EUGENE — “Work work work work!”

Speaking to a packed auditorium on the University of Oregon campus, this was the advice James Lavadour offered to young artists. A self-taught artist whose daily practice involves heading to his Pendleton studio “before the sun comes up,” it is clear that Lavadour knows a thing or two about work.

It’s not just that his long list of accomplishments — the prestigious awards and commissions, the inclusions in prominent museum collections across the country, his influence on other artists as co-founder of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts — are clear indicators of a strong work ethic. It’s that you can see Lavadour’s work — the labor, the process, the contemplation, the rigor — in the paintings and prints on view in his most comprehensive career retrospective to date, James Lavadour: Land of Origin, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) in Eugene. 

Lavadour describes his relationship to the land as a kind of symbiotic or constitutive work. It could be boiled down to a simple list: He is shaped by the land, it shapes him, and he paints it. However, this simplification fails to register both the depth and breadth of this relationship. It is not as if Lavadour is merely roaming the land in search of something to paint. He hikes, camps, drives, walks his dog, and even naps in the open space as a kind of praxis, a philosophical way of knowing through doing.

As Lavadour notes in the wall text accompanying Land of Origin, the 2015 oil-on-panel painting from which the exhibition takes its title, “Exposure and sensual perception and the daily accumulation of bits and pieces of knowledge that sticks with you is what I made the paintings out of.”

Land of Origin is thus a fitting title, pointing to the ways in which land and work are the intertwined threads that run through decades of Lavadour’s artistic production across a variety of media. The visceral, dynamic work in James Lavadour: Land of Origin invites viewers to think about their place in the world on literal, emotional, and spiritual levels. 

Put together by JSMA’s McCosh Curator Danielle Knapp, the assembled works in Land of Origin span four decades of Lavadour’s career, encompass multiple 2-D media, and sprawl across two of the museum’s exhibition spaces. The majority of the work is in the Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Gallery, where  there are small standalone paintings and works on paper as well as almost thirty of the large-scale, gridded oil on panel landscape paintings for which Lavadour is best known. 

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The adjacent Focus Gallery, a smaller space that allows for an intimate viewing experience, houses Lavadour’s prints made using lithography, woodcut, and intaglio processes. Of particular interest are the two versions of Dreaming of Whirlwinds displayed side by side, one an Artist’s Proof and the other an early test proof.

The pair allows us to see Lavadour playing with composition and color and get a brief glimpse into the kind of conceptual and technical labor that goes into printmaking. The Artist’s Proof version features nine different views of rocky ledges in muted tones of red, blue, and yellow. Here the landscape appears almost desolate, washed out as if we are seeing it through the foggy haze of memory.

The test  proof, on the other hand, is more vibrant in part through its contrasts. Bright reds and deep blacks stand out against the white and cream substrate of the paper. A large, lone figure occupies several of the scenes, sometimes seeming to walk through the landscape and in other cases floating above it. Coupled with a scene in which a black and white skull fills the space between two rock faces, the human presence in this version of the print is haunting and evokes the otherworldly.  

The prints in the Focus Gallery add to an overall understanding of Lavadour’s artistic practice, as both conceptual and physical labor. The prints are extensions of his paintings, as they are seamless translations of the visceral markmaking of his paintings into a combination of aquatint, etching, and drypoint.

But printmaking as a practice is also crucial to how Lavadour thinks about his work. He commented that when he started making prints, he began to feel that his paintings could be abstractions; that they didn’t have to directly depict something or have a specific meaning.

Working in collaboration with a variety of Master Printers such as Judith Baumann and Frank Janzen at Crow’s Shadow, Marcia Batholme at Beta Press in Seattle, Eileen M. Foti at the Brodsky Center, and the Kyoto, Japan-based printmaker Tadashi Toda, Lavadour felt that he  “could just jump in and learn something, discover something.” It allowed him to think less and feel more, working through the layered processes of printmaking as a form of labor analogous to the layers of rock and sediment he so often takes as his subject matter. 

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The range of work in Land of Origin allows viewers to discern how the artist’s style has changed over the course of the past forty years. Earlier works like Boom! (1988), Fire and Bones (1990-1991) and  Release the Sun (1990-1991) all feature a limited palette of browns, blacks, and reds, the subdued colors coupled with the misty washes of paint make these landscapes feel mysterious and ancient.

For me, it is as if I am witnessing this land from a distance, contemplating the vast span of time measured on a geological rather than human scale. That’s somewhat ironic given that several of these early works contain figural elements — a spectral face in Release the Sun, a large skeletal figure in the diptych Fire and Bones, and a skeleton as well as several abstract lines that read as bones in Boom!

For Lavadour, these are another strategy for visualizing the relationships between humans and the land they inhabit. The wall text accompanying Boom! quotes Lavadour’s statement that “the land . . . looks like flesh,” testament perhaps to the ways that human beings and the earth, in many ways, shape one another. 

Lavadour’s shift from this fairly subdued palette to a more vibrant, expansive one happened when his perspective on the land changed in an unexpected way. While traveling in Arizona in 2000, he was taken on a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. Seeing the land from above, its subtleties and textures, the range of its colors — especially the Canyon’s famed striations of Redwall Limestone — was, in Lavadour’s words, “such a profound visual experience, I just was shocked.”

Energized by this moment, he returned to his studio and began replacing the blue ground he typically used in his paintings with a red ground. “It’s fire, it’s blood, it’s substance,” he says, underscoring how the change means that in terms of painting, he is representing the same land with a completely different kind of energy. 

Lavadour’s deep connection with the land is evident across his practice, but especially in standout works like the large-scale, multi-panel oil painting Straight Ahead. The work consists of fifteen paintings on panel, hung in a three by five grid. The grid imposes order and structure, contrasting with the chaotic and visceral qualities of Lavadour’s bold colors and strong shapes. Craggy cliffs, sloping outcroppings, and snowy peaks become almost animate, bursting with the life and energy of Lavadour’s frenetic brushwork. Bright reds, yellows, and blues tie the fifteen paintings together, sweeping the eye across the assembled works in a way that feels immersive. While some features of the landscape may be identifiable as specific sites, Lavadour abstracts them, shifting angles and moving horizon lines to create a pastiche rather than the direct, “window on the world” type of landscape painting that has long been part of the genre’s tradition.

This feeling of being drawn in, bearing witness to the land, is linked directly back to Lavadour’s upbringing in Eastern Oregon, particularly on and around the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where he has spent much of his life. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes, Lavadour is Walla Walla and grew up around family members who taught him respect for the land as well as for artmaking.

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His parents both drew, while other members of the community made beadwork and wove cornhusk bags. His father and uncles hunted and preserved meat every fall, and his family went on month-long camping trips in the mountains. En route, his dad told the histories of those campsites, stories that continue to shape Lavadour’s practice today.

“The land has a certain emotional resonance that records all of my family and it holds my family: where they’re buried, where they lived, where they camped . . . . it’s rich in all those things,” Lavadour says. In both Lavadour’s life and his artistic practice, the land is a physical space that nourishes body and soul, a site of work and connection, something that he is part of just as much as it is part of him. 

You can sense that richness in many of Lavadour’s works, a kind of depth and warmth that comes through in spite of the grid-like structures he uses for hanging his multi-panel pieces. As a structure often associated with order and rationality, Lavadour reminds us that it also has a long history of associations with craft and the handmade.

“A lot of my structure is borrowed from weaving,” he says. He alternates warmer tones, typically on the mountains and rock faces, with cooler blues and grays of the sky in order to make “a zig zag [that] creates a certain kind of energy” in the work. He also referred to his paintings “as giant beadworks,” the individual pieces containing subtleties and details, but cohering as a single work that is as vast and awe-inspiring as the land from which he draws inspiration.  

This meditation on the vitality of the landscape reaches a crescendo in  Bold As Love, a three by three grid of paintings dominated by splashy reds, yellows, and oranges. In many of the compositions these bursts of warm color start low in the space of the painting and surge upward, calling to mind fiery lava bursting onto the surface of the Earth. It feels as if we are witnessing something primordial, the overwhelming forces of nature shifting, burning, pushing molten rock upward and into the solid forms of the mountain ridges that define so many of Lavadour’s works. 

The title  Bold as Love is a nod to a song by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of the bands Lavadour listens to while working in his studio. While Lavadour says he does not assign specific meanings to colors, Hendrix had no such reservations. The lyrics of this song personify the colors and assign them clear emotional resonances.

Over a warm, meandering guitar riff, Hendrix sings, “My red is so confident he flashes trophies of war/And ribbons of euphoria/Orange is young, full of daring/But very unsteady for the first go ’round/My yellow in this case is not so mellow/In fact, I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me/And all of these emotions of mine keeps holding me from giving my life to a rainbow like you.”

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The complexity of the music is a good match for the eponymous painting, but also for Lavadour’s works more broadly. The paintings do not simply show us the landscape but take us on a kind of emotional journey through it. 

Lavadour’s paintings and prints have an interesting tension within them: They capture specific landscapes while simultaneously feeling like they could be about any part of the Earth. I take it as a reminder that although place is very important, the land and the water covering the surface of this planet are much more connected than contemporary societies with their borders, governments, and wars tend to recognize.

Perhaps this is because Lavadour’s work is so rooted in feeling, and true to form, he described his inspiration and process by way of a story. One day, there was a logjam out near the back of his studio. He could see one log sticking out, clearly the source of the blockage, so he pulled it out. “All of a sudden I could feel the energy of the water,” he says. That moment when the mounting tension of the water was released, its fluid movement restored, was what began Lavradour’s “process of trying to understand the land not by thinking about it but by feeling it.” 

That feeling comes through in every brushstroke, every drip, every scratchy mark that adds texture to the surface. In a comment reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s discussion of his own practice, Lavadour described painting “as an event. It’s not a picture. I’m not depicting something. I’m acting. The result is that these are the traces of my footsteps, where I’ve been.”

Also in a move easily comparable to Pollock, Lavadour stopped framing his paintings, because the “edges are revealing of the process” and he wants people to see them, perhaps to imagine the world as depicted in the paintings starting to merge with our own, real space.

Land of Origin makes clear that Lavadour is a kind of painter-cum-guide, inviting us to not just see but feel his particular version of the landscape, to experience its vastness and its connection to other places in the adjacent panels, but ultimately encouraging us to form our own connections with it. 

James Lavadour: Land of Originis on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene through January 11, 2026. JSMA is open 11am – 5pm Thursday through Sunday and from 11am-8pm on Wednesdays.

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