About

June Oechler Underwood, Portland, Ore., taught English language and literature in Kansas, Wyoming, New York, and Virginia during the waning decades of the 20^th century. During her tenure in Kansas, she also worked in educational TV at Emporia State University. Her TV productions included a National Cable Television Award for her docu-drama, “Blessed, Blessed Mama,” an historical piece set in rural Kansas. She served for at time as associate dean of E-State’s college of liberal arts and sciences.

After moving to Portland in 1989, she discovered art. She is a painter, doing whole cloth textile art and oil painting.

June paints, dyes, and colors most of her textiles. She digitizes photos on her fabric, and, at other times, she draws and paints freehand on blank white cotton or silk. Her textile work is machine quilted.

June also paints in oils, working mostly in "...scapes:" landscapes, hamlet-scapes, city-scapes. Her paintings are done on-site because she needs to know how human visual perception differs from commonly held Western ideas of what is "real." It also stems from a desire to encompass the scene as she comes to understand it over time. Besides working on the streets of Portland and the rural towns on the Pacific Coast and in eastern Oregon, she has been artist in residence at such places as the Montana Artists Refuge (in Basin Montana)), the Mojave Desert at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in the Valley of the Amargosa, and at the Petrified Forest National Park near Holbrook Arizona. She has become increasingly fascinated with working in multiples of scenes, ranging from series and panoramas to "sets" of painted panels, placed in specific installations.

June Underwood's essay on finding a personal voice, along with photos of processes used in producing one of her large art quilts, Miocene, is part of the Studio Art Quilt Journal, Vol 19, Fall, 2009. "June Underwood's Motto: Fools Rush" in The Professional Quilter, (Fall, 2007), by Eileen Doughty, features Underwood as an artist using somewhat traditional quilting techniques. Another interview was conducted about her oil painting at her residency in Basin, Montana; it is found in "The [Helena Montana] Independent Record" (January 04, 2008), entitled "Celebration of Place." An interview of her in her studio, done in November 2010, is at the Portland Plein Air and Studio Painters Blog.

Underwood has kept notes about three of her artist residencies in her Residency Journals. She has been a contributor to Art and Perception as well as an essayist on the Henri Art Magazine.

June is a member of Studio Art Quilt Association, the Surface Design Association, and the American Society of Crows and Ravens. She has exhibited locally at ONDA and the Guardino Gallery. She has also been part of many group exhibits, showing, for example, at the Sedgwick Cultural Center in Philadelphia, Pa., Quilt National at the Dairy Barn in Athens, Ohio, and the Chandler Center for the Arts in Chandler, Ariz.

Her husband of 40-plus years, Jerry, a writer of satire; daughter, Jan, winner of the 28^th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest; and one grandchild also live in Portland.

To read my resume click here.