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I was at the park yesterday and the sunlight was coming down in visible rays, so I went home and did this :) I think I'll call this "oregon sunbeams"

Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Untitled (On the Snake River), 1906, oil on canvas, 25"x30"

C.E.S. Wood may have been the most influential cultural figure in Portland in the forty years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. He helped found the Portland Art Museum and was instrumental in making the Multnomah County Library a free and public institution. He secured the services of his friend Olin Warner, a nationally known sculptor, to design the Skidmore Fountain, and his words "Good citizens are the riches of a city" are inscribed at its base. The Portland Rose Festival was his idea. He numbered among his friends Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, James J. Hill, and Langston Hughes. Soldier, lawyer, poet, painter, raconteur, bon vivant, politician, free spirit, and Renaissance man, Wood might also be the most interesting man in Oregon history.

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C.E.S. Wood on the Oregon Encyclopedia

#art #oil painting #snake river #landscape painting #plen air #c.e.s. wood #charles erskine scott wood #portland oregon #oregon #oregon art #eastern oregon

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about sculpture. I don’t know much about its history, famous sculptures, influences on modernism or whatever – but I love this piece. (Thoughts about sculpture below.)

It’s tucked away in a corner of the big park in my neighborhood, next to an old bridge that’s since been removed and is now a dead-end path. I found this by accident, and I’m sure others have as well. It’s called Uroboros, by Chuck Kibby (1979), and is unmistakably a product of its time. I don’t know why, but it exudes an essence of the 70s. It’s made of concrete stained brick red with brick-size holes in the front. Angularity in conjunction with the cylindrical form and wavy ends. It’s very non-pretentious I think - partly due to its location off the main path - and the incessant greenery of the Pacific Northwest has colonized its surfaces and recesses so as to emphasize the forms and contours of the sculpture.

Art critics sometimes call work like this “Plop Art” – a non-endearing term to describe large works of public art usually paid for in part by taxes. Public art is often contentious, I think in part because we are so focused on humanitarian or bureaucratic problems we see rather than making public space fun and valuable. How do you justify spending a hundred thousand dollars on viewable concrete art when there are people eating out of dumpsters? In a time and place where everything is expensive, rapid urban developments are largely congruent, extreme political tension, art is - oddly enough - more important than ever.

This work is nearing the age of being historic and is no longer cutting-edge Modernism, so its power as modern art is now softened, accessible, even welcoming. I’ve spent dedicated time and effort over the last couple years trying to understand more about “Fine Art” because the range of human expression is fascinating but often difficult to understand. It turns out that all there is to understand is that all art needs to do to be Art is elicit a feeling - good, bad, angry, lonesome, wistful - and everybody’s feelings are unique to themselves.

My own local sculpture in the park is not much to look at, or think about, and maybe went unnoticed even when new. Maybe it was tucked away because somebody thought it looked out of place. I don’t know much about its history, but I’ll probably read about it just because it could be interesting. The moss encroaches more every year, and it never gets completely cleaned off. The moss ties it to the landscape of the park, camouflages it into the riparian greenery along the creek very, very slowly eroding the cement and returning it to the Earth.

Somebody talked about this piece better than I HERE, and some more history can be found HERE.