Born and raised in Northeast Portland, photojournalist Bev Grant long ago moved to New York where, while Portland slept, the world was happening. . .
Why do Sherrie Wolf’s still lifes of flowers, fruit, vases and other commonplace objects, now on exhibit at Russo Lee Gallery and the Jordon Schnitzer Family Foundation warehouse, somehow satisfy more deeply than the real thing? . .
I know, I know: I just had an exhibit at the Ford of my most recent work, but this is different. Half of the paintings in that show have run off to new homes, and gallery space formerly graced by the work of other artists was offered to me. . .
My show at The Ford Gallery of Art opens this Saturday. I will be showing this painting, “flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing,” along with a selection of other work from the last few years. . .
I crave beauty. The fragrance of a heritage rose. The cry of a newborn. The reflection of late afternoon sunlight on the underside of breeze-bounced cottonwood leaves.
When this painting was little more than a colored sketch, she and I were listening in my studio to KMHD Radio play tracks from the 1957 Blue Note album, “Blowing in from Chicago.” The painting liked the music and chose it as her name (paintings do that kind of thing).
Flow and Beat, Advance and Retreat, Rise and Take a Bow in Disappearing. That is how Langston Hughes described the pulsating rhythm of James Baldwin’s prose, and it became the goal for my most recent painting, a sprawling five-panel pas de deux.
Self-portraits seldom portray contentment or joy. We see an artist glancing in a mirror as it captures the doubt and intensity of the act of creation. It is as if the creator and their reflection are each an expression of the other’s anxieties—yet they are the same person.
In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth, was tortured and murdered by two white men in Mississippi. The crime galvanized the Civil Rights Movement at a critical moment: Rosa Parks had Till on her mind when she refused to move to the back of the bus. A photograph of the young man’s mutilated body in his casket became an icon for Black Americans.
Join me for a stroll through a minefield: What do Chuck Close, Michael Jackson, Robert E. Lee, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Stalin, Christopher Columbus and the Taliban have in common? Answer: They have each been on one end or the other (sometimes both) of calls for the destruction or erasure of art.