In cleaning one closet out this weekend and throwing away lots, taking a box to Goodwill, some things to file…I found a stack of cards that a local funeral parlor (now the site of a Starbuck’s) made up in the 1950’s and handed out. They are all photos of Salem from the early 1900’s and […]
Category: City
Sleuthing Alden Mason
The painter Alden Mason (1919-2013) was becoming real to us as we spoke to his family, friends, colleagues, and former students over the course of a long research weekend recently. We looked at a wide range of his work, many family photos, listened to anecdotes and the narrative began shaping into the whole person. Monday […]
Lucinda Parker: “Knowledge is Not Our Enemy”
Until December 2nd you have a chance to see Lucinda Parker’s new paintings at the Russo Lee Gallery (805 NW 21st Street in Portland)…most done in the last three months. The show is entitled “Knowledge is Not Our Enemy” which sounds possibly political, but isn’t. It’s about mountains…most specifically our own MT. Hood. This morning […]
Conker Park
R, Sidney and I have a lot of “traditions” we’ve established in the last three years and one of those is “Conker Park” in the fall. It involves loading the top of a riding toy in the park with conkers and then making them fly off… we even went in late summer, even though we […]
The Road Trip Part 6: The Last Leg
Before we leave Temple Square and the elms let me show you this one…John Constable, English, “Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree,” oil, 1821….the fun of a resident art historian is that while one is in a reverie about the elms of one’s childhood, R is immediately struck with the similarity of the […]
Lucinda Parker, Alden Mason and a Research Road Trip
A couple of weeks ago we hit the road to Seattle with stops along the way. I had mending, R drove and we zoomed north along with scary log trucks, heading to Longview, Washington. R is deep into the manuscript he is preparing for a monograph on Portland painter Lucinda Parker, which will be published […]
So What About Blogs?
My blog posts have fallen off (and so have my statistics!)…maybe blogs are going the way of all things in this fast world of ours? My need to provide a narrative thread for this blog is slipping as I do more and more on Instagram…quick image, one line…done. The trouble with it is you have […]
Salem Sketchers
For a couple of years an intrepid group of local artists has been participating one Saturday a month in what is an international movement of urban sketchers…very casual, very fun. Each month they draw at a different location…I’ve dropped in and out, but decided to join today, even though the weather was iffy…(58 degrees on […]
City Day
Saturday we left home early to hear George Johanson talk about his new show at Augen Gallery (in the DeSoto Building)…the paintings are lovely and lively, as is the painter. I particularly liked this self portrait…(just above George’s head in the upper left of the painting is Louis Bunce’s life mask, which hangs in George’s […]
Jackie Johnson
Recently we visited painter Jackie Johnson’s studio in Portland on the occasion of a purchase/donation to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. A generous donor bought one of Jackie Johnson’s paintings for the museum collection, and on that occasion Jackie offered to donate a painting of hers to go along with the earlier donation. We […]