(Above: Detail from Gaia in Fall Attire is one of David Diethelm’s oil and cold wax paintings on display at the Midtown Arts Center in Eugene.)

By Randi Bjornstad

Artist David Diethelm’s one-person show at the Midtown Arts Center will be up through April 15. The center at 16th and Pearl streets near downtown Eugene — owned by Eugene Ballet and home to many area arts organizations since its completion in 2021 — devotes significant space in its first-floor gallery spaces, where it offerings rotating shows of work by visual artists in the area.

Diethelm’s show, titled Painting Through a Pandemic, offers just that, a compendium of work that he created from March 2020, when no one knew for sure just how catastrophic the effect of the coronavirus would prove, through January 2023, when the world began, however tentatively, to emerge from its scourge-imposed cocoon.

Wanderers, from Diethelm’s Roads and Contrails series, also is on display.

The extensive exhibit represents about half his work from the pandemic period, and the isolation imposed by the  viral threat had great impact on the way many artists, including himself, work, Diethelm said.

“The most noticeable difference between these paintings and (my) previaousnwork is the saturation and choice of colors, and there are overt references to politics, and the pandemic,” he wrote in the artist statement that accompanies the show.

For example, the use of cold wax and palette knife is one change in style in his The Signs Were There series of paintings, and another series, Covid Bubbles, offers a freedom from previous, more accurate perspective. A single painting, Hill Town, Diethelm created in a more stark, black line style different from the rest.

An earlier group of landscape paintings that he calls The Signs Were There, seem in retrospect to forecast the impending pandemic, he said, perhaps “signifying things that should have been noticed.”

In contrast, the Covid Bubbles paintings dive deep into the pandemic aura, “warping perspective as if seen through a fish-eye lens.

“It creates little self-contained worlds, like we were all doing in our daily lives during the early to middle pandemic,” he said.

Later on he turned to a different style, which he calls his Pyrography Series, which uses a butane torch on wood, followed by the addition of oil paint, with the wood grain determining the eventual character and direction of the pieces.

In addition to creation of painting, illustration, and fine-art photography, Diethelm is publisher of Eco-Justice Press, Aurora books, and Image West Press. He also is founder of TinyArtGallery.org.

His work can be seen and purchased at daviddiethelm.com.

 

Hill Town, acrylic on canvas, is one of Diethelm’s works from “Painting Through a Pandemic,” on display at the Midtown Arts Center.