Today’s blog is written by volunteer Margaret Jennings. We thank her for all of her hard work on creating a blog on such a fascinating topic.
Throughout history, the color red has played a significant role in art, from some of the earliest cave art to Mark Rothko’s dramatic paintings that feature bold color fields of red. On the color wheel, red sits opposite to green, making it ideal for portraying nature.
Red is associated with being the color of lust, courage, vigor, malice, evil, danger, fire and blood. It excites the emotions and signifies many things, including power and passion. Art that is bathed in red has a significant impact on a room. Art with just a touch of the color demands the viewer’s attention to the red elements and provides a strong contrast with the rest of the piece.
Red is a featured or supporting color of many works at the Rental Sales Gallery. Here are a few on view at the moment. To see more of them, either come into the gallery for a visit and look about, or visit our website and search our Catalogue.
Mitchell Freifeld
Mitchell cannot remember a time when he did not draw and paint. He won his first juried show at age 10 and decided that someday, he’d be a ‘real painter.’ He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early ’70s and got involved in the burgeoning tech industry. From there, he moved to Portland upon accepting an information technology position.
On the drive home after being laid off the day of the September 11 terrorist attacks, he realized life is short and decided to devote himself full-time to painting. His work focuses on architecture and cityscapes, and portrays everyday places that become lost to our curiosity through sheer familiarity.
Don Bishop
Don enjoys painting the magical scenery and light that makes this such a beautiful area. Spring and summer months often find him painting outside in the plein air style, while the winter months bring mostly studio work. For Don, painting is a continual growth process which usually involves creating several paintings at a time. The majority of his work is in oil, but he also paints in acrylic.
Kathy Haydon
Kathy trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She says that figurative and formal traditions inform her work, but the juxtaposition of organic and hard-edged architectural forms is a recurring theme. “No matter how loose or abstract a painting may appear, it comes from the dialog that happens between what I see and how I respond to it moment by moment.”
Kathy often paints in series. She once challenged herself to create 100 small paintings of pears with the intention of seeing how the exercise would strengthen her painting skills and change her work as the project progressed.
Christopher Bibby
Christopher is an internationally celebrated landscape and cityscape painter, illustrator and fine artist. According to Bibby, “My career as an artist began in Glasgow, Scotland in 1997. I gave myself one year to learn how to paint watercolors. My plan was to paint mini watercolor paintings, put them in frames and sell them on the streets to tourists and locals for $5 each. It was during those cold, wet and bleak days in the alleys of Glasgow that I found a passion for the beauty of the world and a commitment for creating honest, heartfelt and positive art. By the end of the first year I was supporting myself as an artist by selling over 100 paintings a week on the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Today my passion is stronger than ever!”
Molly Cliff Hilts
Molly is an artist whose work is part of an emerging form that fuses painting, photography, and printing using wax, lithographic ink, oil, and charcoal.
Over the years, Molly has spent countless hours immersed in the landscape of the West Coast, and her experience is embodied in her fleeting views of both nature and humanity. Along with her solitary and expressive landscape paintings, Molly studies images of everyday life, and the play between nature and humankind. These contemplations are revealed through the lens of an ethereal and often mercurial light.
Joan Metcalf
Joan is inspired by the lush landscapes and flora of her native Oregon. She paints shimmering images using oils and composition metal leaf. This results in striking works, that glitter and sparkle. “The reflective, shimmering quality of the leaf causes the appearance of the painting to change as I move past it and even seems to affect the value of the oil-painted areas.”
Carolyn Cole
Carolyn finds her voice within the rich traditions of abstraction and creates a cohesive body of work that translates into a language of intense color, sumptuous textures, and organic compositions. Color plays an important role in describing the emotional value and mood of each work. Her forms are instinctually achieved through the process of applying multiple layers of pigment, and her textured surfaces result from this process.
She spent ten years as an artist in New York City, where she exhibited extensively before settling back into the Northwest in 1991.
