Editor’s Note: This essay was first published on the Portland Community College Art Galleries website.

In her landscapes as in all her paintings, Phyllis Trowbridge shows us what is there. Not what she hopes to see, not an idealized vista, but what she finds when she takes out her oil paints or watercolors and sets up her easel at one of her favorite sites. Through her eyes, we recognize the quiet beauty of “everyday” places, usually depicted when light is soft, and colors are muted. She records the changes in familiar trees and notes the effects of seasons and of longer spans of time. Over the last decade or so, the areas that she has visited most frequently are Sauvie Island, Forest Park, and her own garden which overflows with an ever-growing assortment of native plants as well as annual flowers and vegetables. 

With their freshness and deft brushstrokes, Trowbridge’s paintings can be read as spontaneous images of the places she loves. And they are partly that: she works directly on her canvases, blocking out the main elements of a composition before she proceeds. While paintings usually require more than one session, she does not work from photographs, and edits judicially, so as not to distract from her principal subject. But over the years, many of these landscapes have also become an unintentional document of the dramatic effects of climate change. Extreme winds, heat domes, fire, and drought continue to take their toll on our region’s oldest trees and to challenge the lush green woods of the Pacific Northwest. 

These ravages are especially evident in some of the paintings of Sauvie Island’s oaks. Several of these trees are nearly three hundred years old, and Trowbridge has observed and painted them for more than a decade, creating what could be considered portraits or character studies. Among the most stunning of these works is The Old Oak, 2024. Trowbridge emphasizes the scale of this tree by cropping it, as though it is so big that it cannot be contained within the confines of a canvas. Its age is suggested not only by its size but by the limbs it has shed, and the gnarled trunk and leafless, twisted branches that reach into the background, tangling with clouds in a moody sky that stretches down to the low horizon line.

Trowbridge is an inspired and knowledgeable gardener (certified as a Master Gardener in Oregon), and like many people she found refuge in her garden during the pandemic, painting her flower borders through the seasons, and filling them with perennials and annuals, which she starts from seed. But here too, the effects of climate change cannot be ignored. She has replaced some of her water-loving shrubs and flowers with more drought-tolerant varieties. Despite her best efforts, hot dry summers can be brutal, as a painting of a camellia with its leaves browned and burned shows us.

She is best-known for her plein air painting, but Trowbridge has also made wonderful still lifes, most of them with plants gathered from her garden. These small compositions are as carefully observed and considered as her larger works, and they are filled with life, contradictory as that might sound. She pays as much attention to the gawkiness of a fading pink zinnia or the tremulous delicacy of the season’s last daffodils as she does to her beloved oaks or to the lush green stillness she finds in Forest Park.

Afternote: I have known Phyllis for many years, as a dear friend, PCC colleague, and hiking partner. I’ve gone on several of her painting excursions. We’ve covered many miles in the Columbia Gorge, had a grizzly encounter in Montana, and shared some strange offroad adventures in Eastern Oregon. I have never seen Phyllis when she doesn’t have a sketch book at hand. I don’t think there is a single day in her life when she doesn’t draw, make a watercolor, pack her car to go painting, or work in her studio. She is always learning, always open to new ideas. While she has traveled widely, she has chosen to focus on her home terrain, knowing that she will never exhaust its possibilities, and turning a saddened but unflinching eye to its ever-hastening transformations.

Sponsor

When I look at Phyllis’s oak paintings and hear her talk about trees as though they were old friends, I keep coming back to this poem by Robert Frost which is the best tree poem I know:

Tree at My Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

Robert Frost, 1928

Phyllis Trowbridge: Painting in Time is on view through March 21st at the North View Gallery on the campus of PCC Sylvania. The exhibition was curated by gallery director Christine Weber. The gallery is open Monday-Friday from 8:00 am – 4:00 pm or Saturdays by appointment. Trowbridge will give an artist talk on Wednesday, March 12th from 2:00 – 3:00 pm.