Late Summer #3 by James Lavadour
- Title: Late Summer #3
- Artist: James Lavadour
- Medium: Oil on panel
- Size: 28" h x 32" w
- Creation date: 2013
- Added to collection: 2014
- Donor: Purchased by Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
- Campus: Rock Creek
- Location: B3/2 Hallway gallery near rm 232
This is an abstract painting that appears to be also a highly detailed landscape. The seeming contradiction between these two impulses-- abstraction and description-- is intentional. The painting is as much about the flow of paint and the wiping back of colors which gravity shapes as much as the artist's hand, as it is also highly evocative of the basalt formations in eastern Oregon where the artist lives. The painting has a dramatic and monumental quality surprising for its modest size. Seen from a distance, it is grand, dramatic and alive. Seen up close, the image disintegrates into a skein of delicate drips and gestures, equally alive. "I think of myself as an abstract action painter," says James Lavadour, "I just happen to see landscape in the abstract events of paint.”