Pat Clemens and Josie Koehne, oil and acrylic artists from Portland, will be showing at the Biscuit Gallery in Gold Beach during the month of September. You are invited to a reception for the artists held on Saturday, August 30 from 5 pm to 7 pm at Gold Beach Books/Biscuit Gallery.
We'd like to introduce you to these two very talented women and give you a preview of their art.
Josephine S. Koehne
Josie Koehne is a Portland painter working primarily in oils and acrylics. She was a sculpture major at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1968-1970 and graduated in anthropology in 1973 from Boston University. She got a start as a CETA-funded "Artist in the Community" in Burlington, VT and taught art for several years in Vermont and Brooklyn. She worked as a computer graphic artist in NYC doing children's game graphics from 1983-1993. After moving to Portland in 1998, she worked fulltime as producer/project manager developing Web sites and interactive software and training, and painting part time. Since 2006, she has has been painting landscapes and figuative work fulltime and has a studio in NE Portland in the Boxlift Studios Building. "I am drawn to the environment and what makes people do the things they do--how they think, work, play and relate to one another. I want to capture each individual's essential personality and their motivations. In February, I went to Guatemala to build houses in Coban with a Habitat for Humanities group. My recent work stems from the strong connection I feel for the people I worked with there and their capacity for very hard physical labor. Without language, one can still get to know a person very well by how they work and the way they work with you. I hope my painting captures the individual natures of each of these Guatemalan workers." Pat Clemens Pat Clemens started painting when she was five and was soon asked to demonstrate painting to the other students. She went on to receive the Bank of America award for art in northern California and was offered several art scholarships, including one to the Oakland School of Arts and Crafts. She received her degree in art from U C Davis where she studied with Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson. She then went to UCLA where she studied art history and to Paris for research on Leonardo da Vinci's work in France. For several years she taught art in various schools in California and New York. Pat has her paintings in private collections in Italy, New York, Florida, California, and Oregon and has completed public works projects of her painting in London and New York City. Since moving to Portland, Oregon nine years ago, Pat has had one-person shows at the Interbeing gallery and the Alberta Coop in the Alberta Arts district. She has also shown with the Box-Lift Studios group and her work was picked by the Oregonian newspaper as the example of that group show. Her paintings were also selected by Mark Woolley of the Woolley gallery, one of the foremost galleries in Portland, to hang in a juried show at the Box-Lift Building. "In the last few years, several themes have inspired my work. I explored, by means of painting, the way in which the world of the spirit was expressed in art throughout time and by various cultures. I also painted how nature served that purpose for me - giving me views of the outdoor world that seemed to be more than just that of the physical. I was also inspired by dreams: my current show was based on a dream in which I tried to save a chimpanzee by taking it to the jungle. After painting the process of the dream and being able in paint to actually bring the chimp to safety, I started painting other animals: first, an abstraction of their environment in which words like love and care were painted and then the animals painted into that place of safety. I am most happy when I am inspired by an idea and then find that I cannot stop painting." 
Two Guatemalan Masons
Floras Lake July
Suvie Field
Suvie Island Field at Sunset 
Beautiful post of the Portland artists bios, comments, and work! You and you're skills are greatly appreciated!
Posted by: Shelly Wierzba | August 24, 2008 at 08:08 AM