FAMILY

School’s out, but art classes are in on the Coast

From children making masks to adults learning about the Japanese art of fish-printing, the Coast offers a multitude of artful happy happenings this summer

June 12, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, NEWS & NOTES //

School’s out, but here on the Coast, classes are just beginning, and they’re not just for kids.

Mary Ann Gantenbein will teach a class for adults on collage during the Cannon Beach Summer Art Camp.
Mary Ann Gantenbein will teach a class for adults on collage during the Cannon Beach Summer Art Camp.

The Cannon Beach Arts Association has opened registration for its 17th Annual Art Camp, July 8-12. Five-day classes for the younger set include yoga (ages 4-12), 3D mask-making (8-12) and for the really wee ones — ages 3-5 — “Mini Makers.” The brochure describes the class as a “happy happening” for young and aspiring artists, who will draw, paint, create collages, and just plain play. 

Adult Art Camp offers three classes including “Watercolor by the Sea,” an introductory class in which artists will create a watercolor inspired by Cannon Beach and learn tips and tricks about painting with watercolors. It’s open to all levels, but designed for beginners.

Among classes at Sitka Center for the Arts is an August workshop on the “Art of the Letter. " Besides creating illustrated envelopes, the class will explore how letter-writing can survive in the digital age.
Among classes at Sitka Center for the Arts is an August workshop on the “Art of the Letter. ” Besides creating illustrated envelopes, the class will explore how letter-writing can survive in the digital age.

THE SITKA CENTER FOR THE ARTS is also gearing up for summer workshops — many are already full, but wait lists are available. Those still open include “Color Confidence for Artists,” a class for anyone working in any medium. Instructor Cynthia Herron will demonstrate mixing and matching paint, discuss color schemes for a variety of media, and talk about color as it is found in nature around the Sitka campus near Otis. In “Photography and Place,” students will examine the “potential of photographic practice to address contemporary issues of land use and environmental concepts.” And in “Mining Your Life for Laughs,” teacher Robert Balmer will take a look at “how humor writers turn the painful, the absurd, the odd, the embarrassing, the memorable,” into something to laugh about. Who couldn’t use that?

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Fermenting on South Coast: Live Culture

The 10-day celebration this fall is seeking proposals to build a "culture stand" that will be visitor center, merchandise table and gathering spot all in one

June 5, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, NEWS & NOTES, VISUAL ART //

A press release recently landed on my desk seeking proposals to build a “Culture Stand” for the upcoming “Live Culture Coast” to be held on the southern Oregon coast in October. I confess I was duly – and dually – baffled. A Culture Stand? Live Culture Coast? I had no idea, so I put in a call to Amber Peoples, the creative director behind the event. We began with the obvious.  

What exactly is Live Culture Coast?

Peoples: It’s a 10-day celebration of food, art, and place that will travel the entire South Coast from Reedsport to Brookings, over 135 miles, Oct. 18-27. This is the first. We’re calling it the pilot.

And a Culture Stand?

The Culture Stand itself will be on a 5-by-10 trailer. We’ll put it on the back of a truck and haul it. It’s a traveling visitor center; it’s a merchandise table, a gathering spot. Its location will designate where the celebration is, where the Live Culture Coast is focused that day. We’re also creating a map.

Fermentation Fest in Sauk Country, Wis., bills itself as a “celebration of live culture in all its forms, from dance to yogurt, poetry to sauerkraut,” as well as home-grown sausage. The October event is the inspiration for “Live Culture Coast” to be held along 135 miles of the South Oregon Coast this fall. Photo by: Amber Peoples
Fermentation Fest in Sauk Country, Wis., bills itself as a “celebration of live culture in all its forms, from dance to yogurt, poetry to sauerkraut,” as well as home-grown sausage. The October event is the inspiration for “Live Culture Coast” to be held along 135 miles of the South Oregon Coast this fall. Photo by: Amber Peoples

Let’s say the Culture Stand is parked in Coos Bay on Saturday, October 19. The event happening that day could be a brewery demonstration. It could be an art class, or a coffee roasting. We’re hoping people will sign up for one of these experiences, and that will encourage people to travel and explore the South Coast.

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Aquarium creates a fishy fantasy with “Seapunk”

The new exhibit uses elements of steampunk to showcase sea life. Across the bridge, the arts center welcomes Evan Peterson back to Newport

May 30, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY //

If there was any doubt the new exhibit at the Oregon Coast Aquarium was a success, one only had to listen last weekend as visitors discovered Seapunk: Powered by Imagination.

“This is awesome,” said one.

“This is so cool,” said another.

 And from a third: “I’ve got to come back tomorrow. I forgot to charge my phone.”

 And those were the adults.

A moray eel makes itself comfortable in the “Helmet Memorial” in the “Seapunk” exhibit.

“Seapunk” is a punning nod to steampunk, a genre of science fiction, art, technology, and fashion inspired by 19th-century steam-powered machinery. The exhibit’s story concerns Phineas K. Brinker, “a retro-futuristic and intrepid inventor” who is stranded in his submarine at the bottom of the sea and must find a way to survive. To do so, according to the aquarium website, Brinker “rebuilds the crippled submarine into a modern marvel of engineering by constructing imaginative variations on contraptions one may be familiar with today.”

The underwater fantasy plays out in a series of galleries with exhibits that are at times poignant, at others, humorous, each built around art, antiques, and sea life.

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Coast calendar: Studio tours, exhibits closing, steampunk ahead

Art events this week include a documentary film about art and madness, which may put you in the mood for the upcoming exhibition at the Oregon Coast Aquarium

May 15, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, FILM, VISUAL ART //

It’s not happening on the Coast, but you could say it is of the Coast. That’s the opening of an exhibit of poetry and photography by Oregon State University faculty member Joseph Ohmann Krause in The Little Gallery on the OSU campus in Corvallis. Inspired by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1854-1916), Drawing in the Northern Light combines eight poems with photos, most of them taken on the Oregon Coast.

Oregon State University professor Joseph Ohmann Krause combines his photographs of the Oregon Coast with his poetry in “Drawing in the Northern Light” in The Little Gallery on the OSU campus.
Oregon State University professor Joseph Ohmann Krause combines photographs of the Oregon Coast with poetry in “Drawing in the Northern Light,” a show on the OSU campus.

The idea came to Krause, a French professor, after he happened upon a catalog of Hammershøi’s, said Helen Wilhelm, curator of The Little Gallery.  

“In Hammershøi’s work, a lot of the paintings have to do with an empty room, or you can see beyond into a farther room,” Wilhelm said. “You get the feeling that, yes there are people who live in these rooms, but they just left. There is a sense of mystery, calm. Even a bit of isolation. 

“In Dr. Krause’s photos, there is never a person in them,” she continued. “There may be an empty beach scene, but you get the sense that someone was there earlier. The word ‘absence’ is the major word that comes to mind. The opposite of chaos.”

The opening is 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 4, in 210 Kidder Hall. Someone will be on hand to read the poems, and Wilhelm is hoping to find musicians to play compositions by Danish composer Dieterich Buxtehude, who has also inspired Krause.  “It’s going to be really elegant and lovely,” Wilhelm said.

The show is on view from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays (closed during lunch) May 28 through Sept. 30.

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UFO Festival: Keeping McMinnville weird for 20 years

Parade marchers on Saturday will include extraterrestrials of many stripes, while ufology buffs can attend presentations by scientists, authors, and witnesses

May 13, 2019 // CULTURE, FAMILY, YAMHILL //

Portland prides itself on keeping weird, but this weekend, McMinnville owns bragging rights for Oregon Weird. Saturday afternoon on Third Street, the restaurant-and-tasting-room-thick thoroughfare downtown, the weird will be out in force during a parade celebrating the city’s annual UFO Festival.

Every May, McMinnville draws an increasingly large crowd to mark one of ufology’s iconic events. On May 11, 1950, a farmer named Paul Trent snapped a couple of photographs of what appeared to be a flying disc over his rural Yamhill County property. Remarkably, he didn’t get the film developed right away, opting instead to finish the roll.

In the early 2000s, I talked to Phil Bladine, who in 1950 was the young publisher of his family-owned newspaper, the Telephone-Register (the forerunner of the McMinnville News-Register, where Bladine served as publisher until 1991). His recollection: Trent didn’t even think to rush down and alert the newspaper; he mentioned it to a McMinnville banker who in turn told the Register. For what it’s worth, Bladine didn’t think Trent was the sort  to perpetrate a hoax.

Paul Trent’s 1950 photo of what appears to be a flying disc above his Yamhill County field is the inspiration for this weekend’s UFO Festival.
Paul Trent’s 1950 photo of what appears to be a flying disc over his Yamhill County field is the inspiration for this weekend’s UFO Festival.

In ufological circles, Trent’s photos rank among the best photographic evidence of UFOs from the 20th century. (The acronym has lately fallen out of fashion in favor of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which is possibly a nod to more exotic theories that they are not necessarily physical objects, but visual evidence of some other-dimensional intelligence. That’s the theory I find most credible, anyway, and explored a couple years ago in a piece for the News-Register.)  

Trent’s mysterious images predate by many decades the era of big-screen-quality special effects that nearly anyone can pull off today with Photoshop. Even in the absence of high-tech tools, the photos (to use today’s vernacular) went viral. Following their appearance on the front page of the Telephone-Register, they were published in Life magazine and The Oregonian. For years, you were virtually guaranteed to see those pictures in any book about UFOs.

In 2000, McMenamins Hotel Oregon launched the festival to commemorate the event’s then-50th anniversary. It has, one might say, taken flight. It’s reportedly the second-largest gathering for UFO enthusiasts in the country next to one held in Roswell, N.M. If you’re still with me, you surely know what that’s about.

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Studio tour spotlights creatives along the coast

Artists at more than 20 studios along the Central Coast will open their studios during Art on the Edge

May 7, 2019 // COAST, FAMILY, VISUAL ART //

Lovers of local art and the Oregon Coast can combine their passions May 17-19 during the Art on the Edge Studio Tour along the Central Coast. More than two dozen artists will open their studios to visitors.

Maria Esther Sund incorporates old and new elements in her collage and mixed media work.

Maria Esther Sund incorporates old and new elements in her collage and mixed media work.

The Lincoln City Cultural Center will host the opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, May 10. Guests will meet some of the artists on the tour, see their artwork, and save 50 percent — one night only — on the button that provides entrance to the tour, which is regularly $10.

We talked with Krista Eddy, director of visual arts at the center about the tour.

Mosaic artist Joanne Daschel works in glass and stone tiles to create art on themes including garden, food, landscape, and nature, such as this western meadowlark.

Mosaic artist Joanne Daschel works in glass and stone tiles to create art on themes including garden, food, landscape, and nature, such as this western meadowlark.

What is the Art on the Edge Studio Tour?

Eddy: It is a self-guided tour from Depoe Bay to Neskowin of local, well-known visual artists. You get a map that is kind of like an arts treasure map, you purchase a wood laser-cut button made by our high school kids, and you take the button and the map and go around to the artists’ studios. There are 21 stops. But there are more artists than that, because we have three group studios and each has more than 10 artists. People can choose to go to as many as they want.

How long has it been going on?

This is the third year. We’re still pretty young, but we’re going strong.

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Remembering what is lost, kept, altered, and shared

Linden Eller’s collages on display in Newberg explore the melancholy of childhood amnesia, while reinforcing the value of staying present

May 1, 2019 // CULTURE, FAMILY, VISUAL ART, YAMHILL //

The artist’s statement that accompanies Linden Eller’s Little Small exhibit, on display through June 1 in Newberg’s Chehalem Cultural Center, makes a fascinating point about the nature of individual memory, which is integral to the images she’s given us.

Amnesia is popularly regarded — when it’s regarded at all — as the result of trauma: physical trauma, such as a blow to the head, or psychological trauma, a natural psychological defense mechanism that shields us from recalling some experience too painful to revisit. Those, to be sure, are variations of amnesia, but ignore a crucial fact: Most adults’ first memory is from around age 3 or 4. The first years of our lives are lost to us.

Eller developed an interest in this “childhood amnesia” when she spent a year working with children at a kindergarten in Maebashi, Japan. She responded, as artists do, artistically: A project was born, which began with drawn recollections by children ranging in age from 2 to 6 and culminated with Eller’s sewn-collage versions of those drawings. The pieces were paired and were first exhibited in Maebashi. Now the exhibit has taken up residence in the cultural center’s Central Gallery. Eller writes: “This project is a reflection on what is lost, kept, altered, and shared during the first years of life.”

Artist Linden Eller attempts to replicate the quiet hazy environment from which a memory is recalled, according to her website. Her “Little Small” exhibit is at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg.

Artist Linden Eller attempts to replicate the quiet, hazy environment from which a memory is recalled, according to her website. Her “Little Small” exhibit is at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg.

Eller was born in 1984 and grew up in Phoenix, Ariz., before heading to Southern California, where she earned her BA in studio art. She has traveled a great deal; besides living and working in Japan, she’s lived in New England, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. My interview with Eller, who has returned to Phoenix, was conducted by email and has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m always interested in origins, beginnings — and, of course, this goes directly to an interest of yours: memory. What do you recall about your own introduction to art and creativity? How did you choose to make it a career?

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