The University Club...

I have been honored to be chosen for the next 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at the University Club, here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. As such, I will be given full membership for the year and a studio space to work in. 

The UC was founded in 1898 by a few college graduates, and modeled upon the Yale Drinking and Dining Club, and over the past 100 years it has grown to become the social watering hole of Portland's cultural and business elite. It will be an interesting and fun year for me as part of my responsibilities will include organizing a series of informal lectures around the topic of "100 Years of Oregon Landscape Painting".

For that I will be inviting Oregon collectors, dealers, and living landscape painters – heck, even a few folks from the Portland Art Museum – to come speak to the club's membership, with the intent of increasing the awareness of my state's rich history of outdoor painting.

I will also be exhibiting a major retrospective of my work – over 40 paintings in all from as far back as the mid-'80s – in the building throughout the year, and inserting new work in as the months go by as well. In fact, I think I will use this opportunity to paint some large canvases again, something I haven't done in over five years.

It will be nice to load up a big brush and put my shoulder into a large canvas again. Been missing that.

And if you are old enough,
or an old movie buff,
you might get the subtext
of this photo, eh?

Of course this means I'll have to buy or rent a tuxedo. So many soirees, so little time . . . (Ha!)

Thomas