Three Holidays, Two Talks, and a Trio of Exhibits – Urban Art & Antiques

With a trio of holidays still to look forward to, we initially made the rounds to the openings on First Thursday (also known as 1th). The holidays, “503 Day” (when the date coincides with Portland’s area code, that’s a holiday) Cinco de Mayo, and May the Fourth (be with you) were on the docket as were several exhibits including Weird Sports with Sol Neelman, Dorothy Goode: A Retrospective at Augen and Daniel Robinson: Some Kind of Lonesome at Russo Lee. 

We hadn’t stopped in Blue Sky Gallery on Thursday evening but were invited to a talk coinciding with an exhibit of oversized photographs in the show Weird Sports with Sol Neelman. If you’ve never heard of Chess Boxing, it’s just the kind of thing Sol likes to capture on film or pixels. The size of the images brought the events to life, but perhaps can’t compete with a 3D reel (aka ViewMaster) also offered by the artist via his website. 

The talk was one of several “weird” events that day including characters with light sabers and a visit from Portland’s bagpipe unicycler. 

An hour later at Augen Gallery, Art Critic Richard Speer gave a talk (cover) to a packed room on the exhibit Dorothy Goode: A Retrospective. As her life partner, Richard was able to provide a personal and intimate insight into the life and work of this artist who passed away suddenly in November 2020. Several family members and friends were in the room to celebrate the artist’s return to the scene postmortem. The works spanned the decades and gave a good view of the evolution. Dorothy made her own egg tempera paint and gesso and Richard had with him the brushes, pots, pigments, and other tools the artist left behind. 

Throughout her career, Goode refused to make just another pretty picture to lighten a wall. Her intellectual curiosity and a DIY mentality pushed her for a relentless interrogation of process, material, and her own thinking process. The homemade paint, the repurposed wood, and the mark-making from her own or others are part of her practice, not despite, but because of the challenges. 

Abstract expressionism outside of its midcentury origins often seems forced – like an attempt to relive an exciting period when artists broke new ground. And, although it’s immediately colorful and pleasing, it takes spending some with it to realize it’s also substantial – a careful balance between painful deliberation (scrubbing layers of egg tempera for its translucency) and free-spirited improvisation (that dripped paint from her penchant for exquisite line drawing)

Take the large work Other People’s Secrets No.5 from 2012. The colorful strokes cover text, some of which can reveal itself when you see it in the right light. Perhaps the most captivating painting is from 1994, Incised (above). The abstract figural work contains intense scratches through the paint into the gesso and serves somehow as a pathway into the intense emotion put into the work thirty years ago. 

At Russo Lee, it is easy to forget the contemporary nature of Daniel Robinson’s paintings. From afar, these landscapes based on Eastern Oregon scenery are reminiscent of regionalist art from the WPA era. It helps that the artist wore a cowboy hat at the show. The dress and the landscape seem removed from the stereotypical Coastal Pacific Northwest. That is the draw –  to be instantly transported to an unfamiliar, yet nearby land so convincingly where the setting sun brings warmth and vitamin D.

Unlike the regionalism art of Grant Wood, or Marvin Cone, Robinson has a softness that permeates throughout the canvas. In particular, his few industrial scenes, while following a similar compositional approach as Charles Sheeler, are worn and lonesome. The advancement in industrialization, the very elements that attracted Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth into the subject matter, has become a symbol of the bygone past in many small towns. Here, the rustiness echoes the same peacefulness as the golden prairies, like an elegy.