THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2019 // 3
SCRATCHPAD
Dobrowski on moments of discovery
Artist opens new
landscape series at
Imogen Gallery
By ERICK BENGEL
COAST WEEKEND
I
n an artist statement for a new
series of abstract landscapes
titled “Discover Solitude,”
Ryan Dobrowski refers to the paint-
ings as a search for a “moment of
discovery.”
The paintings are not of actual
locations, but the Columbia-Pa-
cifi c palette is obvious: shades of
coast
green, blue and gray — rolling, tex-
tured land where lush life and end-
less sky meet at the edge of a raw
continent.
During his reception at Imogen
Gallery on Saturday, Dobrowski
and I talked about that moment of
discovery.
It is, he said, that point in the
creative process when the image
starts to emerge and the painting
essentially announces what it wants
to be, and he begins to see its scope
— its boundaries, defi nition and
identity.
“That’d be the moment, not
when you get to the top of the
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mountain, but when you fi rst see
the top of the mountain, and you
know that you have a long ways
to go until you’re fi nally there,” he
said.
How, then, does he know when
he’s reached the summit? When is
the painting “done”?
“When it feels like it can go out
in the world and sustain itself,” he
said. Expanding the child meta-
phor, he said a painting is not done
when it fi rst shows itself; “you have
to take care of it for a while.”
He added thoughtfully: “Maybe
when nothing bugs me anymore in
the painting is a good time to stop.”
COAST WEEKEND EDITOR
ERICK BENGEL
CONTRIBUTORS
RYAN HUME
KATHERINE LACAZE
R.J. MARX
ON THE COVER
Folk musician John
Gorka will play a live
benefi t concert for
Coast Community
Radio on Thursday,
Jan. 17, at Astoria’s
Performing Arts Center.
TAMULEVICH.COM
See story on Page 8
THE ARTS
4
Tom Grant
8
John Gorka
12
A Q-and-A with the jazz legend
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But even this carries challenges.
“Sometimes you can change the
part that bugs you, but sometimes
you have to paint over the part
that’s great in order to make the
whole thing.”
Paintings such as “Elder Island”
and “Morning Moon” recall those
moments when the day dims, or a
marine layer appears, and on cer-
tain stretches of shoreline, you can
almost see the place that the fi rst
Americans discovered many thou-
sands of years ago, and that explor-
ers, in their turn, “discovered.”
Dobrowski, the drummer of
Blind Pilot who co-founded the
indie rock band with Israel Nebeker
in 2008, said one thing painting and
percussion have in common is the
rhythm or focused “fl ow state” he
falls into while doing them.
“Drumming’s a very physi-
cal instrument, and that’s often my
favorite type of painting — the real
physical marks — and then stum-
bling on a new type of mark or a
new sound,” he said, “and then
having that be the starting point
from which the sound or the paint-
ing grows.”
A majority of his marks, often
made while listening to music, are
experiments and their continua-
tion, “an exploration of a mark until
something starts to take form or
something excites me,” he said.
In other words, discoveries. CW