McMINNVILLE — With the start of a new academic year, Linfield University ushered in the fall arts season last week with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by one of its own instructors, Portland artist Richard Cutshall.

It’s a delightfully surreal and sensuous feast, just the sort of thing to widen the eyes of incoming art students and hint at the depths they might one day explore. The institution’s private status notwithstanding, Linfield is one of Yamhill County’s richest sources of art and culture, and everyone is invited.

In the past year or so, the art gallery on the McMinnville campus has brought in thoughtful shows looking outward, featuring work by artists engaging with the corrosive intersection of politics, race, class, war, and capitalism. But in Return to the Fool’s Garden, which runs through Sept. 26, the Mexican-American artist looks inward with a collection of rustic but elegant works that excavate dark, archetypal imagery from the psychic shadows. It’s weird stuff, occasionally disturbing, and yet somehow subversively playful.

For all the fantastical imagery on display in the show, the title itself conjures layers of meaning.

It’s a return in the sense that some of this work was presented before as, simply, The Fool’s Garden, in exhibitions around Portland. Fools and gardens have a rich history in art, with the latter arguably an art in and of itself. One thinks of the Biblical Garden of Eden or the Garden of Live Flowers in Alice’s Wonderland, although — given the unsettling imagery in Cutshall’s work — the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights might be the better comparison.

Then there is the fool — or The Fool — the playful clown and trickster who, certainly in Shakespeare’s plays, is, paradoxically, often the smartest one in the room. Batman’s Joker is a malevolent, 20^th-century version. Of course, we cannot forget The Fool of the Tarot, who is frequently depicted wandering about. He is one of the Tarot deck’s 22 major arcanum, which comes from the Latin arcānus, or mystery. Alas, perhaps we are not meant to know who the fool is or where he’s going.

Still, I had to ask.

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“Who is the fool?” I asked Cutshall one morning last month. He and his wife, Jennifer Gillia Cutshall, an artist and curator in her own right who organized this show, make their home in Southeast Portland, where they live in a cozy house filled with books and art, a couple of cats, and an enormous dog named Odin. We were having our conversation there because last fall, upon discovering his artwork online, I knew I had to see the studio in which this artist’s nightmarish visions are birthed.

“I think that the trickster, that archetype that’s been used so much throughout history, is really important because it’s on the edge, on the outside of things, almost like between reason and madness, in this liminal space and poking at the normal and sacred,” Cutshall replied. “In some ways, I think the fool is an archetype that all cultures have used and people can identify with, but all the stuff in the mythos are probably aspects of self.”

At one point, he acknowledged, “It might be me.”

Whatever aspects of Cutshall’s own self inspired the toothy grins of the bulbous heads and strange, occasionally winged entities that populate his work, the act of rendering them in dark blues, smudged grays, and dirty whites is the product of what he calls “a kind of self-exorcism.”

Whoever the fool is, Cutshall notes that he’s among the characters that inhabit what increasingly feels to him like some sort of “narrative” represented across the body of his work. Cutshall is probably more attuned to whatever story is playing out here than the viewer will be, but there’s also an element of world-building on display that should be evident to all, and it’s a world of psychic space, the subconscious. 

In the main gallery, that world is represented by a couple of dozen images, snapshots from Cutshall’s imaginal cosmos. A dozen sculptures incorporating found objects also fill the floor space (although a few are mounted on the wall) rather like plants in a garden — a garden that, he says, is “like a dark fairy tale” mashup of (he ticks all these off himself), “Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, the Garden of Eden and Where the Wild Things Are,” the 1963 classic children’s book by Maurice Sendak.

In the lobby, an assemblage of “studio ephemera” is tantalizingly displayed in glass-enclosed cabinets: dolls’ heads, figurines, and skulls. All are integral to Cutshall’s artistry, but they also are implements that remind the viewer that this is work; the artist’s tools and sketch notebooks, along with a short essay about his studio space, are displayed here.  

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Often when I ask an artist if I may visit their studio, they agree only if they can prepare — tidy up and make it presentable. Of course, a sanitized version is exactly not what I wanted to see, so Cutshall mercifully let me visit while he was in the messy business of completing work for this show, warning me in advance that “it’s a rough place.”

“He makes a lot of debris down there,” Jennifer told me. “Like, a lot of debris.” That’s why he’s “down there.” When they moved into the 115-year-old house, it was immediately decided that her studio would be on the main floor while her husband would work in the cellar, which is accessible by uncomfortably steep stairs just off the kitchen.

It’s gloriously stuffed with so many supplies, materials, art media, and sculptural works-in-progress that it’s cramped, but there’s an element of compartmentalization that makes it seem more spacious than it is, with a path that leads to each section. Like a garden, come to think of it, where the wild things grow. 

Against the wall in the main work area is a large mixed-media piece, The Storyteller’s Secrets, that appears in the show. Posted on the wall between the top of the canvas and the ceiling, sheets of white paper display aphorisms Cutshall scribbled, such as: “The role of the artist is to create. Focus on the effort rather than the outcome.” Next to all this, a work bench is littered with tubes of paint, brushes, and other tools crammed into jars and tubs. On the other side of that, over in the corner, another messy workbench.

Cutshall marshals a variety of media for his images — a piece may include acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, ink, and graphite. The sculptures incorporate materials including plaster, straw, wire, nails, tape, and wax. “I work with a lot of materials, mixed media, and stuff,” he said. “Image-making is really the thing for me, there’s an importance to it.”

“I often think of his work as skins, rather than canvases or works on paper, and excavated relics, rather than found objects,” Jennifer writes in the show notes. “He transforms the media so vigorously into something unrecognizable.” The result, she says, is “a signature texture that would be hard to replicate.”

Cutshall grew up in Parsons, Kans. His earliest memories are of drawing and, as he got older, making comics inspired by characters like Marvel’s Hulk and Daredevil. He studied commercial art in junior college but didn’t care for it. But when he walked into the art building at Pittsburg State University (in Kansas), “it just felt like home.”

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“When I first started, I was really abstract,” he said. “My professors were all Modernists, you know. They were just like, ‘Take a brush and start painting!’ Which, at the time, I was like, ‘I’m not really learning anything.’ But now I realize that what I was learning was the idea of starting, to just begin.” As the scribbled aphorism advises, after all: Focus on the effort, not the outcome.

“Most of my working style is just tapping into my subconscious,” he said. “I may start with a mark, and it sort of evolves into something as I work, transforms into something that’s very organic.”

Indeed, much of the imagery that fills the frame of one of Cutshall’s pieces resembles a garden in that it appears not so much to have been rendered as grown without the guiding hand of a gardener with a design in mind, and that’s often the case. The ideas, images, or feelings that inspire the first strokes on a blank canvas often go places he doesn’t expect and didn’t plan.

Serpents and doll-like heads, some bearing deranged grins lined with dozens of teeth, jockey for position alongside creatures with an animal’s body and a sort-of-human head in a dreamlike space littered with skulls, trees, and flowers. Each piece is like a snapshot of a fever dream.

Sometimes, he says, making them “almost feels like a fight.”

“I feel like it’s leading me somewhere,” he said of his imagery, which often begins with experiments in sketchbooks. “I’ve heard of authors talk about this, where they’re not in control anymore, and I feel like sometimes I’m a sort of conduit. That’s something I have a deep interest in, the early shamanistic practices that evolved into art in general.”

When the couple moved to Portland from New Mexico about 15 years ago, Cutshall sensed a shift in his work, and he started to become more attuned to a narrative with a fairy tale element.

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“When the pandemic happened, I think I became aware, too, of a more existential angst in the work,” he said. “And that was coupled with the absurdity and the daily tension of our current political situation. Those things have undoubtedly left major traces on myself and thus my art.”

The influences on Cutshall’s creative life are many and varied. Artists he cites include James Surls, the sculptor Leonard Baskin, and the 19^th-century Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar, along with more familiar names such as Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo. In terms of historical and aesthetic currents, he cites indigenous, African and Oceanic cultures, Meso-American sculpture, the work of Carl Jung, folk art, outsider art, the California Assemblage artists and arte povera, a mid-20th century Italian conceptual art movement characterized by the use of rustic materials such as wood, cloth, and even dirt.

Family heritage also plays into the mix.

“My grandmother was indigenous to a tribe in Mexico,” Cutshall said. “I’ve tried to find out more about it, but it was a thing she didn’t really want to talk about. I can’t help but think there’s a transference that comes through the work.”

Transference, the inexplicable phenomenon in which trauma and body memory, the stuff of experienced history itself, is passed from one generation to the next, is among the psychic currents that are tapped and cultivated more readily in the underground space — not unlike a cave — where Cutshall works. He cites this in the show notes: “Smaller spaces contract and can feel claustrophobic, but can also help one go inward.”

I asked Cutshall how important it is, given the tsunami of electronic junk we’re bombarded with daily, for artists to cultivate an interior life.

“I think it’s very important,” he said, adding that one can absorb only so much stimuli from the broader culture, delivered by screens, before “it becomes like a poison.”

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“I think all artists, no matter their medium, I think they really have to dig into their art, they have to pull back to some degree,” he said. “I go through periods of that, where I’m very isolated in the studio, and then I feel like I have to see the world and interact with people. But it’s important to tap into that, because it’s that inner voice, it’s very important to hear it.”

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An edited transcript of David Bates’ conversation with Cutshall is available online at the author’s arts and culture newsletter on Substack.