Roger Saydack started writing his book about Modernist Oregon painter Clayton Sumner Price about eight years ago, but in fact, the retired Eugene attorney has been working on it for most of his adult life.

His path into the life and art of Price, who died in 1950, was one of the artist’s later paintings: The Fisherman, which Saydack saw at the Detroit Institute of Arts when he was 12 years old. Clearly, it made an impression.

Saydack’s research and storytelling is featured in a terrific 312-page book about Price, published by Willamette University’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem and distributed by Oregon State University Press. C.S. Price: A Portrait is the title of both the book and the retrospective show at the Hallie Ford that runs through Aug. 30.

The book, elegantly designed by Phil Kovacevich, retails for $60.

Generously illustrated, the book functions on three levels. It efficiently tells a story about an unlikely figure who became a celebrated painter; it dives deeply into Price’s artistry; and finally, it contextualizes everything within the frame of late 19^th– and early 20^th-century developments in Western visual art.

Throughout the 15 chapters, we get glimpses of how various events, groups, and institutions fit into the world in which Price went from an Iowa homesteader to one of Oregon’s most famous painters — the Monterey artists’ colony in California, Timberline Lodge, and the Portland Art Museum, for example.

“The book is a portrait of a man whose philosophy of life was formed in the last days of the American frontier,” Saydack writes, “who moved to a modern city to have the freedom he needed to paint, and who discovered in Modernism how to give his art the meaning he sought.”

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The Hallie Ford opened in 1998 under the direction of John Olbrantz, and the museum’s dedication over the years to supporting Pacific Northwest art has included an ambitious publishing project. C.S. Price: A Portrait, is the 40th book published in 24 years, with designer Kovacevich on board for nearly all of them.

With the exhibition, of course, you get the art — more than 40 paintings to savor, up close and personal. The accompanying wall panels include some terrific anecdotes, but only in the book do you get the full contours and details of Price’s life.

Born in 1874 into a large family, Price grew up on farms and ranches in Iowa, Wyoming, and Canada. Like his father, he had the skills of a homesteader and cowhand, but even as a youth he was, apparently, different: “Clate had a lot in him in those days that none of us understood,” one rancher recalls. Few people would come to understand him from talking to him, because he didn’t talk much about himself.

Saydack traces Price from his days on the farm, where he started to draw with his mother’s encouragement. “He found that drawing helped him to experience more completely those moments when he felt he was part of something big and deep,” Saydack writes. Later, he would describe that something as the One Big Thing, and he spent a lifetime chasing it in his painting.

As he never married and had no children, Price’s life fits neatly into chapters that align with the few places he lived. There’s one for his first stint in Portland, when he worked as a magazine illustrator. Another follows him to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where he first saw contemporary paintings, including one by Cézanne. We follow him to Monterey, where he became part of the artists’ colony there in the 1920s. This was “where painting becomes his life’s work.”

Saydack spends several chapters in California because Price’s time in the state was so formative. Thanks to connections he made with artists there, he finally landed several one-person shows and was “recognized as one of the most innovative Modernists in the Bay Area.”

In 1929, Price returned to Portland, where he lived a few blocks from the Portland Art Museum. A lovely paragraph concisely describes his set-up:

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It is worth remembering that Price did this innovative painting when he was living alone in a one-room studio in an old office building in Portland, with a hot plate, a trunk that held a few possessions, a table and a couple of chairs, a spring bed and his easel — that’s all he needed around him to be one of the most advanced painters on the West Coast in the 1940s.

By the end of the book, it will likely have become clear to the reader that for Price — whatever his philosophical or theological leanings were (had he even been able to articulate them) his art was essentially a spiritual practice. Saydack dedicates the final chapter to this topic (“Something Sacred, That’s It”) but he pretty much nails it in a single paragraph:

Price had many of the attributes of a religious person; his ascetic life, poverty, and celibacy freed him from the distractions that might impair his ability to experience the spiritual. But the religious person leads a life devoted to the service and glory of a divinity who is approached through ritual worship and prayer. Price in his later years approached this divinity, the great commonality that he called the One Big Thing, through the act of painting, which became a meditative act for him, comparable in meaning and in purpose to prayer for a religious person.

The book is remarkable in that the very nature of Price’s asceticism means he left few footprints for an investigator to follow. With the biographical material, Saydack is constantly (and necessarily) making educated guesses about what Price may have done, why he did or didn’t do something, whether he ever met a particular person, whether he attended a particular exhibition where he may or may not have seen a particular painting that influenced his own work.

This isn’t a criticism; Saydack’s journalism is cautious but thorough and precise. “Pointing out the unknowns was important to me,” he told me. “I wanted to distinguish facts from assumptions of one type or another, from speculation by me or others.”

It works splendidly, occasionally lending the narrative the flavor of a detective story. Even so, Saydack said he never regarded Price as a mystery that had to be “solved.”

“I was trying to understand the sources of his art,” Saydack said. For more than a decade, he spoke often with artist Douglas Lynch, who got to know Price well in the 1930s and 1940s. “I felt close to Price when I was talking with Douglas, especially when we talked about Price’s art. We discussed Price’s ideas about the state of mind he needed to paint, but only so we could explore how his state of mind ‘facilitated’ his ability to paint.  When I asked him questions about Price’s personality or what it was like talking with him in his studio, Douglas courteously steered us back to Price’s art.”

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Unless, years from now, someone unearths dozens of Price’s paintings that have gone missing and boxes full of personal correspondence, it’s unlikely that a more comprehensive study of the artist will ever be written.

The book’s appendices include a comprehensive chronology of Price’s life, a list of selected exhibitions and museums and galleries that have his paintings, Price’s “technical advice for Charles Heaney,” a bibliography, and detailed footnotes. The preface and forward are written, respectively, by Olbrantz and Roger Hull, the art teacher and writer and champion of regional art who passed away in 2023.

“I had the benefit of the great team that John gave me work with,” Saydack said, ticking them off: “Nick Allison, a skilled and elegant copy editor who helped me write clearly and think deeply, Phil Kovacevich, a book designer who thinks like a painter, Carrie Wicks, whose meticulous proofreading was always helpful and clarifying, and Silas Cook, whose installation beautifully presented Price and helped make the exhibition a rich and engaging experience.”

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Read David Bates’s complete Q&A interview with Roger Saydack, curator of the Hallie Ford’s C.S. Price exhibit and author of its accompanying book, on Bates’s Artlandia Substack page here.