This is Engine #5.  I made an ink drawing and later added watercolor since it started to rain and everyone departed early.

We will have a special paintout at this year’s daVinci Days event in conjunction with the Art Guild.  At our booth we will have a model (Laura) dressed in period clothing as a subject, in addition to the entire daVinci Days venue.  Members who sign up for 3-4 hours of painting/drawing will be provided with a one day free ticket to daVinci Days.  However free tickets are limited and we need people for mornings and afternoons of both days, July 18 and 19.  Contact Mike Bergen at mike@creativedialog.com or 745-3941 to sign up for specific time periods. The booth will be located inside the daVinci Days compound at the Art Village, NOT in front of the Arts Center as last year.  Please help us make daVinci Days more about art, not just technology.

The following pdf file is the official 2009  Site Calendar as of Apr 2009:

2009sitecalendarvv1

The following is the Ned MuellerWorkshop  sign up sheet:

nedmueller2

May 13

Shelter at Avery Park, Corvallis

Facilitator, Honor Hoover

May 20

Schreiner’s Iris Gardens

Facilitator, Tom Allen

May 27

Michael’s Landing

Facilitator, Joyce Cannon

June 3

Old Town Albany

Facilitation and lesson,
Mark Allison

June 10

Larwood Covered Bridge

Facilitator, Doyle Leek

June 17

Independence

Facilitator, Richard Helmick

June 24

Cardwell Hill Vineyard

Facilitator, Tom Allen

July 1

Cauthorn House
Shirley Wirth

July 8

Finley Wildlife Park

Facilitator, Kris Mitchell

July 15

Alsea Falls

Facilitators,
Earl and Cherrill Boissonou

July 21-23 Workshop

Green Gables

Facilitator, Dee Yarnell

July 29

Deepwood, Salem

Facilitator, Mike Bergen

August 5 Morning

Rose Garden, Avery Park

Facilitation and lesson,
Joan Brown

August 5 Evening

Oregon State University

Facilitator, Karen Kramer

August 12

Borgo Pass Vineyard

Facilitator, Mike Bergen

Thurs., August 20

10:00 AM

Oregon Gardens
followed by retreat
at Silver Falls Aug. 20-22

Facilitator, Terry Tallis

August 26

Baskett Slough

Facilitator, Carolyn Canoy

September 2

Mary’s River Park, Philomath

Facilitation and lesson,
Debby Sommers

September 9

Holstein House & Gardens

Facilitator, Linda Humphrey

September 16

Harlan

Facilitator, Jim Jordan

September 23

OSU Sheep Barns

Facilitator, Terry Tallis

September 30

Takena Landing

Facilitator, Katy Hanson

October 7

Gregg Farm

Facilitation and lesson,
Mike Rangner

October 14

Central Park, Corvallis

Facilitator, Donna Beverly

Hello fellow artists,

It’s time again to plan our plein air painting year. This year promises to be even better than last year. We will be celebrating our 20th year. Starting with a handful of talented artists in 1989, we’ve grown to a membership of over 120 artists. Celebrating of this milestone, we are including some of the founding artists works in the Murdock gallery in LaSells at this year’s Juried Show in October.  Dorothy Mathews, the initial coordinator of Vistas and Vineyards, will be serving as Juror for our Show. Dorothy lives in the Puget Sound area and hopes to attend some of our weekly sessions.

Richard Helmick and his site committee have already met and are working on this year’s schedule. It promises to be filled with new sites, old favorites, and evening painting opportunities. Our extended day painting location is Silver Falls State Park on August 20th & 21st . Sign-up for housing reservations will be sent to all paid members.

Our workshop this year will be held at Greengable Farms in Philomath on July 21^st, 22^nd, and 23^rd.  Dee Yarnell, our Workshop Chair, has again scheduled a top-notch artist, Ned Mueller, from the Puget Sound area. He is a signature member of the Oil Painters of America, The Northwest Watercolor Society, The Plein Air Painters of America, Northwest Pastel Society (Distinguished Pastelist), Northwest Rendezvous Society, Laguna Plein Air Painters and Puget Sound Group of Northwest Painters. He exhibits his work in some of the finest shows and galleries in the country and has won numerous awards. He has been invited to participate in the Great American Artist Show in Cincinnati, Ohio and the American Plein Air Painters Show. You can find out more about him at  www.nedmueller.com . We plan to keep the registration for this three day workshop in the $100 range for this well noted and accomplished artist. Enrollment forms will be sent around mid-March for this workshop.

A schedule of all sites will be sent by the end of April to all who have paid their dues for the coming year . If you have already sent in your dues for this year, disregard the following information.

To become a member for the year 2009:

· Send your $18 dues to Treasurer Karen Kreamer by April 15 (see form below).  Please include the form and make your check payable to Vistas & Vineyards.  It really helps if you can get your dues in by April 15. Thanks for your help!

· Send names of prospective members to our Chair Jim Jordan (753-6138 or Email jordandvm@msn.com )

I will send information about our group to interested members.

Vistas & Vineyards Mission: to paint together on-site at outdoor locations; to express ourselves individually as artists; to be inspired by each other and by local surroundings; to safely explore and visit outdoor locations while painting; to share our work with mid-valley communities.

Please return the form below with your $18 check, payable to Vistas & Vineyards

Karen Kreamer

2961 NW Tyler

Corvallis, OR 97330

All the Best in 2009!

Jim Jordan,

The following is the 2007 Site Schedule (Archive)

2007-site-calendar

Attention Vistas and Vineyards Artists,

The annual meeting of Vistas and Vineyards artists will be held in Corvallis on Monday, November 17th at 1 pm at Fire Station #5 Conference Room on Fair Oaks Drive off Walnut Blvd (just south of Walnut Park).

Discussion topics will include:

· By-law changes

· Budget

· 20^th Anniversary of V&V

· 2009 Committee Chairs

· Sites

· Juried & Open Shows

· Lessons/Workshop

· Election of Officers

· Two day paint trip

· Website

· New ideas

Please plan on attending this meeting. We need your input to make next year even better.

Thank you,

Jim Jordan

Chair, Vistas & Vineyards

Our last planned outing for the year occurred last week at Fort Hoskins.  Apparently the fort has been temporarily  misplaced, or at least I didn’t see it.  However there was a nice grove of apple trees which was the subject of many of the painters who attended.  It also served as lunch for a few people.  This is the oil painting I started on site.

Painting and Photography: Musings from a Member
Richard Helmick
When I see a painting or drawing I think has been copied from a photograph, I get a
uneasy feeling. Why is that? I have no trouble with photography and cinematography as
art forms. I think cinematography may be the most powerful contemporary art form. So
why do I get this uneasy feeling when painters copy photographs or even use photographs
for reference?
Perhaps I’ve assigned inappropriate goals to painters who use photographs as the subject
of their paintings. What is the goal of painting in what can be loosely called “the realist
tradition”? I now think the referent (subject) of paintings heavily dependent on
photography is photography itself, not the scene, place, or location depicted in the
photograph. This is not a new idea. Back in the late 60s and early 70s an art movement
called Photorealism emerged with the goal of painting the illusion of photographic
lenticular qualities. This is a satisfactory goal for painters, but I fear that the goal of
many contemporary realistic painters is to express their emotional attachment or reaction
to place. I suggest that pure plein air painters who do not use a photographic referent do
that most effectively
All works of art are a mediation of direct experience. Pure plein air painters mediate
direct experience through their eyes, minds, and hands manipulating paint. One might
think of this as being one degree of separation from reality. If we insert a camera into the
scenario and paint from the resulting photographs, we have two degrees of separation
from reality; photography is the first separation and painting is the second separation.
The painter is responding directly to photographs with all the inherent attributes of
photography, rather than the scene itself. The subject of the painting is photography, just
as it was for the photorealists. However, the photorealists were quite intentional about
what they were doing, while contemporary realistic landscape painters may be unaware
of the real referent of their work. The subject of pure plein air painting is a particular
scene, location, or place. The insertion of photography into the painting process dilutes
expressions about place and substitutes expressions about photography. There is nothing
wrong with painting responses to photography, but I think it’s desirable not to confuse
the two, expressions about place and expressions about photography.
I recently saw the international exhibition of the Colored Pencil Society of America in
Seattle. The show exhibited the work of many latter-day photorealists. That alone was
not surprising, but coupled with the juror’s statement, it was puzzling. The juror
encouraged artists to work directly from nature, not from photographs of nature.
”… many entries appeared to be copies of photographs. While I
understand this tendency, I shall take a moment to rally support for the
plein-air, working-from-life school. There is some near-magical quality
that is transmitted into the art from the directly observed that is not
conveyed when copying a photograph. For the most talented artists, it
seems a form of clairvoyance.”
Jeffrey M. Moose, 2008
The juror’s statement was thoughtful and articulate, but many of the works he selected
for the show were not consistent with his views. His statement assumed the artists’
primary goal was, or should be, an expression of attitudes about things and places. But I
maintain the primary goal of these works is to express attitudes about photography and
secondarily, if at all, attitudes about things and places. Perhaps the artists themselves are
unclear about their goals. It seems there are two types of photorealists, deliberate and
unintentional. Deliberate photorealists approach their work self-consciously and
knowledgeably. They know what their relationship to photography is and deliberately
flaunt it. They seek out the telltale idiosyncrasies of lenticular optics. On the other hand,
unintentional photorealists earnestly pursue expressions about place, being unaware that
inserting photography between themselves and the object of their muse actually displaces
the object of their muse. Their paintings and drawings are not so much celebrations of
their children, old buildings, tractors, and pets as they are celebrations of snapshots of
their children, old buildings, tractors, and pets.

The 2008 Annual Juried Show is presently showing at the LeSalls Stewart Center, OSU Campus.

Press Release (pdf)

The Best of Show “Start of Fall” was painted by Mike Rangner:   The other paintings shown here received Honorable Mention:

Start of Fall (Mike Rangner)

Basket Slough (Doyle Leek)

Amazing Colors (Nancy Rogge)

Cardwell Hill (Dee Yarnell)

Fiechter House (Linda Humphrey)

Tractorsaurus Hex (Mike Bergen)

Tyee Vineyard (Betts Cole)