Tag: oil on linen

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Daily Art Moment: Shirley Gittelsohn

Shirley Gittelsohn (American, 1925–2015), Family Portrait, 1977, oil on linen, 72 in x 144 in, Gift of the Families of Shirley Gittelsohn and Ernest Bonyhadi. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, 2017.49.1

Shirley Gittelsohn’s Family Portrait is featured in the current exhibition, Portraiture from the Collection of Northwest Art. The painting depicts her adult children, the family pets, her relaxed husband, herself, and their Cannon Beach gathering place. I’ve been drawn to different details of this piece over time, most recently focusing on Gittelsohn’s self-portrait. She is…  Read more

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Daily Art Moment: Adam Sorensen

Tabernacle, Adam Sorensen, 78 x 119 inches, oil on linen. A horizontal rectangular painting depicting a surreal landscape scene of mountains, waterfalls and streams. The upper half of the painting shows steep mountains and cascading waterfalls in the distance. Each mountain is composed of smaller mounds heaped upon one another to form the larger mountain. Each portion is greatly shaded and highlighted in dark charcoals, rusty reds, oranges and golden yellows. The water appears to be bright white with very pale blue. The mountains and waterfalls fill the left top of the work and slope down at the right side revealing a small bit of sky with rusty red clouds and a pale blue and bright white sky. The mountains continue off to the right creating a distant valley with a stream emanating from it. The lower half of the work shows more waterfalls and streams in the foreground with smaller mounds in the same colors as the larger mountains with the addition of greens and pink stripes. At center left a fallen log in charcoal can be seen laying across a stream.

I was deep in my love for Frederic Church when I painted Tabernacle, and the sky is a direct homage to Twilight in the Wilderness (@clevelandmuseumofart). It was the idea of the heroic painter romanticizing the American West that intrigued me, both sincerely and with a sense of humor. All the embellishing and drama really…  Read more