Musings on Process: Nila Oakes

I travel and I work: the scenery keeps flying by and I keep cranking out the pictures. I am a servant to my landscapes and to the paint that creates them. After a trip, I return to my studio in a state of expectation. I’m never sure what will surface: some images never boil up, others take hold like some crazy siren or harpy.
Landscape painting is sort of like organizing a party. I make a guest list, which might include a delta levee, some fog and a few trees. If the trees are arguing with the levee, I need to turn the water into a road. If the road gets too rigid, I turn it into a coastline. But then what are those trees doing on the beach? They quickly become dunes or reeds. Then I have to shush the rocks and driftwood because they are being too showy. I create a quiet place for the eye to rest: the ocean has a soothing quality. Finally all the personalities are co-mingling, creating one visual experience, not a discordant racket.
The trick for me is to recognize that a certain mark, silhouette, or shadow, can be used as a counterpoint in the image. Metaphorically, one could consider a perfect glowing stroke of white to be a band which crashed the party, and which the guests are dancing around. To get the “perfect stroke” in the studio, temperature can be a help or hindrance. When it’s hot, the oils get gummy and easily overworked. I try not to force the paint on days like that, and often create visual textures like grass or dirt, or use line to depict rock and vegetation. Smooth and flat surfaces in waterways and clouds are best painted in the winter when I can fuss around with dark and light without making a mess.
Sometimes I think about Jackson Pollack and de Kooning and the way they relied on their subconscious and materials to guide them through all that slopping and finagling. Painters have to train themselves to know when a piece is done. Is it balanced? Does the eye move around the image properly? So much of this understanding goes under the category of instinct.
I’m a much better painter today than I was a decade ago and the older I’ve gotten, the more I appreciate and respect my  “process”. Now I just give the brush to my muse, get out of the way, and watch the work unfold.
Landscape is a language understood by all of us. It’s a visual  common denominator with metaphoric capacity strengthened by the viewer’s own life experience. For me, these blustery scenes hark back to my painful childhood. For others, they may be reminders of romance or adventure. Each painting is unique in the eyes of the beholder, each view is seen through the filterofone’s  own memory.
—Nila Oakes 2005


Editor’s Note; Nila’s Oakes work will be exhibited in Traces of Light, Chemeketa Community College, Salem, opening Feb. 13, 2006. Her web site: http://www.nilaoakes.com.  

“As a student of architecture I was told that to be a good architect I would have to be a good observer. Toward that end I was advised to have a sketchbook with me at all times to record my observations of the world around me. I took that advice seriously and I have a shelf full of sketchbooks to attest to my interest in observing and recording what I have seen.
“When after many years of architectural practice I decided to become a professional artist, my motivation was the same: a fascination with the world around me and an urge to use drawing and painting as a way of understanding more about that world. But as I have spent more time drawing, I have become more selective in what I want to do as an artist. Ten years ago I might have produced fifty or a hundred major pieces in a year. Now a year’s work is more likely to be five or ten pieces. I look for places that seem to epitomize something wonderful about my world. When I find such a place (like the place in the image shown here) I will spend much more time studying it with small drawings and watercolors, and much more time making the final drawing.”
Mike Pease is nationally recognized as one of the first artists to use colored pencils as a fine art medium. Even among colored pencil artists his drawings which are made by layering the three primary colors are unique. Mike’s work focuses primarily on Northwest landscapes, particularly in and around the Willamette Valley. He is represented locally by the Alder Gallery