artsy
A Roumagoux
retrospective
Looking back at a career
of representation
Works by acclaimed Newport oil painter
Sandra Roumagoux will be on display in a
retrospective exhibit opening this Friday, Oct.
4, at the Newport Visual Arts Center.
The exhibit, which features oil paintings
dating back as far as 1973 as well as collage,
drawings and mixed-media works, will open
with a public reception from 5 to 7 pm,
featuring a talk from the artist at 5:45 pm.
Roumagoux was born in Yakima,
Washington, in 1940 and raised on a farm
near Camp Adair in the Willamette Valley.
After earning her BA and MFA from the
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, she
returned to Oregon and Newport in 1985.
From that time forward, Roumagoux has
grown into one of Oregon’s most established
and recognized oil painters. Others know her
from her three terms as Newport’s mayor,
which ended in 2018.
“I’ve been called political, but I don’t
know how to separate politics from art,”
Roumagoux said. “Both ask something
of us, something that challenges us to a
responsibility. Painter or politician, we
come as candidates. We want our message
to resonate with the body politic, with the
voters. We make promises.”
Roumagoux has shown her work in
juried exhibitions such as the 1995 Oregon
Biennial at the Portland Art Museum, the
1992 Drawn West: Third Biennial exhibition
at Utah State University Museum of Art,
the 2010 Art Around Oregon Annual at the
Corvallis Art Center, and the 1997 N.W.
Women Artists, 3rd Annual, at the Littman
Gallery at Portland State University. She
has had solo exhibits at Blackfish Gallery,
Michael Parsons Fine Art Gallery, Mount
Hood Community College, Quartersaw
Gallery, Mark Wooley Gallery and
Worksound Gallery in Portland, as well
as Gallery 110 in Seattle, LaSells Stewart
Center in Corvallis, Triad Gallery in Seal
Rock and the Newport Visual Arts Center.
“Roumagoux paints what she sees, what
grabs her, as she drives the back roads of
Lincoln County,” wrote LC Smith for
Hipfish Monthly in 2013. “She inserts
human-made beauty — the classic form of a
Conde McCullough bridge in cerulean blue,
for example — into the wild. Some of the
paintings are joyful or hopeful. Other reflect,
simultaneously, deep serenity and profound
loneliness. Still others are subtle-yet-biting
commentaries on modern rural life. Every
one of the paintings is strikingly beautiful,
22 • oregoncoastTODAY.com • facebook.com/oregoncoasttoday • October 4, 2019
even those of discarded tires in the landscape.
The tires become part of the flora, hauntingly
appealing in much the same way the Ashcan
School of the early 20th Century turned the
squalor of the New York’s Lower East Side
into a thing of aching beauty.”
“I see the human form and landscape
in relation to social and environmental
issues,” Roumagoux said. “I have never had
the ability to completely lose reference to
real-world subject matter, like my hero,
Oregon painter CS Price. I love the abstract
expressionists, particularly De Kooning, as
well as Clifford Still and the Northwest
mystics.”
Roumagoux’s paintings are part of the
permanent collections at Oregon Health
Sciences University, the Microsoft Corporate
Art Collection, the University of Arkansas,
the VA Medical Center in Portland, Indiana’s
Center for Diaconal Ministry, the Clarence
Bates Collection in Corvallis and the City of
Newport.
“The Runyan Gallery at the Newport
Visual Arts Center is the appropriate place
for Sandy’s first retrospective,” said Oregon
Coast Council for the Arts Executive
Director Catherine Rickbone. “This is the
home from which she has established her
statewide and regional reputation as one of
the finest oil painters of her generation.”
The retrospective will be on display
through December 1, available to view from
11 am to 6 pm (5 pm in November), Tuesday
through Sunday in the Runyan Gallery of
the center, located at 777 NW Beach Drive.