Paul Riederer

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Art by PQR

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New / Recent Paintings by PQR, for sale below:
Misty Morning in May
painted from a photo taken while biking past a barn near 75th & Valmont in Boulder 
Oil on canvas, 18x24, original $550 original, giclee $200
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Contradictory Natures!~ or Perhaps Complementary!  
Reflections on the nature of relationships, Oil on Canvas, 24x36, orginal $450, giclee $200
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Enjoying the View, 
Nature is Awe Inspiring God-dess Sublime, Oil on canvas, 24x36, original $600, giclee $200

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Discovering her Powers, 
orange juice, beet juice and acrylics on paper, 8x10, touched up and sealed with acrylics
Original $250


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Pujatnai's Colors, 
Monoprint, oil on Paper, 8x10, touched with oil pastels, sealed with acrylics
8x10, touched up and sealed with acrylics
Original gifted

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Landscape (portion)
Acrylics on wood panel, 4x12, original $150
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Notes from Paul at "Art by PQR"  ~

When I'm painting
                    all else stops...
                            body-heart-mind relaxes
                                    I release, let go
                                            I feel present
                                                    deeply satisfied
                                                            most fully alive
                                                                    in the creative acts ...    

  
Storm Approaching the Canyon  by PQR 2007 acrylic, 4x4


I feel lucky - grateful - when I get carried away
in a creative moment


I can spend days, weeks trying to set up that creative space within
uncluttering my mind
cultivating emotional spiritual states
getting out of my own way
allowing ideas, shapes, forms, forces
 to germinate and grow
and then,
sometimes through discipline and routine
other times through whim, luck, accident
words flow
shapes appear
form themselves



Purple Mountain Sunset, by PQR, 12-09, Acrylic on Canvas 20x16


painting, music, planting, decorating, yes, all these creatives
but thinking too
deeply
skeptically
critically
action
disobedience
revolution
the ultimate creative act


            to be swept up in the passion of the moment
                    is one of our heavens on earth


My favorite subject is nature, so I do mostly landscape paintings. 
In my early work I used to edit out human made infrastructure. 

After a teacher chided me, however, I am becoming more interested in structure ...
cities, buildings, fences, streets, powerlines... and I see these elements emerging in my art. 

New Urban Sun, 2009, Acrylic on Canvas Paper, 8x6



Urban Abstract, 2009, mono print 5x7



And the human form ...

                                                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                                                            ~ Park Statue Falls in Love with City Life
by PQR 2009 acrylic on 4x4 fridge magnet

       I love getting carried away in the bliss of creative joy...
      


                                                                                          Sun Cloud Taunts Ocean Rock, 2009, Acrylic on Canvas Paper 7x5


       ... letting go of the worry of daily worldly events...


Boatman's Journey,  2005, Acrylic on Canvas Paper 12x8     
            In the creative act
                    I heal
                        and the world with me  



High Mountain Lake, 2004, Acrylic on Paper on Foam Board, 8x6


I often paint on canvas, but also enjoy playing with many other surfaces...
wood, refrigerator magnets, china plates, cardboard, foam board, just about anything lying around.




Furrowed Fields with Night Stars,
by PQR, 2006, acrylic on fridge magnet 4x4

I also experiment with pastels, oils, water color, mixed media and collage. 
The picture below was painted using oil pastels on artist's paper.

Ocean Sunset - How the Waves Catch the Light
by PQR, Dec 2009, Oil Pastels on Artist's Paper, study for oil painting




Allowing a Creative Space to Emerge

I need periodic "time-outs"
- sometimes even a full-fledged "media black-out"
- to give me space
- to help me establish a "creative space"
 - both within my self and in my work space  

Stop the stimulants! 
- Cease listening to the news, no TV, no movies, little or no radio...
- fewer conversations
- ignore email and blackberry for a few days

Even the the "busy-ness" of family and friends
- though well intentioned
- can be distracting.

I need to be quiet...
        listen to my own internal rhythms
                 play my favorite musics
                                classical, new age, folk, rock and roll, world, jazz, blues
                        with solitude & deep relaxation, I enter a meditative, creative state
                                and the art flows



Zen Mountain Sun, acrylic on china dinner plate, painted in 3 minutes, photographed, then washed away.


Series... I enjoy exploring many aspects of a subject or topic by doing a series of treatments of that subject.

For example, after my heart attack I was fascinated by heart images, using art as therapy, to literally open my obstructed arteries.  At another time I became entranced by medicine wheels, those circles of hundreds of stones placed in 20-40 foot circles at equinoxes and solstices.  Another recurring strong and significant emotional theme is my life has been war, as I spent two unwilling years in Viet Nam.  For each of these themes I explored a variety of presentations, drawing, painting, computer images.   I did sketches, paintings, small and large, even computer generated images, exploring various aspects of that subject, over weeks, months, sometimes over years.


Hands Holding Heart, by PQR, 2004
oil pastels on black cardboard 6x6, one in several in the "heart" series after heart attack in 2003

(several more of these heart images will e forthcoming, soon as I get them scanned)


"Rendering" or modifying art from Medium to Medium - Sometimes I begin a painting in one medium and end up in another for a very different result with the same subject.  Here are two examples, the Haapy Path ot Brilliant Mountains and the Yellow Marsh sequence, both below.

For the Happy Path to the Brilliant Mountains, I first painted s small version on a 4 inch by 4 inch refrigerator magnet, with this result:


Several years later a very dear wonderful sweet friend showed me how to use the Adobe Illustrator artist filter menus, and after seveal variations with the settings, I chose this one which limits averages and limits the colors, thus changing the image substantially, giving it the look of a woodcut, or block art, with this result:




A second example of moving the art to a different medium is below.

In the "Yellow Marsh"  sequence below, I began first with a watercolor study of a meadow behind our family reunion cabin at Snow Mountain Ranch YMCA camp.  In this simple water color sketch I was able to capture the basic form of, mountains, trees and meadow, along with the color patterns as I observed them that day.  Then later I scanned the watercolor into my computer and began rendering it as shown in the following two paintings.  As the painting progressed I used my "artist's license" to modify color, texture and patterns to suit my whim at the time I finished the computer image.


Yellow Marsh 1 - original watercolor sketch at Snow Mountain Ranch, Colorado
Later, back in my studio in Boulder, I scanned this image and began modifying it as shown below.

Yellow Marsh 3 - original water color image has been scanned into the computer and modified with computer painting programs.
I reworked the sky to add interest adding brighter patches of brighter white, blue and gray, and the used the "smudge" tool to shape the clouds and streak the sky.
Then I used the "spray can" tool to paint in trees and bushes, add blue mountain reflections in the marsh, add in blue water in the marsh and white streaks to capture the cloud reflections.  The spray of several colors in the foreground create the impression of rocks and pebbles in a sandy river bed.
I also interrupted the long continuous left-right flow of the green bushes in the horizontal middle in order to add interest and realism.

Yellow Marsh 5 - Adding browns, reds, purples and pinks changed the tone of the painting to a later afternoon just before sunset feeling.
I also softened the mountain reflections in the marsh, and added lighter tones on the darker bases I had laid earlier, adding yellow highlights to the bushes,
and added darker green and brown ground covers at the bottom to pull the foreground forward.

Perhaps my favorite part of this painting is the sky and clouds... they seem more realistic than other sections of the painting.
And I love placing bight clouds behind purple mountains.  This sequence was done in 2004, and I would do it differently today, and yet, it reminds me of who I was and how I worked, and so even though it is en electronic file which I could modify further, I plan to leave it just the way it is.






Nederland Sketch, pen on paper, 8-06, Nederland,Colorado




Yosemite by PQR 2006 acrylic canvas 8x12


Dancing Trail in High Meadow - PQR 07 acrylic on 4x4 fridge magnet


Sky Cloud Earth and Sea - PQR 07 acrylic on 4x4 fridge magnet

                                                                                                                                                                                           Boulder City Park by PQR 10-06 acrylic canvas paper 12x9

being pursued in a dream - © Paqueri 4-09 acrylic on canvas paper 8x6




Photo of Niwot's Valley Inspires Water Color

The watercolor painting below was painted from a photo I took facing west from the top of Gunbarrel Ridge near Niwot, Colorado, a sacred site about a mile from our home.  I renamed this area "Niwot's Ridge" to honor Chief Niwot.  You can see both the watercolor painting and the original photo below.  Here's a bit of history to help interpret these artifacts.

Chief Niwot and Boulder Valley --- A curse, a dream, and an ill-fated peace  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Niwot )

Chief Niwot is said to have first stated at this meeting his legendary Curse of the Boulder Valley.[2] According to the chief, the curse was its breathtaking landscape:

“ People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty. ”

"The Curse of Boulder Valley is reported[1] to be a sentiment expressed as certainty by Chief Niwot, leader of the Southern Arapaho, to Caucsian prospectors come to the Boulder Valley in search of gold. Encamped at what they considered to be a sacred site, Valmont Butte, some 4 miles to the north east of what is now central Boulder, Colorado, Niwot and his closest elder braves, Bear Head and Many Whips, rode out to the site where the new arrivals had decided to camp, near the place where Boulder Creek releases from the Front Range onto the Great Plains, that place where the City of Boulder, Colorado now shines forth. Momentous and ephemeral as the actual event was, it cannot be disputed that the sentiment behind Chief Niwot's ominous proclamation of the Curse was a portentous aspect of the settling of not only the Boulder Valley, but of the entire West itself.

Up through the mid-1800s Southern Arapaho hunting parties for ages had ventured as far north as Boulder Creek. In fact, the tribe considered Valmont Butte, east of present day Boulder, a sacred site where they held rituals and ceremonies. It was one of these hunting parties, led by Chief Niwot, that encountered the first Caucasian gold seekers to enter Boulder Valley in the fall of 1858.[1]

Led by Captain Thomas Aikins, the gold seekers had come from Fort St. Vrain, 30 miles east. Chief Niwot and his deputies, including Bear Head and Many Whips, encamped near Valmont Butte, immediately rode to meet them, greeted them peacefully, and promptly told him and his party to go away.




When Niwot threatened the gold seekers, they refused to leave and flattered Chief Niwot, plying him with exotic fare like canned beans and salt pork, and getting him drunk. Meantime, Bear Head and Many Whips returned to the Arapaho camp to raise a war party, but when they returned Niwot had made an uneasy peace with the gold seekers.

After three tense days, with the threat of a battle hanging palpably in the air, Niwot rode into Aikins’ camp once more. One of the Arapaho shamans, he told the Captain, had received a dream from the Great Spirit the night before. In the dream, the holy man saw a great flood covering the earth and swallowing the Arapahos, while the whites survived. Niwot interpreted this to mean that gold seekers would flood his homeland, and he could do nothing to stop it. Peace with the whites, Niwot realized, was the only way his people would avoid being swept away by the flood.

Thereafter, Niwot and his neighboring chief, Little Raven, who had recently welcomed white settlers to the Denver gold camp, maintained their stance of peaceful coexistence with the whites. The Arapaho chiefs were so welcoming that the newcomers named the first county in the territory after the tribe, as well as streets in both Denver and Boulder.

The initial peace did not hold. As whites continued to encroach on Arapaho land, a rash of settlements broke out along the Front Range. An 1862 Sioux uprising in the northern plains states made frontier settlements like Boulder jittery and suspicious of the Arapahos they initially thought were friends.

By 1864, a fateful year along the Front Range, tension between whites and Arapaho warriors was at a boiling point. Raids by tribes other than Niwot's people on wagon trains and outlying settlements intensified, culminating on June 11 with the brutal murder of the Hungate family on their ranch 25 miles southeast of Denver.[3]
















 Check back on this site from time to time, as I will be adding more art and commentary during 2010.
Thanks for visiting!  ~ Paul Riederer