Jackson Hole Wyoming-Horizon Fine Art Gallery

There is tons of snow in Jackson Hole Wyoming. If you are headed there to ski don't forget to stop by Horizon Fine Art Gallery at 30 King Street, it's latest location.

Click here or above for a preview of all the great art featured at the gallery.
With over 70 artists, painters and dimensional, there is plenty to see.

End of the Line?

"Warehouse (w/ Lone Train Car)"
oil on panel, 2010
5" x 7" (12.7cm x 17.78cm)

A warehouse near the LA Harbor. A warm bright day. The old train car sits at the end of the tracks, huddling against the side of the cool toned warehouse, it's skylights like giant ice cubes.

The tracks in the lower right curve away in a different direction, seemingly avoiding the outdated rail relic. Has the train car been forgotten? Is this the end of the line for it?82

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Horizon Fine Art Gallery

Two of my watercolors in Jackson Hole Wyoming. Contact Barbara Nowak at Horizon Fine Art Gallery for purchase: horizonfineartgallery.com, email: HORIZONFINEART@WYOMING.COM

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Click titles to see original posts

Top        "Refinery, Power Poles, Saw Horse"

Bottom   "San Pedro Plant"

5 Paintings in Jackson Hole

Horizon Fine Art Gallery- I have 5 more paintings at the gallery in Jackson Hole Wyoming. One watercolor and 4 small oils.
Click titles below to see original posts, click 'here' to see all paintings at the gallery, or click 'Horizon Fine Art Gallery' in LABELS column at right.

"Lone Mojave Home"
"Power Pole #3 (Twin Transformers)"  &  "Power Pole #5 (2 Buttons)"
"Power Pole #2 (Deep Blue)"  &  "Power Pole #7 (Rain)"

Contact Barbara Nowak at Horizon Fine Art Gallery for purchase: horizonfineartgallery.com, email: HORIZONFINEART@WYOMING.COM

New Gallery

NEW GALLERY-I have two paintings at Horizon Fine Art Gallery in Jackson Hole Wyoming.

"Retired Power Plant" and "Storage Yard Nocturne" Click on titles to see original posts.

For purchase contact Barbara Nowak at horizonfineartgallery.com , email : HORIZONFINEART@WYOMING.COM

Jarring

"Storage Yard Nocturne"   SOLD

oil on panel, 2010

5"x 7" (12.7cm x 17.78cm)

Horizon Fine Art Gallery

Industrial nocturne, just after a rain. Combining four of my favorite image elements or subjects; the nocturne, the industrial, rain, and a simple composition.

Much like I said in my post 'Of the Night' / "Nocturne-Lucy(Cat)", the simple image can be tricky. It needs to have something to hold your attention, some quality that stirs up memories, emotions, some drama... anything to prevent it from being boring.

Here a crisp cool night, a dark blue clearing sky, the scene soaked in the yellow sodium street light, the slick wet textured street, the harder lines of the foreground offset by the lingering fog.

Dangerously close to being too simple, the power pole, dissecting the composition just off center was needed to provide a jarring effect. Without it or the lit up electrical box at the far right the image isn't as compelling to me. Hopefully this painting is provocative to others in some way, so that the industrial motif is secondary.44

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Utilitarian

"Refinery, Power Poles, Saw Horse"    SOLD

watercolor on paper, 2009

9" x 12" (22.86cm x 30.48cm)

This, in keeping with the last two posts, is to show some of my watercolors, another medium other than oil.

What drew me to this view was how it exemplified the utilitarian nature of the industrial subject. Nothing is there without serving or having served some purpose. Even in other images that may show the discarded, the forgotten, the untended, most everything in industry was created to execute a specific task or duty. No matter how mundane.

And while that may also be said about city, urban and nature subjects, these three more often are a blend of utility and aesthetics.

It is worth pointing out that there is plenty in industry that does have aesthetic concerns... automotive design, environmental design, architecture etc., but this painting is an example of function without aesthetics playing a direct role.

So aesthetics, if any, lies with how it is presented by the artist. A reflection of what the artist sees. Like so many still life artists that celebrate the common and the mundane, I felt this view was worthy of a look.

Not a glorious subject, not even a beautiful subject, but I am always struck by the similarities between refineries and cathedrals, their stacks and spires respectively, anchored in the heavy mass of their bases, piercing the skyline. Their ornate detail breaking up and sub-dividing their mass. That, for me, is compelling enough to show on it's own. That is what I see. Why not look at a subject out of context?

But as I said, I'm not looking to glorify the refinery here, so including the saw horse, power poles, and signs serve both as compositional devices to break up and fragment the picture plane and as reminders of their unsung status.40

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Lone

"Lone Mojave Home"    SOLD

watercolor on paper, 2009

9" x 12" (22.86cm x 30.48cm)

Here's a watercolor of a home out in the Mojave Desert. I always find dwellings like this rather strange because with the desert being so expansive, any lone building seems to be randomly dropped in place. There's no tree's to nestle in amongst, no rock formations, no stream, pond, lake... the house could just as easily be a few hundred yards in any direction and it would not matter.

And of course their one Christmas decoration, the string of lights tree, up year round (this from May) with it's lone star silhouetted against the desert sky further emphasizes it's singularity.39

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Corrugated 2-watercolor

"San Pedro Plant"                     SOLD

watercolor on paper, 2009

9" x 12" (22.86cm x 30.48cm)

Horizon Fine Art Gallery

"Cole's Battery (w/ Oil Barrels)"    SOLD

watercolor on paper, 2009

9" x 12" (22.86cm 30.48cm)

As I said in my previous post 'Corrugated' I had done these watercolors of both of those groupings of corrugated buildings from different views.

Here, "Cole's Battery (w/ Oil Barrels)" was the actual name of the business that was formerly there and moved to another location before the site was razed. "Champion" , the title of the oil painting was named for the Champion Spark Plug logo painted on the wall. This view is of another smaller building on that site, looking east toward the LA Harbor. At the time this was painted the business had already left and a sort of reclamation was taking place with the weeds and vegetation springing up thru fractures in the asphalt. It had also apparently been serving as a home base for someone as evidenced by the hole in the chain link fence, the shopping cart and water hose dragged to the back.

"San Pedro Plant" is the same view as in "Shed Stack", but pulled back. It very much reminded me of the view of the house on the hill from the movie Psycho, so with that, I decided to paint it from this worms eye view, tilting the perspective to enhance that impression then adding the string of crows.

This was one of those paintings that about half way through was going downhill really fast. And with watercolor, painted in this more traditional method, fixing bad areas is usually out of the question. At this point I figured it was a loss anyway so I let go, threw down some unifying washes and was quite surprised it pulled together. It's true sometimes being too careful makes for bad paintings. Some of my better images are born out complete failure.37,38

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Retired

"Retired Power Plant"    SOLD

oil on panel, 2010

10" x 8" (25.4cm x 20.32cm)

Here's another industrial painting of a subject that may not be inherently beautiful to many. A 1950's era power plant. One of the many reasons I love industrial subjects is the palette of colors usually found. The blues, greens, grays, earthy & rusty browns, ochres, creams and whites.

I (and my two photography buffs)walked around the block eyeing the plant, searching for an angle that had some kind of drama, exciting composition, anything that might jump out, when I caught this view. I loved the way the stacks of scaffolding planks, steel, and railroad ties walked their way back towards the power plant, repeated by the driveway and concrete berm. The hiccup in the curvilinear shadow from the guard rail playing off the straight lines was one of those happy accidents you almost can't dream up. And of course those tiny bright accents of yellow and red almost always found at sites like this.

Since it was actually a crystal clear day I made some changes to better suit my concept of a retired but still maintained plant. Using cooler tones in the plant itself and dropping it back into an approaching airy mist separated it from the still utilized neatly stacked planks, steel and ties. Warming the middle ground tone a bit helped to ease the stark rectangular stacks, and reshaping the tree mass to echo the forms protruding from the smoke stacks.

It's reasons like this that I'm more of a studio painter than a plein air painter. I need time to contemplate a subject, create an image that would take far too long on site. It just suits my personality better.23

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3 Different Qualities

"Power Pole #3(Twin Transformers)"

oil on panel, 2008

8" x 6" (20.32cm x 15.24cm)

"Power Pole #6(w/ 3 Contrails)"

oil on panel, 2008

8" x 10" (20.32cm x 25.4cm)

For Sale at Daily Paintworks, CLICK HERE

"Power Pole #5 (2 Buttons)"   SOLD

oil on panel, 2008

6" x 8" (15.24cm x 20.32cm)

Horizon Fine Art Gallery : horizonfineartgallery.com, email: HORIZONFINEART@WYOMING.COM

3 more from Power Pole series. A slightly wider color palette than my previous Power Pole post, 'Fingerprints'. One of the nice things about where I live is that with the hills I'm able to get views from various angles instead of always the worms eye view. After that I try to instill in the image some sort of quality about them that caught my attention, usually my first impressions.

#3 has the most vertical emphasis. It's wires leading to and from the pair of transformers are graceful and rather lyrical.

#6 has a prominent, almost portrait-like appearance, the late day shadow from an unseen tree behind the viewer moving up the pole and out of the top of the composition.

#5 with it's two odd bolt cover buttons, shows the organized chaos so often seen in power poles. The zoomed in view emphasizes this chaos, allowing the wires to dart in and out of the composition from all sides. The two buttons really amused me. Are they there to protect the serviceman with all the other obvious hazards present? I would love to know the answer.16,17,18

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Fingerprints

"Power Pole #8(with Contrail)"    SOLD

oil on panel, 2009

5" x 7" (12.7cm x 17.78cm)

"Power Pole #2(Deep Blue)"

oil on panel, 2007

6" x 8" (15.24cm x 20.32cm)

"Power Pole #7(Rain)"    SOLD

oil on panel, 2008

6" x 8" (15.24cm x 20.32cm)

Here is part of my Power Pole series. Although everywhere, they are very much like an industrial subject. Most people don't pay much attention to them, if at all. Their fascination for me begins with the fact that, like fingerprints, no two are alike. As a subject for painting there is a lot going on here. All the fundamental shapes of art and design crammed into one object; cylinders, square & rectangular forms, cones, round and spherical forms, triangle and angular forms, elliptical forms, long linear forms, the fluid lines of the wires... but not designed as we think of design... it's really all sort of functionally haphazard... an organized chaos.

#8  A worms eye view. I spotted this pole just as the sun was leaving it to shadow. I love the three transformers, each different... the lean, the taut wires pulling unevenly on the one crossbar. And yet as a painting it still needed something more, something to re-enforce the late time of day, give it some drama.

I love contrails, temporary manmade clouds... ephemeral. They carve up the sky unlike clouds then disappear. Here, it was exactly what was needed. Still catching full sun, cutting at an angle, soft edges against hard, both manmade.

#2  What I liked about this one was, although rather small and simple with it's single cross bar, it was still loaded up with a lot of wires, cables, metal connectors and that black gizmo hanging off the side.

#7  I caught this as the sun temporarily broke through the wind driven rain clouds. One of those days where the elements seem to be competing for attention like some kind of dramatic stage play.6,7,8

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