Last night was the opening reception for the Froelick Gallery group show, Equine. I am fortune that my painting Twenty-Oneis included among the work of many accomplished artists. Tonight is First Thursday, and there is a reception for the show from 5:00 pm until 8:00 pm. The show runs all of June, through July 16, 2011.

The Froelick Gallery is located at 714 NW Davis Street, Portland Oregon, 97209.

Artist Statement for Twenty-One

The painting Twenty-One is inspired by the prehistoric drawings found on the walls of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France. These drawings, made before humans possessed written language, are the earliest known record of primordial expression, and they are images of horses. Later, humans learned to use symbols instead of pictures to create words. Inspired by the transition of pictorial language into words, the repetitive form of grazing horses in Twenty-One suggests ancient cuneiform. Impressed by stylus into clay tablets, cuneiform script marks the abstraction of pictorial expression into symbolic characters. It is the precursor of the modern  alphabet.

Twenty-One by jparadisi