Monthly Archives: October 2010

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Blessing on thee, little man (and dog)

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Ana Reiselman and Tim True in Lee Blessing's "Great Falls" at Profile Theatre. Photo: Jamie Bosworth

By Bob Hicks

Lee Blessing stopped by his old college stomping grounds Monday night, packing a big dog’s bark and a puppy’s eagerness to please.

Blessing, the author of such frequently produced plays as Independence, A Walk in the Woods, Eleemosynary and Fortinbras, sat alone on Reed College’s Mainstage, a couple of bottled waters propped on a stool next to him, as he read his 1999 one-actor comedy Chesapeake to a crowd of theater regulars, Reedies, and a few old friends.

Playwright Lee BlessingBesides being a homecoming of sorts — Blessing is a 1971 grad from Reed, where he directed and was directed by another high-profile theater alum, Eric Overmyer — the reading was one of the opening events of Wordstock, Portland’s annual orgy of bookiness. And it was a highlight of Profile Theatre‘s season-long look at Blessing’s plays, which has just kicked off with the West Coast premiere of Great Falls. All in all it was a convivial, low-key evening, capped by Mead Hunter‘s warm and smart onstage chat with Blessing after the show.

Chesapeake is the unlikely tale of a New York performance artist named Kerr (he’s best-known for a piece in which he recites The Song of Solomon as members of the audience strip him naked, one piece of clothing at a time) who becomes a pawn in the right-wing war against the National Endowment for the Arts (remember, the year is 1999).

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Maryhill stretches its legs for the future

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The extension blends landscape and building architecture to keep a low profile. C.S. Holmes for GBD Architects

By Bob Hicks

Today Mr. Scatter donned his reporter cap with the story Maryhill Conceives a Broader Canvas in The Oregonian. In case you missed the print version (which has lots of cool pictures, including one of Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the Maryhill Museum of Art in 1926, and another of original mansion owner Sam Hill sitting in the library with a bunch of medals slung around his neck), you can follow the link.

Paul Guinan, "Marvel on the Klondike," from "Boilerplate: History's Marvel," copyright 2009 by Paul Guinan.The gist is this: Maryhill, that unlikely yet undeniably charming citadel far out above the Columbia Gorge, has announced a $10 million expansion to its 1918 building, which is a beloved landmark in Gorge country and was built as a home for good-roads champion Hill, who never actually lived in it. The place has been bursting at the seams, and the expansion plans, by Portland’s GBD Architects, offer it necessary breathing space while keeping a low enough profile to give the beaux-arts style original mansion pride of place. Plans are to have the extension completed by March 2012.

Mr. Scatter’s trip out the Gorge (Maryhill is about 110 miles east of Portland, on the Washington side of the river) also gave him the chance to see Maryhill’s temporary exhibition Comics at the Crossroads: Art of the Graphic Novel, which he wrote about here for the Big O. It’s drawn mostly from Portland’s vibrant comics/graphic publication scene, and includes the very cool illustration of Paul Guinan’s Boilerman and a dancing bear shown above.

The museum has already raised $8 million of the $10 million it needs for its expansion, but not everything’s rosy.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

‘It’s not about me, it’s about the region’

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Lee Kelly in his studio at Leland Iron Works, outside Oregon City. Michael J. Burns.

By Bob Hicks

The best way to see the art of Lee Kelly, if you’re not lucky enough to visit his studio and expansive sculpture garden near Oregon City, is to hop on the bus or your bike or just start hoofing it around Portland. The city and its suburbs are speckled with his large public pieces, which have gone a long way toward defining a Pacific Northwest vision of a place where the natural and the man-made can coexist in harmonic creative tension.

Lee Kelly, Arlie, 1978, steel, at Portland Art Museum. Museum Purchase: Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, © Lee KellyOf course, taking the grand tour can be a bit strenuous. So before you pull out your official Lee Kelly art-hop map (the Portland Art Museum has handily created one, in easy-fold form, which will guide you to 31 sculptures in the greater Portland area and down the Willamette Valley as far as Eugene) head on down to the museum to take in the crackerjack retrospective of Kelly’s work that opened Saturday and continues through January 9.

Since Kelly’s been an active artist for more than 50 years, that’s a lot of retro to inspect. (The museum has also published a lavish and fitting catalog to accompany and expand on the exhibition.) But it’s a fascinating time trip, reaching all the way back to the heady days of abstract expressionism. Curator Bruce Guenther defines those brash young painting days as the first of three key periods in Kelly’s career, followed by his busy years of making large metal public work and a latter, reflective period — in Guenther’s words, “the post-public Kelly,” during which he’s created “not monuments, but personal landscapes.”

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General, Laura Grimes, Music

Night at the opera with Large Smelly Boy

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A night at the opera at Keller Auditorium/LaValle Linn

By Laura Grimes

“It’s three hours long!” the Small Large Smelly Boy repeated what he had overheard in a low, urgent voice.

It was minutes before curtain at Portland Opera’s Pagliacci/Carmina Burana on Thursday night. I immediately shuffled the pages in the program to confirm it. He was dead right.

This was no small matter, and I could sense the growing unease we both felt. I already knew he was calculating the clock in his head, not only fretting about a long performance where he wasn’t sure what to expect but also what time he would get to bed on a school night.

He gets sleepy mid-evening, puts himself to bed and gets up on his own bright and early in the morning. He doesn’t like after-school activities because they get in the way of his homework. He long ago gave up on me getting him to school because he knows I cut it close. Instead, he shows up 45 minutes before the tardy bell and hangs with his friends. He is never late and is always orderly.

I, on the other hand, fight sleep like a toddler, except every morning. I’m not sure how he came to be my child (and I’m sure he often wonders the same thing), but because of him I totally believe that story about the Virgin Mary.

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