Jacqueline Hurlbert and Erin Ruiz at the Basement

This statue, "Lighthearted" by Jacqueline Hurlbert, was a lot of fun to sketch, its limbs splayed out every which way and the great expression on its snout as it stares at its winged heart.


I'm sure I've said many times on this blog how much I love Erin Ruiz's work. In this sketch of her picture "Wolves in the Bed," I tried to capture the way she used red for outlines and highlights (and for the eyes of the wolves) to lend a sense of danger to the picture. I ran out of room before I could sketch the fourth wolf, which is tearing into a pillow.

Melissa Graves and Jerri Lisk

Apparently, I was into aspens last First Thursday. This is Elk Meadow by Melissa Graves at the Basement Gallery. These trees were actually very yellow, but you know, blue background ... pastels ... yellow and blue make green ... and I have limited patience with trying to fix these sketches sometimes.


This is Growth Chart by Jerri Lisk. I probably ought to have drawn one of hers for this blog before now, since they are quite nice, but I tend not to go to the Lisk Gallery very often because it's always the same stuff.

Joseph Cowman at the Basement Gallery

My apologies that this didn't reproduce very well on the scanner. I was really impressed by this untitled piece by Joseph Cowman I saw at the Basement Gallery on First Thursday, though. I really liked all the tension from all the wires and hooks pulling the figure every which way.

Bill Carman at the Basement Gallery

This is my rendering of Bill Carman's picture, "Oh crap, sorry," which was hanging at the Basement Gallery. He's been a longtime favorite at the Basement, so it's nice to see the new owners haven't changed that. I love this little narwhal-headed guy.

Ego and Kelly Packer

This exhibit actually just closed at the Basement Gallery. I came in Friday afternoon, the second-to-last day of the exhibit. But I wanted to post these anyhow. Above is A Comparative Reading of the Past by Kelly Packer. I liked the blocky shapes in the background and especially along the spine.


This is Forgotten Monarch by an artist called Ego. I like the kind of ancient, but not deadened look to him.

Ben Wilson, Erin Ruiz and John Warfel in the Basement

I sketched this rendering of "Pink Lemonade" by Ben Wilson, which is currently hanging in the Basement Gallery, on the Friday before last. I got about a third of the way into it before I really thought about what I'd gotten myself into. Holy crap, hands are hard to draw. I think it came out okay, though. I like the spot color.


This is "Floating" by Erin Ruiz. As usual, I started a little too far down the page and didn't give myself quite enough room. As you might guess from the title, her right sock foot is not touching the ground.


This is just a partial from John Warfel's "PB & J 4 Life" (I think the rest of it had the sandwich flying off a lunch counter that also contained a wormy apple). If I ever get a tattoo, I want it to be of a flying sandwich.

For those who don't know, the Basement Gallery is under new ownership. The new owners plan to continue showcase a lot of Idaho artists, but will also show work from around the Northwest and from their other gallery in East Sussex, England. I think it's a win for local artists, though, because the owners will also be showing Idaho artists in their gallery in England.

I've already been drawing pictures on and off from exhibits at BAM, whether they've been created locally or not -- the idea being to show what you can see in Boise -- so I don't think the ownership change will affect my sketching practices.

John Killmaster at the Basement Gallery

I'm not sure landscapes are really my thing, so I'm not sure my sketch does this justice. But they are definitely John Killmaster's thing. He's got a great use of color and texture for fleshing out masses of rock, stubbly underbrush and soft pink clouds. This is Aspen Gulch -- City of Rocks. It's one of several of Killmaster's landscapes on display at the Basement Gallery right now.

Also on display at the Basement Gallery are some pictures by Tarmo Watia. I sketched one of his pictures during BOSCO's Open Studios Weekend. The one I sketched then is not among those that were at the Basement Gallery, but like I said then, there are literally thousands of paintings in his house.

Dragging from a Cigarette

I honestly don't know if this is still in the Basement Gallery or not; I sketched it a couple of First Thursdays ago and I've just been slow about putting it up. But it's still a cool picture, so I wanted to get it up. It's called Dragging from a Cigarette, by David Colcord and Tomas Montano (together they go by rail v. y tomas). There's two things that you can't tell from my picture, though. One is that in the upper right corner, there is an old-fashioned brassy door handle affixed to the canvas. The other is that there's a poem written in the orange field in the right-hand side. (My handwriting is really crappy, so I didn't attempt that on the drawing.) It goes as follows:

DRAGGING FROM A CIGARETTE
and nodding her head
in self-reassurance
she tries to convince me
of the omnipresence
of angels
how they are always there
but can't be seen.
She doesn't look
like a smoker
and not quite
like the angels
I've imagined,
but I've inhaled her whiskey smoke
on hundred times
and have been
saved
by her image
in restless sleep
many more times
than I deserve.

Jany-Rae Seda at the Basement Gallery

I liked these pictures by Jany-Rae Seda so much I sketched three of them. There's a preciseness to the lines because of how sharp the pencils are, but that's contrasted with how quick, gestural and imprecise the actual forms are, and how softly and subtly they're colored. Seda told me she draws them all in 15 minutes or less, then does a water wash over the pictures, then adds color the wash.


Seda saw me sketching some of her pictures, including this first one. "I take it as a compliment that you love the pubic hair," she said.


I wanted to color my sketches while I was in the gallery, so I used my pastels for the colors and rubbed a dirty shading tool on the gray areas. It's as close as I could get without actually using her technique; I didn't have watercolors there, and even if I did it would have been impractical to whip them out in a gallery.

"I rip pictures out of magazines and imagine the people naked," Seda told me. "You should do that."

What I See

When I saw this, I thought it could be a few things:

The last thing you see before succombing to death by hypothermia.

A depiction of the force of will it takes to sprout chin-whiskers at the drop of a hat.

Smurfette and the Amazing Technicolor Turban.

Deanna Eveland, the artist, saw it as something else -- a force of nature. That's why she called her oil painting Force Majeure, the French term for force of nature.

The title has more to do with the creative process for the oil painting, which I attempted to replicate in pastels above (the actual painting is much more visually intriguing, trust me). She started something completely different than the final result, then painted over the top and wiped away top layers of the paint with a palette knife. She didn't sit down and plan it, she said; it just took on a life and a force of its own. "It's going to come out whether you like it our not," she said.

Deanna's show is running at the Basement Gallery, and it's her first gallery show. She also has some nicely done cartoon characters for a children's book she's working on.

Other artists at the Basement Gallery included:

- Fred Choate, who had an installation of landscape paintings in muted tones. I'm much more familiar with his murals -- I met him once and took some photos of him when he was painting the fairy character on the side of the Ceramica building in downtown Boise, and I know he painted the Hitchcock Building (where the Record Exchange and Neurolux are), although it was Oliver Russell that designed that one. Still, his landscapes are much different than his murals. I was surprised.

- Nancy Brossman, who had a display of woodcuts -- mostly landscapes, if I remember right. I picked up a postcard invitation to the opening reception with one of her woodcuts of buttes. She does a good job using the woodcut medium to capture the butte's stark, earthy sides, as well as the undulating brush in the foreground.

- Michael Margulies, a photographer whose work includes one of the last pictures ever taken of Bobby Kennedy. He was shot the morning after the photo was taken. I thought his photos of dumpster divers were more visually interesting.

- Matthew Jordan, whose colorful, fantastically shaped glass work was one of my boyfriend's favorite installations in the gallery.

- Bill Carman, whose work I've learned to recognize. He often has cartoons at the Basement Gallery or on the cover of the Boise Weekly, and his style is very distinctive - very whimsical. A lot of them were pugs this time -- he had a pug Frankenstein and a pug Tin Man. The hands-down favorite exhibit of both me and my boyfriend at the Basement Gallery last Thursday.

That's not even all of them. The fit a lot of art in that little gallery -- and it's all pretty good.