VISUAL ARTS
BY B O B K E E F E R
A RETURN TO BEAUTY
New show at Schnitzer Museum highlights Oregon painters who came of age before art became arid
S
omewhere in the late 20th century, art
in America went through a cosmic shift:
“Beauty” became a dirty word.
In the 1950s, a middlebrow, slightly
romanticized version of modernism
dominated mainstream American culture. Writers
like John Steinbeck, composers like Leonard
Bernstein and painters like Jackson Pollock
produced works that were infused with beauty and
hope and spoke to ordinary people.
All that came to an end as the century closed
out and those artistic hopes and dreams crashed
into the cynicism and irony of postmodernism,
with its emphasis on conceptual works and roots
in critical theory. Beauty was out. Ideas were in.
Catching the last gasp of the middlebrow culture
that once thrived here is one of the premises behind
Visual Magic: An Oregon Invitational, a new show
that opens with a reception from 7 to 8 pm Jan.
18 and runs through May 12 at the University of
Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
The exhibit looks at work from 45 living
painters who began or expanded their artistic
careers in Oregon in the 1960s and ’70s.
A collaboration with the George D. Green
Art Institute, the exhibit grows out of a smaller
show mounted by the institute under a similar
name, Visual Magic: Hand Made Pictures, at the
Northwest Academy in Portland in 2015, says
Danielle Knapp, the Schnitzer’s McCosh associate
curator.
A catalog statement Knapp wrote for the earlier
show might apply equally to the new exhibit.
“The works included in Visual Magic are
MUSIC
LUCINDA PARKER’S ‘RETREATING ICE’
beautiful,” she said. “They transfix. Bewilder.
Delight. More importantly they are original
manifestations of deeply realized personal visions.
In some instances, they are unlike anything ever
seen before.”
Included in the Schnitzer exhibit, which is to be
mounted in the museum’s large Barker Gallery, is
work by such familiar local artists as Jon Jay Cruson,
Margaret Coe, Kacey Joyce, Craig Cheshire and
Kenneth O’Connell, as well as regional art stars
like James Lavadour and Lucinda Parker.
That doesn’t mean you should expect to see
nothing but traditional painting.
Portland artist Robert Dozono, for example,
makes his large landscape paintings included in
Visual Magic by gluing the garbage he produces
in day-to-day life to canvases and then painting
over it. Stand close and you see a collage of used
toothpaste tubes and other plastic detritus; back up
and you see a river scene.
“I think we don’t respect or take enough
responsibility for our natural environment. In this
age and our economy, it is almost impossible not
to waste. I almost wish that we could return to a
time where no one wasted and reused everything,”
Dozono once explained in an artist statement.
Having come of age a half-century ago, the
artists in this show are not youngsters. Two —
Edwin Koch and Janet Reaves — have died since the
roster was selected. The oldest is Portland painter,
printmaker and ceramicist George Johanson, who
was born in 1928.
“By the 1960s he’d already been to New York
and come back,” Knapp says. ■
BY B R E T T C A M P B E L L
RECOVERING
ARMENIA’S PAST
THROUGH MUSIC
Portland's Cappella Romana
return to Eugene for free concert
C
appella Romana is one of Oregon’s most famous
classical music institutions. Founded in 1991, the
Portland-based professional vocal ensemble has
gone on to become the premier exponent and ex-
plorer of the musical traditions of Byzantium and
other early Christian music.
Artistic director Alexander Lingas is one of the field’s
leading scholars. He and other researchers have found and
revived a long-dormant repertoire, which the group sings
in its original Byzantine and Slavic languages. And Cap-
pella has performed music of contemporary European and
North American composers who draw on those traditions.
Although it’s based in Portland and performs several
concerts each year there and in Seattle, the group draws
singers from around the country, including the Bay Area,
and has performed in Europe, Los Angeles, New York
City, Canada and elsewhere, appearing on National Pub-
lic Radio, various early music festivals and even at New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Cappella earns glowing reviews wherever it sings, se-
curing its reputations as one of the Northwest’s most ac-
complished musical institutions.
Recently, the group has branched out into other Ortho-
dox Christian music descended from Byzantine origins, in-
cluding Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian and more. You’re un-
likely to hear any of this music performed anywhere else.
Now the Oregon Humanities Center is bringing Cap-
pella Romana to Eugene to share its latest discovery: long-
lost Armenian Orthodox liturgical music.
On Thursday, Jan. 17, in a free concert directed by Lin-
gas and Haig Utidjian, a British conductor of Armenian
descent, Cappella will sing traditional Armenian chants
and later arrangements of them by 19th-century Armenian
choirmaster Makar Ekmalian and his student, Komitas
Vardapet, known as the savior of Armenian music.
Vardapat collected and transcribed thousands of works
that would have otherwise been lost to history, including
about the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turks in the
early 20th century.
The 8 pm concert is at Central Lutheran Church. It’s a
chance to experience a lost world through music. ■
eugeneweekly.com • January 17, 2019
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