< a fellowship with the land Oregonness didn’t come through. In fact, Pendleton could have just as easily been Maine we were all so alien to the prevailing cowboy culture of the town. Looking around the table, we were a far cry from the models of Betty Feves and James Lavadour. I often think of Wallace Stegner’s dictum that the first landscape a person encounters creates a layer through which all subsequent landscapes are judged. I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I didn’t leave New England until I was 21 when I moved to New Mexico. Those old colonial ghosts and hulking dying factories of New England still insert themselves into my perceptions of Portland’s industrial area. New Mexico is where I came of age, a place I love in my bones, but where I never felt like a native. In Pendleton, I began to understand the disjointed sense of place that I have as an adult. I was looking at the land through two lenses: the one of my nativity and the newer one from my 20s. And it was complicated by what was being sold to me as a visitor – Cowboys on the one hand and Indians on the other. Neither image was telling me the truth about a life lived in the high desert in the way the Betty Feves exhibition did or the paintings of James Lavadour. As urban artists it’s possible to feel smug about ourselves. After all, we are an elite group. Everyone at the table had traveled extensively and has very impressive resumes. And yet, we are provincials in a wider view of the art world. If we’re such hotshots, why do we live in a dinky city like Portland? Big fish in a small pond? Maybe so. But I think place works on an artist in a much more complicated way than the simple rural-urban divide. I don’t think we chose Portland because we can’t hack it in the big, Big City. I think we chose Portland because of a broader sensibility: to our contacts with peers and a hands-on working ethos and independence. Portland is a place where there is an acute awareness of the weather and the seasonal changes. A mental map of where you’re standing in relationship to the world guides an artist in subtle ways. The regional artist, while in danger of cultivating a false high self-opinion, may be a bulwark or even an antidote to the corrosion of a global celebrity culture. We arrived the next morning bright and early as per Frank’s demand. Jokes about bad coffee and gambling greeted him. (We Portlanders take our coffee seriously.) Frank had led us through the basics of monoprinting the night before. To make a monoprint you make an image on a Plexiglass plate with very thin printing ink. Ghosts can be achieved by printing a second or third time from the same image. It is a process that is deceptively straightforward, but requires skill and finesse. Stephen Hayes is adept with the technique. Sang ah, Aki and Heidi had never done it. David, Bruce, and I had made monoprints on occasion, but not with any real rigor. Michelle, a painter, had a real feel for the process. As work began, I realized how freeing it was to be a complete amateur at something. I regularly use printmaking in my own work, but I make block prints, which requires a different sensibility and skill set. It also became apparent that I was getting to know my fellow Fellows more by watching them work than had I just sitting around talking. Something very deep and instinctual is communicated through one’s work process. The more we as a culture communicate via typing on tiny tablets, the less we really get to know each other through wordless interaction. As a teacher, I’ve become more and more aware of the importance of bodily experience. Throughout the weekend, there were huge blocks of time when the studio would take on the tranquil hum of concentration and creative joy. Aki worked quietly in one corner creating stunning analog images that somehow matched his usual digital mode of working. When he pulled his prints towards the end of the day they knocked us all out. David made images that reflected his new body of drawings and paintings with scumbled forms disappearing into gray sfumato. Sang-ah was unbelievably prolific hitting a stride incredible for a first timer. Stephen pulled one lovely landscape after another. Heidi, resistant at first, dove right into experimental mode. Michelle’s prints held the seeds of new work. Bruce created thick, lovely and strange tree images. Early on, I had a revelation about the process that relates to being a local. I felt like one day of printing was all I needed. I got a couple of images I liked and a lot that didn’t. Now I would either want to 26
high desert journal
commit to an entire residency or be satisfied with the one-day tutorial. There is a similar relationship between the traveler and the local. The local has clocked many waking hours in a place (and dreaming hours for that matter) and knows his home deeply. But the traveler only sees the most superficial of qualities about a place. Anything whiz-bang, or novel is in the forefront, like the taste of cloying sugar. It is only with reflection that those novel impressions get connected to the more complex flavors of the place – and that takes time. Of course, a traveler can see a place with a beginner’s eyes and sense possibility where a local may have become blind or entrenched in particular conclusions. The most important quality an artist can bring to a place is the nimble position of maintaining that tourist insight while wedding it to that of the local. One sensibility should never win out over the other. During a mid-afternoon lull, I walked outside to look at the hills and the sky. Ah, that blue sky was heartbreaking. Birdcalls faintly echoed through the calm afternoon. I heard silence. I’m so used to living in an environment that emanates a constant barrage of electronic chirping and whirring and dinging and barking, that I forgot what quiet is like. There was no smartphone to check, no updates, no messages. When I returned to my workstation, I painted a landscape. A blue sky and a yellow hill. A suggestion of an out building. It turned out to be one of my favorite prints of the day. That evening, exhausted from the workday, the remaining Fellows stayed on to have dinner in Pendleton at a little place called Great Northern. On the way in, I saw Betty Feves’ son watering the flowers. Inside, while drinking some delicious local beer, a group of musicians was just finishing up a session. They sat at a round table playing fiddles, accordions and guitars, drinking pints and playing old-time tunes. The group was followed by two members of Reina del Cid and the Cidizens from Minneapolis. The duo consisted of Reina, the singer and songwriter and guitarist Toni Lindgren. A young bearded guy – a transplant from Portland – who said he convinced the band to come to Pendleton, joined David, Aki, Bruce and myself. He had contacted them via Facebook. Watching this somewhat old-fashioned singersongwriter on a low budget tour aided by social media, gave me another glimpse of what being a regional artist means. This was an exchange that could only have happened on the ground, in person. I bought a cd and we went back to the hotel. At the hotel we enjoyed a nightcap at the casino where we watched a local band do tepid covers of soul classics. Here was another glimpse of the heart of Saturday night in Pendleton. In the morning, we drove home listening to Reina del Cid and the Cidizens’ new cd. Visions of the desert landscape were punctured by the Umatilla weapons depot and other grim realities of the contemporary West. We also passed hills where Feves had dug her clay, and the cliffs and clouds that are suggested in Lavadour’s abstract paintings. It occurred to me that like it or not, place makes an artist. David, Ellen, and I all teach at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Aki teaches at Reed College, Bruce teaches at Marylhurst and Portland State University, Heidi and Michelle teach at Oregon College of Art and Craft. Stephen has taught at most of those institutions not to mention various workshops. As a group we have trained a whole generation of Pacific Northwest artists. Moving from the arid land into the wet spray of the western Cascades, I sensed the numerous threads that connect the landscape of the high desert to my home in Portland: the grain brought from eastern Oregon along the train lines to the ports of Portland; the goods shipped across the Pacific that land in North Portland docks; and the other migrations, natural and unnatural, that spin webs of connection east to west, west to east, south and north, carrying not only goods, but ideas. It’s time to lose the old idea about regionalism, that it’s backwards and conservative. A regional artist is not a provincial quaking at the unknown. The regional can be progressive and generative, alive to what is most human. Back in Portland, I unpacked my bag and unrolled the prints I made. I was glad to see my daughter, who, as it turns out is a Portland native. She and my wife showed me the tomatoes that had ripened in the garden. I’ve lived in this house longer than almost any other home. Out the window, migratory birds were preparing for the next season. < hdj >