99W Series Artist's Statement

Series in Brief

The 99W series of watercolor paintings depict contemporary scenes of Western Oregon, utilizing the route of a historic highway as a unifying element. The series is currently in progress, and will comprise of no fewer than six paintings.

Series Subject & Goals

I began this series with two goals in mind. While each painting would have to have value enough to stand alone, each also had to share a common theme that made them coherent as a group as well. My second goal was to inject into the series the narrative of the contemporary world surrounding me.

The common theme I chose for the series is the environment immediately surrounding the 1950 alignment of the former U.S. 99W, also known as Pacific Highway West. This choice would allow me to create a cross-section of the landscape of Oregon's Willamette Valley. While most any highway would have sufficed, the 113 miles of 99W has an extremely personal connection to me: it is the main highway of my youth, connecting my hometown to urban Portland in the North and the vast verdant country of the valley to the South.

My hope for the series is to provide a distinct sense of place. It is to be neither intentionally critical nor intentionally complimentary. The choice of subjects for individual paintings is a purely personal one, and reflects my own moods, views, and biases. Yet I hope that someone viewing this series will come away with an understanding of the region that goes deeper than promotional hyperbole and political boosterism.

Technical Matters

The 99W series is painted in watercolor on cotton-based papers. The paints are applied over a pencil drawing which is mostly erased later. The images tend to be larger in size, with most being in the range on 17.5 x 22.0 inches. Although the medium is traditional, my employment of it reflects my personal taste.

Stylistically I prefer honest brushwork. I want the finished paintings to look like paintings, and in select situations show brush strokes for effect.

My palette varies from painting to painting, but it is almost invariably limited. I prefer to choose just one tone of green, brown, and blue as a base, and mix the majority of colors from them. I believe this contributes to a continuity within the final image. Although the number of colors is limited, my use of them is strong, including rich darks are also characteristic, and are never, ever, ever made from black paint.

Summary

This series provides for me a unique blending of journalistic philosophy with traditional artistic approaches. While I'm not a radical, "ideas-first" abstract artist, I believe that painting is simply another medium of communication, another way to tell a story. In this way, the 99W series is the application of photojournalistic sensibilities to the medium of painting.

But unlike photojournalism, there is no camera. The camera is me. So each painting in this series reflects not only the environment that I have experienced, but also my perceptions of it. Each is a deeply personal commentary, starting with the choice of lens: 99W, the Pacific Highway West, the hometown highway of my youth.

~Alexander B. Craghead
November, 2007

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