References for Final Preparation: The Seven Seas

George Bethea, Miami, FL: acrylics on canvas, 48 x 60.
See more Bethea at http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgebethea/

George Bethea. Camille's Blue, acrylics on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Bethea studied with Walter Darby Bannard; their lineage includes Jules Olitski, whose show at the Kemper last year was featured on this blog in April 2011.

Susan Homer, Brooklyn, NY: DETAIL of painting that is weirdly the same size as Bethea's!

Homer, the whole image. See more Homer at www.SusanHomer.com.
She exhibited with MetaphorContemporary; her paint is juicy, she works like a novelist.

Space for Worship

God-minotaurs under ecclesiastic light, or so I thought in 1973.

Thought Bubble, 2012, 65 x 54

Led Zeppelin II, designed by David Juniper

White-hot glistening shadowy flows, 2012, 65 x 54

Guy Pealleart, 1970s rock star illustrator (Diamond dogs insert?)

Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, FL, coming up.

The Freewheeling Landscapes of Olive Ayhens

Olive Ayhens Website

A world of variation: Olive Ayhens' landscapes

Detail: Bonnardian dabs of color

Cars, each uniquely treated

Coastal painting, somewhere in Europe--can't remember now; where she spent time painting

Detail of the coastal city

Traffic - a recurring theme in Olive's work (she has also painted at the old WTC residency and all over the world)

New painting - animals resting in a Moorish castle;

So much love in her unique logic of animals.

Multiple perspectives, as we've come to perceive the world;

And right next to it, a gorgeous cemetery painting from the 1990s

Uneasy co-existence of elements in a newer painting

Thermonuclear plants and

a pink hotel.

Olive in the studio

In 1996 I flipped over an Olive Ayhens painting at DC Moore for its painterly facture and humorous drawing portraying a traffic jam of cars falling between rocks as if water. The serendipitous combination of real elements and imaginary landscape delighted the eye and engaged thoughts on time, place and how they are experienced and remembered. Since that show Olive exhibited and was represented by Frederiecke Taylor until its recent close; she is making new paintings in her Brooklyn studio. It is always an inspiration to see her work as it is harnessed to the real world, but not limited by its rules. Here are some of the paintings in her studio at the moment.