Category Archives: Visual Art

Bob Hicks, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Delores Pander, 1938-2010

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Henk Pander, portrait of Delores Rooney, December 2009. 54" x 64", oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

Graceful, intelligent and hard-working, Delores Pander generally stayed behind the scenes of Portland’s arts world, where she had a habit of making sure the scenes were working precisely the way they ought to. Born on Aug. 16, 1938, she died of cancer on Thursday, June 24, 2010. For many years she was the wife and partner of the Dutch-born Portland painter Henk Pander, one of our best and most important artists, whose work has fused the long tradition of Dutch art with the frontier edge of the Pacific Northwest and a keen outsider’s feeling for the American psyche. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West, a longtime friend of Delores, offers this personal tribute.

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By Martha Ullman West

Delores Pander died early Thursday morning after a long, hard, painful battle with cancer. Her accomplishments were many, her passion for knowledge profound, the reach of her love and loyalty and friendship broad and deep.

Henk Pander’s extraordinary portrait above of his beautiful wife, made in December of last year, says it all: she is surrounded by images representing the things that were most important to her — a ceramic made by her granddaughter Mary-Alice; the house she shared with Henk and Mary-Alice and several dogs for a number of years; a pile of books; and in her hand a book by Ursula Le Guin, another artist whom she helped with the practical details of work. Her favorite color was the deep, dark red that saturates the painting, and the lighter red shoes she’s wearing are emblematic of her love of pretty clothes.

Delores was years away from becoming an artist’s wife when I first met her in the fall of 1973 at David Nero and Associates, where I was an incompetent technical writer and she was the highly competent secretary for an educational research project to study Follow Through, a shortlived offshoot of Head Start. With her dark hair and sparkling eyes, her clear intelligence, her love of laughter, and the incredible speed, organization and efficiency with which she ran the office and kept our motley crew in line, she reminded me at once of my mother, who put all those attributes, including the dark-haired beauty, to work in the caring and feeding of my artist father.

Delores’s refusal to put up with any guff from those of us who were above her in the pecking order also reminded me of my mother. I’m ashamed to say I was a bit uppity with her at some point, and for Christmas she gave me an engagement calendar inscribed “to the writer from the typer-writer.”

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Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Visual Art

Art & funk; the happy crunch of kimchi

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Mr. Scatter hasn’t been writing a lot lately, at least not for print. Lots of notes, lots of transcriptions, lots of interviews and looking at stuff and thinking about it, but not so much for instant gratification — Mr. Scatter’s or his readers’.

Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino GalleryIn case you missed it, he did have this piece in last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, a reflection on that not-so-polite (and extremely loosely organized) form of art known variously as folk, outsider, naive, primitive, self-taught, you name it.

A recent trip to the Bay Area has got him to thinking about artists like The Hairy Who (from Chicago, but they had a big influence on the Bay Area Figurative Art scene) and Robert Arneson, and of course the splendidly loony master cartoonist R. Crumb, whose surprising take on the Book of Genesis is at the Portland Art Museum right now, and fun and funk, and the disappearing distance between high and low art, “taught” and “outsider” art. That’s what the A&E piece is about, in the context of Portland’s variously beloved and maligned Alberta Arts District scene. ‘Nuff said. Read it for yourself.

The view from Mr. Scatter's window: the pagoda in San Francisco's Japantown. Wikimedia CommonsWhile he was in Baghdad by the Bay, Mr. Scatter stayed in Japantown, where the view out his window was the pagoda at right. Best thing about the very good hotel where he stayed, thanks to an excellent online deal: the long deep Japanese soaking tub, which he filled with hot water nightly to wash away the stress of those up-and-down hills. He tried not to think about the ungodly amount of water he was using. Sometimes, a person splurges.

San Francisco is a great place to eat, maybe right up there in the United States with New Orleans and New York, and Mr. Scatter had a bite or two. About a third of the city’s population is Asian, and it follows that eating in Asian spots can be a good bet, even little ones that don’t get much press. That was the deal with a little Korean diner he found one night: good bubbling stew with soft tofu and little oysters. But the side dishes, or banchan, were knockout: nine little bowls of kimchi and other various fermented sprouts, cucumbers, radishes and the like, including a dish of dried anchovies that had been partially reconstituted with oil, giving them a sharp funky taste and a chewy, almost woody texture. Outstanding. San Francisco treat or not, Rice-A-Roni didn’t stand a chance.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

— Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino Gallery.

— The view from Mr. Scatter’s window: the pagoda in San Francisco’s Japantown. Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

Windy City West and the old ballgame

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By Bob Hicks

SAN FRANCISCO — The cabbie’s whipping around the corners like a Tim Lincecum curveball, as wild and abandoned as the wind whistling down the bay. We’re heading back toward town from an art studio near the south waterfront, and the driver’s rapping out opinions like a batter playing pepper in spring training. Mr. Scatter checks his lap a little nervously: Yes, his seat belt’s on.

Louis Grant, "Rundown," 2010. George Krevsky Gallery/San FranciscoChicago lays claim to the nickname The Windy City, and it earns it, although Buffalo and Rochester could put in likely claims, too. And San Francisco certainly fits the profile, as anyone who’s ever sat through a ballgame at Candlestick Park can attest. As the cab nears AT&T Park, the compact and nostalgic home of the San Francisco Giants, the chatter turns to sports.

“The Giants,” the cabbie says. “The Giants, they mean something to this town. I mean, that’s history, man. That’s glue.”

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Bob Hicks, General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

Review: Those Old Masters could draw

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By Laura Grimes

Mr. Scatter boarded a plane this morning when the sky was barely light so I’ll be his best blog buddy and post a link to his visual arts review that ran in The Oregonian this morning.

Here’s an excerpt teaser from his review of A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings From the Crocker Art Museum, which is on view at the Portland Art Museum through Sept. 19:

German artist Johann Georg Bergmüller’s crowded and energetic 1715 drawing and watercolor “Saint Martin Appealing to the Virgin,” for instance, is suffused with allegory and religious phantasmagoria. It revels in the sense of a larger, ordinarily invisible universe just out of human grasp: the artist is chronicler of the real but unseen.

Johann Georg Bergmüller, German, 1688-1762, "St. Martin and Other Saints Appealing to the Virgin," 1715, Crocker Art Museum, E. B. Crocker Collection

Johann Georg Bergmüller
German, 1688-1762
St. Martin and Other Saints Appealing to the Virgin, 1715
Pen and brown ink, brush and brown and gray washes, blue, pink, red, and orange watercolor, white opaque watercolor on cream laid paper
13 7/8 in. x 7 7/8 in. (31.0 cm x 22.0 cm)
Crocker Art Museum, E. B. Crocker Collection

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Mr. Scatter recently wrote about how several artists through history have rendered the grisly tale of Holofernes, an invading general who lost his head to the beautiful and clever Judith.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Losing our head over the Old Masters

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Hendrick Goltzius, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, n.d. Pen and dark brown ink, brush and grey wash and blue and white opaque watercolor, partially darkened, on brown laid paper, 20.3 x 16.6 cm. Crocker Art Museum, E. B. Crocker Collection 1871.142

By Bob Hicks

Here’s the thing: If you’re an invading general with a roving eye, never invite a beautiful woman from the enemy city into your tent and then get so rip-roaring drunk you pass out.

Holofernes, this post’s for you.

Two intriguingly intertwined shows opened yesterday at the Portland Art Museum — The Bible Illustrated, maverick cartoonist R. Crumb‘s faithfully rendered graphic depiction of The Book of Genesis, and A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, a gathering of almost 60 old-master drawings from the Sacramento museum’s impressive collections.

Friend of Scatter D.K. Row wrote vigorously in The Oregonian about Crumb’s project, and sometime in the next week or so the O will run my review of the Crocker exhibit. But first, let’s spend a little quality time with Holofernes, and Judith, and her faithful handmaiden, and one of our favorite Dutch artists, Hendrick Goltzius, an artist we admire so much we’ve featured him twice before: in this post about Hercules and baseball’s steroid scandal, and in this post about Wall Street’s bull and bear markets (we found his engraving of Icarus tumbling from the sky apropos).

Caravaggio, "Judith Beheading Holofernes," 1598-1599. Oil on canvas, 57 inches × 77 inches, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.In brief: Holofernes, a star general for the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, is laying siege to a city of the Israelites, and things are getting brutal. Alarmed and angry, Judith, an attractive young widow, sneaks out and into the enemy camp, where she charms Holofernes in his tent. She feeds him sweet cheeses, then gets him drunk as a skunk. While he’s sleeping it off she grabs his sword and lops off his head. When Holo’s army sees what’s happened it panics and heads for the hills. Judith saves the day!

This story has fascinated artists for centuries, and everyone’s version seems singular. Why draw and paint pictorially? Because representational art tells stories, and there are as many different ways to tell a story as there are storytellers. Caravaggio, a genuine genius with a notorious violent streak, concentrated (inset) on the gorgeously bloody deed itself.

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General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

When it comes to art, I got balls

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By Laura Grimes

Mr. Scatter: What’s a dirty dog ball doing in the dishwasher?

Mrs. Scatter: Um … getting clean.

Mr. Scatter: We don’t have a dog.

Mrs. Scatter: That’s why it needs to get clean.

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Points if you can find the clean dog ball.

OK, I confess. I completely took poetic license with that dialogue. In other words, it didn’t happen. Which is exactly what makes it highly unusual.

When Mr. Scatter sees a dirty dog ball in the dishwasher he doesn’t even bother to ask anymore. He just packs more cups and saucers around it, and closes the dishwasher again. He’s used to finding tile pieces and doll legs in the silverware caddy. He knows better than to toss a perfectly good broken plate when it’s sitting on the counter.

This is what you call marriage security. I have to stay married to this man because I could never find someone else who would put up with dirty dog balls in the dishwasher.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

A circle of women: Eva Lake’s collages

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By Bob Hicks

Eva Lake collage, Natalie Wood

William Tell and Robin Hood were fair hands at them. In war, they can be crucial to battle strategies. But in the art world, it was Kenneth Noland who took targets off the practice range and put ’em on the map.

“Yes, I love him. I love him. I’ve always loved him,” Portland artist Eva Lake says of Noland, whose famous target paintings made him an icon of mid-twentieth century New York art. “And I love Josef Albers. I love something inside of something inside of something.”

'Beginning', magna on canvas painting by Kenneth Noland, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1958/Wikimedia CommonsLake has a new exhibit of collages on view at Augen Gallery‘s DeSoto space, and while they draw obviously on Noland, they’re also very much their own thing: not so concerned with Noland’s color-field theories, much more concerned with social meanings.

“I am the one doing this,” she says. “I am the one putting the woman in the target.”

Lots of women, and most of them famous: Lake is fascinated with the allure and effects of celebrity culture, particularly strong and beautiful women who have been vilified or victimized or pushed to extremes in one way or another. Natalie Wood. Tina Turner. Marilyn Monroe. Lana Turner. Carole Lombard. Liz Taylor. Jean Shrimpton. Naomi Campbell. Ann-Margret. Lindsay Lohan. Liza Minnelli. (“It’s not that I relate to Liza; I relate to Sally Bowles.”)

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General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

Rain and more rain, sky and more sky

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By Laura Grimes

It’s raining and the sky is pretty much a solid dull gray. Gray upon gray. Rain upon rain. End upon end. But the sky doesn’t have to be that dull.

The Pantsless Brother must have seen something different out his window. He sent me this note:

I’m looking out at the sky over the water as the evening fades and all I see is Turner.

Could he have been thinking of this painting?

"The Fighting Temeraire" by J.M.W. Turner, 1838, National Gallery London/Wikimedia Commons

The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner, 1839
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

That brilliant expanse of sunset sky is saying goodbye to a famous warship that’s seen its last good fight and being carted off on its last voyage to be broken up. Broad, colorful strokes know their bigness and strikingly evoke a sense of loss. The canvas gives room to all that the sky has to say.

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Bob Hicks, General, Music, Visual Art

I didn’t know what time it was. Then I met Mingus

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By Bob Hicks

Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory," 1931

We live in an age of miracles so commonplace we rarely think to marvel at them. On a quiet cloudy afternoon Mr. Scatter is standing in his kitchen, balancing on a floor made of oak chopped down and milled and planed almost a century ago, but looking new because it’s protected from scuffs and stains by an invisible, magical plastic coating that freezes entropy in its steps. He is pulling dishes out of a robotic mechanical device called an automatic dishwasher, giving them a swipe or two with a colorfully printed cloth woven somewhere in modern industrial China — China! — and putting them into cupboards that except for their compressed-particle composition aren’t much different from the ones you might see in an 18th century English country house. Scant steps away is the little breakfast nook which, well-wired, is Mr. Scatter’s electronic portal to the virtual world (and what, Mr. Scatter wonders, might a virtual world actually be?).

Charles Mingus, playing in Lower Manhattan on the U.S. bicentennial, July 4, 1976. Source: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA/Wikimedia CommonsA few more steps into the dining room is the small stereo system on top of which is cradled a sophisticated, powerful little green computing and storage device called an iPod. Ignoring this more recent communications miracle, he’s fed the system a small bright disc that, powered up, fills the room with sounds that the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus, with an ensemble of other innovative musicians, made in 1959 for an album called Mingus Ah Um. Mr. Scatter relaxes as the burnished rigor of a former revolution curls sharply and gently around him — a revolution that, a half-century on, has become a living, cultured comfort. Exactly the same as it was then, and worlds different.

This is our world: Time melts. Salvador Dali is our prophet, and his 1931 melted-clock painting The Persistence of Memory is our holy image.

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ILLUSTRATIONS:

— Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931. Wikimedia Commons

— Charles Mingus, playing in Lower Manhattan on the U.S. bicentennial, July 4, 1976. Source: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

In tough times, SAM’s calculated gamble

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By Bob Hicks

The "Art Ladder," the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian. May 5, 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons

The Wall Street cowboys keep whoopin’ it up with other people’s money, the Dow dips and rises like a desperate trout on a line, the economists crunch numbers and announce happily that the recession’s over.

And in the real world, people brace for the worst. Jobs disappear. People take pay cuts and thank their lucky stars they didn’t get pink-slipped. Workers go on unpaid furloughs but keep the same old workloads. Basic benefits get deep-sixed. People simply drop out of the job market.

The state of Oregon trembles at the prospect of a half-billion-dollar shortage — a budget hole that will mean extraordinary cuts that are bound to include deep whacks in state cultural spending. This year’s crisis could make last year’s $1.8 million raid on the Oregon Cultural Trust seem like a mild practical joke. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Doors will shut.

Up north, they’re starting to swing already. In a bold and risky move, the Seattle Art Museum has announced that it will shut down most of its operations for two weeks early next year in a bid to cut costs enough to balance the budget. Janet I. Tu has the story in the Seattle Times. The cuts will also include a seven percent reduction in staffing and hefty salary cuts for top administrators.

“We are taking steps to remedy a tough situation,” said museum director Derrick Cartwright, who plans to take at least a fifteen percent salary cut. “I hope it will not impact the public.”

It will, of course. People will show up during those two weeks and the doors will be locked. Some people will be confused or disturbed or angry. Others will shrug their shoulders and possibly never show up again.

SAM and other major regional museums hold special roles in their communities. Even more than a symphony or opera or ballet or theater company, all of which routinely take breaks between performances, an art museum is looked on as a bulwark of reliability and stability. It’s expected to be open, except on Mondays. Only shutting down or curtailing a public library or a public school system — realities that more and more communities face — has a greater potential impact on a city’s sense of its cultural self.

On the other hand: When times are lean, what can you do but take extraordinary steps? SAM’s move is a calculated gamble. It’s more than budget-balancing, it’s shock therapy. Will potential donors see the move as tough, hard-headed pragmatism, or will they see an organization in trouble and tiptoe away? Obviously SAM is counting on the former: People will see an organization willing to make tough but necessary decisions and will want to put their money on the group that willingly faces reality. SAM could end up a “winner” in the increasingly difficult nonprofit funding race — but at what cost?

What do you think? Is this a smart move? How will it turn out? What can other cultural organizations learn from it, and is Seattle’s situation a harbinger of things to come in Portland? Let’s get the ideas rolling. Comments, please.

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PHOTO: The “Art Ladder”, the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian. May 5, 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons.