Click the link in orange above to visit my artist page with currently featured work.

SwinkShop offers new works as they become available for purchase. Click the orange heading above to visit.
If you're local to the Portland area, you can opt to type in a code at checkout to save shipping costs and come by the studio to pick up your purchases.

Add your name to my mailing list: eepurl.com/oElav to hear about upcoming shows and workshops. When you click on the link and type in your email address, make sure you click on "add contact to your address book" so that my emails don't end up in the spam folder.

Next time you're visiting the Oregon coast, don't miss Rowboat Gallery in a new Gleneden Beach location. A stunning space with an outstanding collection of art.

The Art Beat folks were here filming for a segment that aired in October 2013 and which has since aired on PBS affiliates across the country.
In this TV segment, I failed to thank my mentor-teacher, Coeleen Kiebert, for the immeasurable contribution she has made to my creative life. She invited me to teach using her creative process methodology, an approach I use in my own sculptural work and have taught in workshops since 2000. It is a rare thing when one person can influence so many others so profoundly in such a positive, life-affirming way, and Coeleen is such a person. She has had thousands of people in her classes, wrote and published "All of a Sudden: The Creative Process", and continues decades of work making, studying, and teaching art, creative process and the understanding of creative personality.

I can't read Chinese, but I like the look of it!

Here's the online version of the article, "The Stories Within", written by Carolyn Hazel Drake.

This video details the decorating process on a piece titled "Carrot".

A very quick demo with original music by my son, Bearsly.

This is without a doubt the best ceramics video I've ever seen. It focuses on process: how she observes her environment for inspiration, her amazing documentation (think image journal/sketchbook), how she takes inspiration and transforms it through sketching into brilliant ideas in her own oeuvre (vocabulary & style), and some of the methods she uses, including sprigging and coiling, and adding hand-formed details. She talks about trusting the process and letting it inform her. And talk about test tiles!

Georgia O'Keeffe loved the motif of the unfurling stem/leaf and she seemed to zero in on it at the beginning and at the end of her painting life. It could be considered an essential mark of hers, what we talk about in workshops as a doodle.
This BBC documentary of her life is great.

Basquiat is one of my artistic heroes. This is a great video about him and his art.

Helpful info about how to make tiles that will stay flat—an OPA workshop with Cathi Newlin and Dawn Panttaja.

Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Klint began her artistic career as an academy-educated painter of naturalistic landscapes and portraits. Influenced by the spiritual movements and scientific discoveries of her era, however, af Klint soon strove to express abstract concepts beyond what the eye can see. She began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private.

"Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future," the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, is on view October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Learn more at www.guggenheim.org/hilmaafklint

My mentor Coeleen Kiebert (M.S., UCSC) discusses the archetypal meaning of shrines, temples & cathedrals.

Coeleen eloquently describes her ceramic work over the decades and how she uses it for self-discovery.

Kathy has used the emotional turmoil of a difficult break up to generate an immense body of work in clay and really find herself in the process.

"I have studied and meditated on David Blum's extraordinary documentation of his dreams and inner work — the immense gifts that were given to him from his unconscious and poured into images and music. We are intrigued on all levels — emotional, imaginal, intellectual. Our hearts are split open as we watch the process of the inner marriage."
—Marion Woodman

Rates vary. You can contact Dru to negotiate a rate.

On Instagram at @theguestroomwestlinn $150/night. 503-841-8423