I find myself working in two directions in the art these days. One is a continuation of working landscapes and scenes into printed textiles and quilting them. The other, which has become an increasingly larger part of my art making in the last few years, is painting in oils.

The oil painted "hamlet-scapes" shown below are from a two month residency, December and January, 2007-08, where I painted all I could find of the tiny village of 255 of Basin, Montana. My object in painting these scenes was not to record the hamlet -- cameras do a far better job of that. It was to try to locate, in a visible (i.e. painted) manner, the intersection where the scene meets with my thoughts on it. So the scenes are representational but not accurate; they aren't Basin, Montana, nor even "Basin" Montana, but rather a quirky  "take" on a place I inhabited for a short period of time. They show something of the freshness of a stranger's eye, with the limitations of a stranger's eye.

The paintings below (a sampling of some 30 of that sort that I did during the time) are oil on board, 12" x 16". They are presented in roughly chronological order, the first having been painted December 3, after we had been in Basin for two days. It was painted looking out my studio window, in the old Hewitt Bank Building at the Montana Artists Refuge. The last was painted the night before the final Open Friday, at which everything I had done was exhibited. On Saturday, we returned the studio to its vast emptiness, ready for the next artist, and started the trek back to Portland.