Art Hound

With less than a week left til xmas I present you with the fourth and last installment of the Art Hound Gift Guide. This installment rounds up works from online gallery The Beholder – a great place to look for original pieces on paper and photography under $1,000. I chose pieces that were soft, beautiful and understated imagining them for that dear friend or sibling who’s read every Classic and whose favorite movie is Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.

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Betsy Walton just released these very cool, new prints in her etsy shop. Unfortunately, Walton is closing her shop on December 18th for a few months so her work is only available through the end of the week. You can see more of Walton’s beautiful watercolors on Flickr.

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And here are two paintings from her new series “biologica mythica.” While definitely a departure from her earlier work, these paintings are still distinctly Walton. I wonder whether her collaboration with APAK, Yellena James and Jill Bliss has influenced this new work.

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Photo: Betsy Walton

This is crazy cool! Five of Portland’s biggest indie art stars collaborated on over 50 paintings for Elemental at Together Gallery. Yup. Betsy Walton, Jill Bliss, Aaron and Ayumi Piland of APAK and Yellena James. I’m having a blast piecing together the different influences of the five artists in each painting. Here are some of my favs that highlight the different collaborations…

Here I see Betsy Walton + APAK…

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…and Jill Bliss + Yellena James + APAK.

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Here I see Yellena James + Betsy Walton…

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… and APAK + Yellena James…

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… and Jill Bliss + Yellena James.

Keren Kroul showed in last summer’s A New Breed of Watercolors at Soo Visual Art Center with Betsy Walton, Serena Cole and others. Kroul’s work is vibrant and visually-ripe but fairly open to interpretation – a nice combination.

Kroul’s dream-like narratives are reminiscent of Betsy Walton’s work although while Walton’s narratives are grounded in the natural world, Kroul’s float in the transient space of the mental landscape. As the artist explains in her personal statement, “Memories and dreams flow forward and backward, turn over and over, are deconstructed, abstracted, reconstructed.”

Nevertheless, certain material landmarks (houses, flowers, clouds) appear in Kroul’s work, rooting these scenes in a loose context of identity, memory and mortality.

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Betsy Walton is a Portland, OR based artist whose works are dream-like and full of unusual, visual intricacies.  Her use of bright colors and mix of geometric and organic shapes form the foundation of her unique painting style.

As Betsy states on her website: “Many of my paintings and drawings explore the tension and balance between the mysterious nature of our existence and the objects and environments we find in everyday life. We can experience the sublime in the same room where we fold the laundry, and perhaps at the same time… My style is informed by a range of influences including Byzantine icon paintings, American folk art, geometric abstraction, and the work of many contemporary illustrators and painters.”

[Show as slideshow]

Betsy’s painting, Turquoise Plants (below left) is reminiscent, in my mind, of Matisse (see Algue Blanche, below right) and the Fauve painters.  Her use of bold colors, plant shapes, and striking geometric patterns translates the Fauve vocabulary of the early part of the last century into a thoroughly modern vernacular.

I’m particularly fond of her painting, We Can Hide in Here, which was a gift from my husband.

I decided to hang the painting above our dining table which is also the first thing you see when walking into the apartment. I like that it is colorful and playful and makes a lively focal point in that corner of the room.  It also helps define the “dining space” from the “living space” which are essentially the same room.