James Lavadour Star House, 2008 oil on panel 24" x 30


"My main interest has always been about the properties of paint, what paint does. One of the things that paint does is that it is organic and does the same sort of things that dirt does, anything in the natural world does. It has the same processes: erosion, sedimentation, flow... I saw in that microcosm of a landscape. I saw the same processes in watercolor settling in on a piece of paper as rivers and mountains. That was the first principle that struck me early on and I realized that ever since I was a child I was fascinated by those particular processes.

I realized that I had two basic things that I work with in my paintings: the first is organic flow which is the landscape. The second was an architectural grid or abstraction which is based on the human perception or response to the natural world. Those two ideas have always been my right hand and my left hand. They were polar opposites of one another. I used to do either abstracts or landscapes. At this point, they intersected in this collision. After that I had no idea what was going to happen then. The abstracts became more like landscapes and the landscape became more like architectural structures with a cellular structure that had spaces within spaces within spaces.

When I experienced that microcosm of the cosmos, everything else just fell away. (More)

Whether you are an artist or an art lover, curators are the people in your community that you need to know and the job involves a lot more than simply selecting who gets to show in a space.

Last year's roundup was hugely popular and this 2008 roundup will take things even farther. It is still by no means comprehensive as Portland has seen an explosion in interesting alternative spaces. It goes without saying that there is a whole new crew in Portland these days.

Participants for 2008 are: Bruce Guenther, Linda Tesner, Josh Smith, Nathan Gibson, Patrick Rock, Namita Wiggers, Kristan Kennedy, TJ Norris, Paul Middendorf, myself, Stephanie Snyder, and Damien Gilley... (more)

Portrait of MK Guth by Marne Lucas

"I have no life," confesses MK Guth with a chuckle. "But that's off the record." What the overachieving Portland artist means, of course, is that outside of an accelerating art practice that has her touring a new project across the nation-state-hopping her way to the Whitney Biennial-and heading the new Masters in Visual Studies program at PNCA, she doesn't have a lot of time for hobbies. But Guth seems to be taking both her hectic schedule and success in stride. The Wisconsin transplant, who has lived and or shown in Portland for...(more)

Mary Henry- Metaphor, Acrylic on canvas 1995.
Image courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art Portland, Oregon


I wasn't sure what I was expecting as I drove up to Seattle with my wife on an early on a Saturday morning in June. I knew that I was traveling to meet with one of the great painters of the Northwest, Mary Henry. I was familiar with her paintings with their beautiful colors and meticulous craft. The paintings have such a remarkable clarity that they ring with a distinctive tone, not unlike hitting a bell at a Japanese temple. Perfect, complete and clear. More...

Vermilion 2005

A Conversation With Terry Winters:

"I hope to be clear in describing the process, but the experience of making the painting isn't linear. The best things tend to come by surprise or emerge from the circumstances"...(more)

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt is one of the most exceptional and prolific photographers in the field today. Born in 1928, he's been photographing steadily (and indulging in his hobby on the side) for over half a century. Erwitt's Leica has captured iconic figures from Che Guevara to Marilyn Monroe, as well as countless slices of daily life, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dogs, and the ever-evolving social landscape of America, Europe and points beyond. A selection of images culled from his latest book, entitled Personal Best, is on view at the Portland Art Museum through April 29th. Mr. Erwitt recently spent a few days in Portland in order to deliver a lecture at PAM, and kindly shared a little of his time for the following interview.....................(more)

Curators are the people you need to know in the art world and Portland is full of them. To begin 2007 we thought we'd poll a few of them and learn a little more about how they see their roles. Now prepare yourselves, this is one long article. Also, as expected the term curator was incredibly loaded. Some reserve the term only for nonprofit work, others admitted to acting in a curatorial role without actually claiming to be curators. For some being a curator seemed to be like breathing. To be sure there are as many types of curators as there are curatorial roles. From old pro's to rookies, these 13 are only a sampling of the curatorial voices in town:


Terri Hopkins by Joe Macca (detail)

Terri Hopkins: Director & Curator of the Art Gym, Marylhurst University

How did you get into curating? It was a circuitous process of career sampling and elimination. I prepared for a career teaching art history, which
............(much more)

Marne Lucas, MLSP: Alphorny, archival pigment print 2006

Artist Marne Lucas and I took brief respites from our densely packed holiday schedules to sit down for an electronic bi-coastal conversation about her current exhibition, Sitting City: Portland Artist Portraits. The images of local artists created for Sitting City were partially funded by a RACC (Regional Arts and Culture Council) project grant, and represent a small cross-section of Lucas's ongoing project of capturing the appearance and essence of her artistic peers.....................(more)

Jackson's Viking Burial Ship at PS.1's Greater New York show (2005)

Isaac D. Peterson
Matt D. Jackson (P.I.C.A. artist in residence)

IDP:
I was thinking about what we discussed earlier about the new structure of information, and I noticed in one of your sculptures you made this connection between Punk Rock and a Viking ship. This is one of those associations that couldn't normally exist in a linear structure but clearly Punk Rock culture may have some Viking undertones.

MDJ:
That piece was really a suicide piece.

IDP:
It was a funeral pyre, right?

MDJ:
Well, it wasn't historically accurate, but I'm not even concerned with that, I'm concerned with maybe the Hollywood representation of Vikings. Basically I had come to the point where I realized I was fulfilling someone else's legacy of making art. I was operating within this formal strategy that was completely developed by my predecessors. You know from Modrian to Reinhardt to Philip Guston to Jonathan Lasker. Basically what they were making were super-narrative abstract structures. I realized that what I was doing was something that was not entirely a part of my generation, and that my ideas and creativity were constantly struggling against this. I wanted to put it all to rest, so I started making this funeral vessel for my own ideas and it took the form of this very heroic funeral practice. Of course the whole idea is pure Hollywood myth, there would be no artifacts of these ships if they had all been set on fire and pushed out to sea. I would say that that definitely didn't happen, but I wasn't as concerned with that. I was more concerned with heroic death and how it was represented in the media. I wanted to focus on death in relationship to all of this iconography. The sail refers exactly to a pattern from a specific Mondrian painting, and that leads in to the idea that these modern icons have narrative potential.

IDP:
That seems pretty radical to think of Mondrian as having narrative potential.

MDJ:
But it is! We've gone there! It's on clothing, it's on swatches, it's on furniture!

IDP:
Regardless of what Mondrian intended, the work has acquired a narrative.

MDJ:
Yes, and that's the world that we live in. I think of the Brancusi heads I'm making now, they are stacked up like cannonballs. The original sculpture was called the Sleeping Muse, and its eyes are closed, but in my version their eyes are wide open! The Sleeping Muse has been awoken from its slumber of the last 83 years. It's a statement about modernity to think of Brancusi used as a cannonball. We are at the tail-end of the industrial revolution, and that thing that was calm and banal is essentially being used to knock you out.

IDP:
I wanted to ask you about your interest in Bosch and Breugel.... (more)

The back-story for this interview is that I met Hamza in Cincinnati as a graduate student. He was a guest lecturer in our visiting artists program and sat in on critiques for a couple of days. I bumped into him again at the Affiar, I'm transcribing this conversation as faithfully as I can remember it...

Isaac: Hi Hamza, do you remember me from Cincinnati? I was on the visiting artists committee and we went out to dinner after your lecture. My name is Isaac.

Hamza: Oh yeah! What was that place called?

Isaac: Biagio's

Hamza: That's right.

Isaac: Some of your critiques became the stuff of legend in Cincinnati.

Hamza: Oh really?

Isaac: Yeah, there was a color field painter you were critiquing and you told him to look at Frank Frazetta....