Maureen O'Hara Ure

Vision

2013

San Rafael Reef #2, acrylic on panel, 11 x 37 1/2 inches, $2,200 “It is my feeling that the desert country of the American West is too large, too wild, too gorgeous to be encompassed by traditional landscape painting. Our inherited aesthetic defines beauty in landscape as green and arable land or grand, breathtaking places. I feel the need to expand that definition. I want to portray the desert as it is right now; to dispense with the limitations of what has come before, to quietly point out the beauty of places that are harsh and forbidding to habitation but express an aesthetic of the wild. I strive to go beyond the sentimentality that often defines our images of the West. The scale of many of my pieces (an extreme horizontal) is a compositional strategy to capture the vastness of these places.” – M. Knudsen Mark Knudsen...

"Blue and Green Abstract" by Claudia Sisemore, acylic on canvas, 43.5 x 46 inches, $4,800. "I have a vague idea of what I am going to paint. I...

The gestural paintings of Hyunmee Lee are sumptuously minimal. Rich forms advance from buttery canvases like an abstract garden. Gauzy veils of paint hover like soft air against the ebony weight of matter. Light peeks through translucent shapes like sunlight illuminating soft mist. Texture swirls and echoes across the canvas as if carved by waves or eroded by the wind. The viewer, invited into a realm of contemplation and meditation, is surprised to look away and see the physical world existing in only three dimensions. But perhaps that is precisely the experience the artist would like the viewer to have. In her current exhibition, Touch, on display at the Phillips Gallery...

"Untitled, 1974" by Claudia Sisemore, acylic on canvas, 58 x 56 inches, $7,200. Unframed. "I have a vague idea of what I am going to paint. I read that many artists are inspired by an idea before they begin their work and plan their approach and process based on that idea or muse. Others become inspired after they have begun working and watching colors, shapes and designs form. I basically belong the second group. Usually, after painting begins in a loose, free manner, I become excited by certain colors and patterns and continue from there." -Claudia Sisemore -- Caudia Sisemore says she was teaching English when artist David Chaplin (an equally popular and influential teacher) was at Weber and initially got her into landscape painting. “Then he took me to a show at the Art Barn and Lee [Deffebach] was showing there [with Don Olsen...