Shelley Curtis | OHS Exhibits: Art About Agriculture: A Retrospective | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.2

OHS EXHIBITS

Art About Agriculture: A Retrospective

by Shelley Curtis

THIS BOUNTIFUL PLACE IS A retrospective exhibition of the Art About Agriculture permanent art collection. Reaching beyond simply illustrating agriculture in Oregon, 155 regional artists have created works of art that connect us to the agricultural landscapes and related natural resources of the Pacific Northwest. Majestic mountain ranges, rivers that flow through fertile valleys to estuaries and the Pacific Ocean, high deserts, wheatfields, vineyards, the light and atmosphere of Oregon's gradually changing seasons, and an array of iconoclastic agricultural symbols have inspired these artists to draw, paint, photograph, sculpt, and assemble a mixture of art mediums into cohesive compositions. Their works of art enlighten and delight.

These artists proclaim the Pacific Northwest's abundant agricultural enterprise with both insight and understanding. Karen Rudd's steel sculpture Pea Pods and Karen Hendricks's watercolor Last Summer's Poppies, for example, enchant from close observation of the ornamental. Marly Stone in Duck Harvest, a hand-tinted gelatin silver photograph, and Frances Ross in her watercolor Hilltop View of Siena, convey the agriculture of exotic lands. Two artists, Susan Trueblood Stuart in her watercolor Tualatin Vineyard II and Loren Nelson in Laurel Ridge Winery and Vineyard, his gelatin silver photograph, investigate the region's burgeoning wine industry. Charles True's digital panoramic photograph Filbert Orchard at Sunrise is the collection's first work of art in this new photographic media. It is a contrast to Jan Boles's Near Wilder, Jan. 1992, a stunning montage assembled from a series of gelatin silver photographs created before techniques of digital photography became widely available.

Agrarian roots are encapsulated in unusual ways in pieces such as Rich Bergeman's platinum-palladium photograph Boston Mill, Shedd, OR and Charles Leach's nocturne Reflections on Time, an acrylic painting — both of the same nineteenth-century flourmill that is now an interpretive museum. Don Whitaker's gelatin silver photograph Forward to the Past captures a farmer glancing past his tractor, and Robert Schlegel's acrylic painting Grain Elevator express emotions often attached to symbols of the past, such as an outmoded implement and a structure that once may have served as the hub of a farming community.

Robert Schlegel, Grain Elevator, acrylic on board; recipient of the 2005 Carey L. and Glen S. Strome Agricultural Art Memorial Purchase Award (sponsored by Gayle Strome)

Courtesy of the artist

The Art About Agriculture program began at the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University in 1982–1983. It was founded by a dean's advisory committee that included university faculty and agriculturists from throughout Oregon. The Committee established fundamentals for the art exhibition, which opened at the main campus and toured the state during the spring and summer. The founders also scripted basics to enable the College to initiate a permanent art collection that could continue to grow, by accessioning art through jury review from among the pieces selected for the annual exhibits.

Sally Haley, Filberts, acrylic on canvas; recipient of the 1983 E.R. Jackman Foundation Purchase Award

Courtesy of the artist

Today, this art collection represents 156 artists with more than 200 works of art, including drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, quilts, sculptures, watercolors, and mixed-media pieces. For those who visit this year's exhibition, This Bountiful Place, or read about it in its catalog, it becomes clear that through a unique partnership with the College, these artists have been responsible for advancing Art About Agriculture program themes. They have given expression to the agriculture and natural resources of the Northwest and to their lives and lands they traverse beyond this region.

Because the annual art competitions are open to artists living in the Northwest, we know that the artists represented in the permanent collection live or have lived here. Many are native to this region, while others have relocated here from other states and from Canada, England, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, South Africa, and Spain. Their ages span seventy-two years. Sally Haley, born in 1908, is the oldest; Michael Lawrence, born in 1980, is the youngest. However diversified in origins and generations, their works of art are focal points for connecting ideas and activities to time and place.

The artists who apply for the art competition and the panel of three jurors, which changes each year, shape this dynamic collection. Each year, artists are invited to investigate the main themes of agriculture and natural resources. In some years, the curators have designed prospectuses that identify such subthemes as the color spectrum, fibers, related implements and structures — barns, silos, threshers, tractors — seasonality, and food. Artists have investigated and broadly interpreted these topics to constitute a statement that exists only in the Art About Agriculture permanent collection.

Rich Bergeman, Boston Mill, Shedd, OR, platinum and palladium print; recipient of the 2003 Northeast Environmental Purchase Award (the Curtis family)

Courtesy of the artist

Together, they let us experience the western landscape and light, agricultural practices and products that provide sustenance, people in relation to land and to toil, and the cultural diversity that is found in the Pacific Northwest.

THE REGION HAS A DISTINCTIVE body of artistic work focused on agriculture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington sought to tell the story of the process of pioneer settlement in the Great Plains and the West.¹ Their friendship and their style of art resurface in some of the artworks in Art About Agriculture. One of Oregon's most notable twentieth-century painters, Clayton Sumner "C.S." Price, studied art under Russell at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. Price later moved to Portland to live from 1909 to 1915. From there he moved to California, returning to Portland in 1928 until his death in 1950. Nelson Sandgren arrived in Portland not long after Price returned.² The two men met through a circle of artists that gathered regularly to engage in art-related parlance — a circle of artists with lasting connections and influences in the Northwest.³

Karen Rudd, Pea Pods, steel; recipient of the 2005 Roy D. Nielsen Art About Agriculture Purchase Award (sponsored by Gwil Evans and William Cook)

Courtesy of the artist

Sandgren was hired by Oregon State University in 1947, where he is now professor emeritus of art.⁴ He is represented in Art About Agriculture with an oil painting, Spring Series #3, and a monoprint, The Gardener. Several artists who trained with Sandgren, including his son Erik, are also represented in the collection.⁵ Of particular interest in this lineage is Marie "Lid" Rhynard, who took watercolor workshops with Sandgren. She is represented in the collection with a watercolor, Sheep Sheds at High Noon, similar in style to Remington's architectural illustrations such as his Coming and Going of the Pony Express.⁶ Both works portray a single building that conforms to the landscape, rendered with weathered textures that blend the structures' hand-hewn materials with natural surroundings of windblown shrubs, rocky outcroppings, and pastures. Rhynard's fence and Remington's diagonal linear elements reinforce the ideas and observations of expansiveness. The colors of both paintings draw from the West's clear, midday palette of pale yellow, orange, and cerulean, in contrast to the buildings' shaded façades painted with cool dark hues.

Remote settlements are also the subjects for colorfully storied myths of the American West. Clint Brown's Sweet Betsy Romance situates a compelling Wild West narrative in a simple composition of three flat-color fields placed at varying angles to one another and a keystone section of blank paper in the center.⁷ A cowboy on galloping horseback leans into the chase — to the empty center space devoid of detail or color that abruptly becomes black at the right edge. Sweet Betsy, an excellent bovine specimen, stands firmly in her element, holding the horse and horseman in a gentle gaze. Another ghost-like figure on horseback floats away in the opposite direction from the other rider and Betsy. Brown's mixed media piece embodies the adventure, heroics, and sense of loss and longing popularized in ballads and folklore about Oregon Country's inland reaches.

Ken McCormack, Jam Session, type C photograph; recipient of the 1992 Oregon Women for Agriculture Purchase Award

Courtesy of the artist

THE MOUNTAIN RANGES, HIGH deserts, coast, rivers, and fertile agricultural river valleys have inspired artists to portray the Northwest. Pieces by two of the artists in the Art About Agriculture permanent collection, Humberto Gonzalez and the late John Rock, serve as an overview of the collection's landscape-inspired holdings.

Humberto Gonzalez was born in Mexico and moved to the United States when his family immigrated to the Midwest in 1951. He moved to Lebanon, Oregon, in 1971 to teach language arts at Lebanon High School. Gonzalez, who is now retired and lives in Portland, is a prolific watercolorist who paints throughout the Northwest and in many other parts of the world. His two watercolors from the collection, Remains of the Homestead and Snow Peak Orchard, were painted on location in Oregon in the plein-air tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. Watercolor painting has always been one of the more popular mediums for Northwest artists, possibly because of the portability of the materials and the immediacy of the translucent colors. Gonzalez writes:

Line and color are the essential elements which hold my interest and give form to my participation in the creative process. From a very early age drawing, the simple act of making marks to record an observation, proved fascinating and magical. In watercolor I have found the most natural vehicle in which to exercise this visual interest. The medium's characteristics of nuance, transparency, immediacy, and flexibility contribute further to complement my chosen approach. My painting, although drawn directly from fieldwork, are studies, struggles, or searches; they tend to reflect the nature of the painting process as well as the basic substance of the subject matter. The subject might begin as the focus of observation, but as the process unfolds and develops, it is the visual dialogue, the internalizing of the moment with its myriad influences, which I synthesize to produce a personal reflection of this experience.⁸

John Rock (1919–1993) taught art at Oregon State University from 1957 to 1989 and was widely regarded as a master printmaker. His painting Peoria Wheat Fields is a regionalist's expression of a Willamette River Valley locale. The scene is simultaneously representational and abstract from atmospheric effects near the Willamette that produce such painterly qualities on many days. Rock captures the sky mirroring the land in an elegant balance of subtle shifts in hue and saturation. He continues his discerning observations by softening details in the dissolving background at the horizon and in his spare surface treatment of earth mounded in the foreground. Thereby, Rock sets up a glowing instant of light reflecting off variegated grasses in the center. It is a moment that could quickly vanish, as those we see in the fleeting arc of a rainbow or while watching spectral displays at sunrise and sunset.

Nature on a grand scale brings the lengthened sunlit days of the growing season, warm spring rain, and dark, dormant winters. Elise Wagner created Dawn After Storm after watching a storm over the Willamette Valley and then seeing the front move and the Valley begin to clear. She juxtaposes three panels horizontally, simulating the storm's path above the land. Her use of layered pigmented encaustic wax produces a churning mixture of thunderheads, cumulus clouds, azure sky, and slices of the earth beneath all the commotion, to dramatic visceral effect.⁹

RECORDINGS OF AGRICULTURAL practices and products that provide sustenance are frequently at the center of pieces in Art About Agriculture and include still lifes and two- and three-dimensional stylizations of goods that reach our tables from the region's fields and orchards. In Filberts, oil on canvas, Sally Haley exercises classic Modernist ideals, using basic color, line, the illusion of light, and shape as universal language. Haley carefully constructs these elements to create the realism of a woven basket generously full of unshelled hazelnuts, each accurately modeled with textures and tones. She suggests an environment far removed from garden or orchard with an arrangement of broad ochre squares that closely resemble a courtyard terrace. Another American still life painter and Haley contemporary, Wayne Thiebaud, isolated elements such as food — often confections and mass-produced foods — and common household items in a square background of flat color. His oil painting, Cherries, 1983, is an example from his work.¹⁰

Kristie Johnson, Amanita, silkscreen; recipient of the 2003 Captial Press and Paul Lamb and Reese Lamb Art About Agriculture Purchase Awards (Mike O'Brian and Lamb Foundation)

Courtesy of the artist

Alan Mevis, Tony Angelo in His Zucchini Field, NE 33rd Drive, Portland Oregon, October 3, 2003, gelatin silver photograph; recipient of the 2004 Jim and Stella Coakley Purchase Award (sponsored by Jim and Stella Coakley)

Courtesy of the artist

Ken McCormack's Jam Session is a color photograph of home-processed jams in glass jars, backlit to reveal an inviting color palette of concentrated fruits. Acquiring fruit is a balance of nature and human labor, which is boldly reiterated in Laura Ross-Paul's watercolor Find and in Nelson Sandgren's Spring Series #3. Making and canning the jam requires an exact science — a reliable recipe — and an able cook. It is much easier to crack a walnut shell and eat the nutritious meat inside. Mark Elliot created a one-of-a-kind testimonial to this nearly perfect food in his woodcarving Walnut. He sculpted this curvilinear nutmeat whole — scaled to approximately 500 percent larger than life size — from a single chunk of an English walnut tree. McCormack's and Elliot's pieces are amazing transformations of common foods, while Ross-Paul's watercolor and Sandgren's oil painting connect us to fruit and nut ranching and gathering practices.

PERSONAL GARDENS AND THE edible goods planted, tended, and harvested from them are often sources of artistic inspiration. Lynn Wiley's Homage to Passages derives from such a setting. Her vibrant flower blossom is an attractive display for a butterfly to locate nectar and carry out its role as pollinator.¹¹ As the title of Wiley's piece implies, her art also takes its inspiration from knowing and appreciating gardening as an involvement with less-than-precise life cycles.

While human figures are usually implied in this collection of art, some artists feature individuals in their compositions. In Amanita, a silkscreen by Kristie Johnson, the artist creates an autobiographical childhood narrative. She overlaps elements to convey memories of staying with her grandmother at the edge of a forest, a style similar in its storytelling effect to narrative silk screens by Robert Rauschenberg from the 1960s and 1970s.¹² Although the forest was a richly intriguing place in Johnson's print, she needed her grandmother's protection from its certain dangers, especially the beautiful, poisonous amanita mushrooms. Johnson includes a photograph of her grandmother's home among the layered images. A drawing of an immature hand in the protective grasp of a much larger adult hand tells us about their relationship and the tradition of passing knowledge from one generation to another.

In Michael Lawrence's King, Queen, and Jack of Spades an intricately detailed wood engraving depicts a farmer, his wife, and a scarecrow, fashioned as if they are face cards from a game deck. This imaginative portrayal of farmers shows them laboring on one end and resting on the other, bringing the figural work of Thomas Hart Benton to mind, whose characters exhibit signs of strain and fatigue from their labor.¹³

Tony Angelo in His Zucchini Field, NE 33rd Drive, Portland, Oregon, October 3, 2003, a gelatin silver photograph by Alan Mevis, reminds us of the human labor required for tending and harvesting crops from family farming enterprises. Angelo appears in his field of zucchini mounds, which he has planted with care in a grid pattern. Close observation also reveals that this field is clear of weeds and that the thriving squash plants are abundant with vegetables from Angelo's efforts. He stands firmly in his field, one of the few remaining farms within Portland's city limits now threatened by urban encroachment.¹⁴

Marjorie McDonald's oil and tissue collage, The Family Farm, shows a man and woman raking the barnyard, with two children nearby feeding a small flock of free-range chickens. Other animals are at pasture behind a fence that skirts the path to the family dwelling high on the horizon line in the background. McDonald achieves a sophisticated style by her use of collage materials that combine both primitive and impressionistic characteristics. The Family Farm and An Apprehensive Bird, depicting the scene just before the family's prize turkey receives its first indication of its imminent preparations for becoming a family feast, are recognizable tales we know about farm life.

AN ARRAY OF CULTURES INFLUences the Pacific Northwest, from indigenous peoples to the many peoples who have migrated to the region since the turn of the nineteenth century. Art About Agriculture reflects these cultural nuances both in the artists represented in the collection and in its exotic agricultural art. Duck Harvest, by Marly Stone, depicts a woman poised in the extreme foreground confronting the viewer, a protective angel to the beautiful rice paddy behind her. There are few ducks to be seen, leaving us to wonder if the woman has frightened them off with her stern expression. While the geographical location of this field is unknown, it certainly is not in the Pacific Northwest.

Amy Beller painted The Red Bowl, an empty bowl with chopsticks lying at its side on the table to indicate that this bowl would hold only one portion. The simple bowl and familiar yet foreign utensils are chosen and arranged sparingly with brush strokes of delicate impasto paints in prismatic colors. This inviting vignette places us squarely at a table with a modern twist on today's modest health-conscious trends.¹⁵

The Art About Agriculture permanent collection has two bookends — the rich history of the Pacific Northwest and the region's magnificent geography. The art engages us in new ideas that help connect us to the past and to the land through the many facets of agriculture. The College of Agricultural Sciences is privileged to represent these artists and to present the Art About Agriculture permanent art collection in a retrospective exhibition, This Bountiful Place.

Notes

^1. Peter H. Hassrick, Remington, Russell and the Language of Western Art (Washington, D.C.: Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 2000).

^2. Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, Oregon Painters: The First Hundred Years, 1859–1959 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1999), 258; Nelson Sandgren, interviewed by Shelley Curtis, Corvallis, Ore., March 13, 2006. Sandgren moved to Portland with his family around 1930. He was encouraged by his parents to draw from a young age. Sandgren's father was a blacksmith and master metalsmith who learned the trade from his father. Sandgren visited Price's studio several times and observed: "Price scraped his paint while painting and applied heavy impasto often with a palette knife." Sandgren says he practices this scraping technique to remove some paint yet leave an impression of the composition, which he learned from observing Price at work.

^3. Nelson Sandgren, interviewed by Shelley Curtis, Corvallis, Ore., April 6, April 29, 2006. Soon after Sandgren moved to Portland, he met the Rev. Bernard F. Geiser, who was instrumental in introducing him to Amanda Snyder. Geiser encouraged Sandgren to interact with influential artists associated with the Portland Art Museum in the early 1900s, including Louis Bunce, William Givler, Charles Henrey, Henry "Hank" Kowert, C.S. Price, Charles Voorhies, and James McLarty and his wife Barbara.

^4. Ibid.; Allen and Klevit, Oregon Painters, 276–7. See also J. D. Cleaver, "Introduction to Oregon Art History," in Allen and Klevit, Oregon Painters, 20.

^5. Artists in the collection who studied with Sandgren include: Mark Clarke, Laura Ross-Paul, Marie "Lid" Rhynard, Erik Sandgren, and Carol Yates. Sandgren interview, April 6, 2006.

^6. Matthew Baigell, The Western Art of Frederic Remington (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), color plate 29.

^7. Clinton Brown is emeritus professor of art at Oregon State University.

^8. Humberto Gonzalez, "Artist's statement," in Art About Agriculture (Corvallis: College of Agricultural Sciences, Oregon State University, 2005).

^9. Daniel Wheeler, "The European School of Painting: 1945–60," in Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 61–92.

^10. Karen Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 96.

^11. Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch artist who changed the course of painting with his imaginative ideas and methods, indulged in close observations of plants as metaphors for his own artistic maturity, decline, and renewal, as in his oil painting Irises, 1889. As van Gogh struggled to emerge anew from conflicts and confinements, flowers and agricultural themes symbolized his tumultuous journey. Susan Alyson Stein, ed., Van Gogh: A Retrospective (New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1986), 247.

^12. Wheeler, "European School of Painting," 132.

^13. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York: Knopf, 1989), 135, 145, 214.

^14. Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997), 233.

^15. Douglas Messerli, ed., The Sun & Moon Guide to Eating through Literature and Art (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994). This cookbook is a fascinating compilation of literature illustrated with works of art and stories of food from America's cultural diversity.

The College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University is pleased to present these works of art and many more in This Bountiful Place: Art About Agriculture, a Retrospective of the Permanent Collection (1983–2006). The exhibit is presented in partnership with the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon, and the generous sponsorship of Brenda Hood in memory of her late husband, John Gordon Hood.

An exhibit catalogue, published by the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences in cooperation with the Oregon Historical Society Press, is also available in the ohs Museum Store. It contains 238 images, including 183 full-color artworks.

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