Matthew Picton, Olga Seem, Deanne Belinoff

By Vickie Aldous
Ashland Daily Tidings

The cracked bed of a drying lake seems an unlikely place to make art.

But that's where Ashland resident Matthew Picton begins his process of making sculptures that bring form to the empty space inside cracks.

"The autumn is the time to start doing a project," Picton said. "I begin by pouring plaster in the lakebed, then going back in a few weeks and getting extremely muddy and getting it out."

The plaster cast is used to make a rubber mold. After the plaster is pried out of the mold, Picton pours in resin or a clear, tintable rubber material that sets and becomes the final sculpture.

His works are on display through Aug. 31 at the Davis & Cline Gallery in Ashland as part of the New Botanicals exhibit.

The artists in the show rely on nature for inspiration, but use innovative processes to create their works.

For Picton, the process can be frustrating at times.

He usually works at Emigrant Reservoir just outside town or travels to Lake Abert, a body of water in the dry, isolated country north of Lakeview that lies beneath the towering cliffs of Abert Rim.

Picton surveys dried lake beds searching for the right composition of cracks. He must make several plaster castings for every one that is pulled successfully from the earth.

"There's a balance between the accidental and the planned. I do five or six for every one that works," he said. "Some of them fall to bits."

Picton has noticed that Lake Abert, with its different soil structure and cracks, yields casts that are shorter and thicker than the taller, more delicate casts removed from Emigrant Reservoir.

Like Picton, Olga Seem - who is showing acrylic paintings on archival tissue paper mounted on canvas - undertakes a painstaking process.

She paints flowers and plants, with much of the composition made up of dots smaller than pencil erasers, even though many of her paintings are quite large in scale.

Seem, a resident of a Los Angeles suburb, does not find the work tedious.

"It's rather meditative and I am a person who is detail conscious," she said.

Explaining her purpose, Seem said, "(The image) gets muted with the dots. My purpose is to create a veil, one might say, or an obscurity so not everything is obvious."

While most of her backgrounds are obscured, she usually paints the plant and flower parts clearly, relying on photographs, plants she finds and images from old botanical books rescued from used book stores.

But Seem's plants are not cheerful daisies or beautiful roses. Leaves are serrated with tooth-like edges; flowers seem predatory.

"I do like things that are not pretty. I don't go for pretty plants. I go for shape. The more ominous it is, the more I'm inclined toward it," she said.

In contrast, the flower paintings of Deanne Belinoff are graceful and elegant.

Still, her works also are not standard paintings of flowers in a vase.

Belinoff, a Portland resident, applies ink, paint and encaustic to paper and folds the sheet over to create a Rorschach-type blot.

She may fold the paper more than a dozen times as she builds up the surface of her paintings.

"The paper can be folded 12 or 15 times. I put a mark down and fold. Then I add a layer of color and fold," she said.

To avoid an overly symmetrical, static composition, Belinoff frequently paints in additional flowers, but then blots the flowers to maintain a textured look.

Each flower head is completed with a sweeping line for a stem that is almost calligraphic with its variation in line weight.

"I make the stems with a stick or the end of a paint brush. I use a loaded hard surface so I get the thick/thin quality," Belinoff said.