The oil painting “Rising Above the High Desert” is a grand testimony to the contrasts in the Central Oregon landscape; a wide painting that stretches a panoramic view, the horizon is a field toasted golden, yet spiked with green trees here and there. The heat almost glows from the painting. But then there is the […]
Art Watch
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Art Watch 7/15-7/22
Going By Bike
The bulk of the presentation for the jury-selected paintings in A6’s “Going By Bike” are three paintings hung in A6’s front corridor. The first is from Jane Quale; a calm and demurely beautiful painting, a tomato-red background with the black silhouette of the back half of a bike covering the painting’s lower quarter. Adjacent to […]
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Art Watch 7/8-7/15
Summer Festival Fine Art Promenade
One of the best smorgasbords of art in Central Oregon is hosted this weekend at Bank of the Cascades’ Summer Festival, with 150 booths and artists. There are wood carvings, water colors, and fine outdoor wildlife photography, like Dan Ester’s collection of crisp photos of osprey with fish in their talons set against the blue […]
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Feasting on Fiber
Sisters’ Outdoor Quilt Show celebrates 40 years
It started inconspicuously in 1975: Jean Wells Keenan simply hung a dozen quilts made by her students outside her shop on one Saturday in July. Over the years, though, a few more quilters showed up, and then a few more, and so on, until nearly every square inch of the small town of Sisters was […]
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Art Watch 7/1-7/8
The terminal at Redmond Municipal Airport/Roberts Field is not the most likely place to expect an art gallery, but throughout the summer, the walls along the north entry corridor are lined with beautiful plein-air paintings of Smith Rock. The 25 different pieces of art were individually created during one five-hour period of time during the […]
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The Bradley Alston Files
With themes of natural and supernatural, playful animation
For our cover artist of the month, Bradley Alston, art is a chance to manifest an imaginative, animated world that straddles both natural elements and high-grade science fiction. For everyone else, his work is a glimpse into the mind of a talented comic artist who is equally fascinated with the paranormal as he is with […]
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Art Watch 6/25-7/2
Georgia O’Keeffe came from lush and wide-open landscapes of Wisconsin, but famously translated desert landscapes into vibrant and intensely personal visions. And, it is that interplay between scarcity and abundance that seems to lay at the heart of much of the blossoming genre of “desert writing.” This Thursday, the High Desert Museum will host the […]
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Art Watch 6/18-6/24
Nacho Ordinary Art Event
How do we communicate when words fail us? If you’re Icelandic band Sigur Rós, you create your own language, called Vonlenska or “Hopelandic.” If you’re OSU-Cascades Masters in Fine Arts students you get a little meta with, and create collaborative, site-specific art inspired by Sigur Rós’ “Ágætis byrjun,” a dreamy, expansive soundscape with a deep […]
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Art Watch 6/10-6/17
Call for artists to paint storm drains
When stormwater washes down the drain, it can be easy to forget about what happens next—out of sight, out of mind. But it often makes its way into the Deschutes River, that same body of water that is home to fish, frogs, and—at least in the summer months—floating humans. A new partnership is hoping to […]
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Art Watch 6/3-6/10
Co-working spaces are hot in Bend right now and, with a growing population of makers, telecommuters, and other out-of-the-cube workers, it’s no surprise. Joining the recently opened Dastardly Arts are two new ventures: DIYcave and The Wilds. DIYcave opened May 30 in the former Pakit Liquidators space (444 SE Ninth St.). The new work shared […]