with for the last year. This experiment was successful!! And while exploring these printing techniques, I found information on something called ice dyeing. This is usually done with a particular dye and I don’t use that dye. I decided to adapt the technique to the type of commercial dyes I do use and it worked! Yay! I am now on a roll and hope to have some wonderful new felt and silk accessories for you to see in October!

-- Pat Spark

Collage Scarf with Hand Printing and Painting

Detail of the Scarf Above

Ice Blue Scarf

Bill Origer

The Photography of Bill Origer

Gallery Calapooia is proud to present the brilliant photography of our newest member, Bill Origer. Bill, a long-time Albany resident, will join us to show his preceptive images of the landscape, wildlife and plant life of the natural world. He travels throughout Oregon and the western USA, but his work also reflects his world travels to breathtaking destinations like Myanmar, Morocco, Iceland, Japan and Namibia. Bill’s work is offered in a variety of formats, including acrylic, museum quality prints, framed and matted prints and photo cards. We hope you’ll come and celebrate the debut of Bill’s work at the First Friday reception on October 4, 6pm - 8pm.

First Friday Artist Reception
October 4, 6:00 - 8:00 pm.

Come join our featured artists, Pat Spark and Susan Bourdet, along with other Gallery Calapooia artists. Our newest artist, Bill Origer will be displaying his photography.

Along with a variety of refreshments, live music will be provided by Rose and Thistle.

Other businesses participating in Downtown First Friday include Albany Regional Museum, Urban Ag Supply, No Dinx, Cronies Antiques, Eclectic Zebra, Sniffany’s Pet Boutique, and the Crow’s Foot Gallery. Don’t miss the fun in Historic Downtown Albany!

The work of Susan Bourdet and Pat Spark will be featured October 1st - 26th.

Local happenings and upcoming events

Prints and paintings by Cheryl French will be on display at Sybaris Bistro beginning during October.

"Fields by the Edge of the Sea" by Cheryl French

sybarisbistro.com
Sybaris Bistro,
442 1st Ave.
W, Albany

Watercolor Workshop in Brownsville
By Lorie Mooso

The Brownsville Art Association is pleased to announce the “Paint It Like You Mean It: Conveying Your Personal Vision” workshop with Beth Verheyden. It will be held on October 24th, 25th and 26th at the Brownsville Art Center.
Verheyden’s paintings have won numerous awards at the state, national and international levels, including Best of Show at Northwest Watercolor Society’s Waterworks Exhibit in 2013. Her work hangs in personal and corporate collections around the United States, such as the Maryhill Museum in Washington. She is a Signature Member of Northwest Watercolor Society, a member of the National Watercolor Society and Western Federation of Watercolor Societies, and is Vice President of Watercolor Society of Oregon. Her painting “Chasing Vista” is featured in North Light Publishing’s “Splash 17, The Best of Watercolor.” Verheyden has been teaching watercolor techniques in her Boring, Oregon studio for the past 25 years, and also teaches workshops around the state of Oregon regularly. If asked what she enjoys the most, she’ll always say, “Successfully capturing the emotion of my subject. Not what it looks like; what it feels like.”
In this watercolor master class, Verheyden will share with you her extensive study on which types of design elements express different emotions. She’ll inspire and challenge you to believe in your own vision and will teach you how to visually communicate that vision. In the “Paint It Like You Mean It” workshop, you will learn to evaluate your own emotional response to the subject matter by composing an emotion with certain shapes, line and direction to convey what you feel. You will discover the influence that color, values and edges have over our emotional responses. You’ll come away with the knowledge and passion to paint with intention and purpose.
The BAA is excited to host a Beth Verheyden watercolor workshop. Due to her popularity, the workshop is filled. If interested, please leave your name and contact information at the Brownsville Art Center in case of a cancellation - info@brownsvilleart.org.

Gift Registry and Gift Certificates

Let Gallery Calapooia help you with special gifts by using our Gift Registry. Come in, note items in our gift registry that you would like to receive as gifts, and let your loved one know so that he or she can get you the perfect gift at Gallery Calapooia. We also have Gift Certificates available.

Gallery Calapooia is a 501(c)(3) organization.
Donations to the gallery are tax-deductible.

Artists Invited to Apply for Membership

Artist Application form for membership in Gallery Calapooia
Membership and application information

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Gallery Calapooia Inc. receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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