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MAY 19, 2006
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Paul Soriano Lets It Out
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Like Carravagio, his favorite Baroque painter,
Paul Soriano is a gay artist who used to hide
messages in his art. He would create homoerotic
figurative paintings but
supplant their true
meaning with religious
titles.
“I would hide my
messages in other narra­
tives to make the art
more acceptable,” says
Soriano. “Now I am
more direct. The mes­
sage is so important
since everything in
painting
has
been
done.”
His pieces “St.
Sebastian” and “The
Incredulity of Thomas
are both exam­
ples of Soriano
using religion to
cover up pom.
Both paintings
are oil on wood
and use bold, sol­
id colors to high­
light the stark
male musculature
of the figures. “I
once described
the
‘Thomas’
piece to a writer
as being about
penetration [the hand entering the wound of
Jesus]. Needless to say, she didn’t write the piece on
me.”
Originally from New York, Soriano has lived in
Portland off and on; he joined the Portland
Association for Gay and
Lesbian Artists after his most
recent move back to the city
two years ago. “Lawrence
Ferlinghetti once said that art
was revolution. That is essen­
tially my work’s inspiration,
he says.
Soriano strongly advo­
cates an active gay culture
and doesn’t accept the notion
of equal rights for gays and
lesbians. “We are an evolu­
tion of the human species,
and we deserve more than
equality.” Identifying and
documenting the gay culture
in his art is how Soriano plans
to keep the enemies of the culture at bay.
His art is meant to be provocative. He’ll
be showing the piece “Party Play Die” at
City Hall’s First Thursday show. “It’s an
extension of the ‘party and play’ epidemic in
the gay culture that is a real problem,” says
Soriano. The large painting is very bright
and incorporates text to convey his message.
“The text is set in mirror image so that it
takes a person longer to read and therefore
absorb it."
Who Isn’t David Strough?
Lulla Bcxits, son of a Native American father
who was eaten hy a bear and a Cajun mother killed
in a combine accident, is a young artist from
Selma, a small town in southern Oregon. Myrl and
Delia Buford are painters and conjoined twins.
Portland artist David Strough
is a'll of these people, as well
as Bouch de St. Rough and
others.
Strough moved to Portland
30 years ago for three rea­
sons: to have his first one-
man show, to get a master in
fine art degree and to have
his first love affair. For a
while he chose not to show
but watched the art world
closely and realized some­
thing very important. “I’m
not very interesting,” says
Strough, “and I’m getting to
be an old fart.” But by
inventing young minority
artists with absurd personal his­
tories, he found a way to get his
art out.
“People pay more attention
to the story of the artist than the
piece they’re buying,” says
Strough. “One of Lulla Boots’
pieces sold, and I saw it in a shop
one day. The owner said it wasn’t
for sale. She repeated my story of
Lulla Boots to me verbatim!”
Strough continues to create
art in his own name and will be
displaying a wall piece from his
series “Tools of the Empire” at City Hall’s First
Thursday show. The piece incorporates the lined
children’s paper we all learned to write on as well
as chalk on a board to answer the question “What
happens when your world has to come oOt?” In
“The Length of a Lie,” the
phrase “My dog ate it, hon­
est” appears at the bottom of
the piece.
Also in the series is the
piece “Self Sentenced,”
which repeats the sentence
“I don’t know” down the
length of three pieces of the
children’s paper. “This is
how we all dealt with being
gay in my generation,” says
Strough. “We made sure we
fit in to the world outside,
without considering how
that outside world affected
us.”