by Diane; Charter membership of Portland State University's White Gallery

1960 en plein air Humbug Creek
donated to
Oregon State Fish Hatchery and Research Center

      New hope soon followed after Professor Richard Muller shared his vision of a devastating, dwindling support for art and education when he just heard Kennedy was shot and probably dead.  The very next art history class Professor Richard Muller tapped half a dozen students for an opportunity which would forever benefit our life beyond college years. Based on our class term essay about our personal involvement in an art piece, we were selected to be charter members of a student run Portland State College art gallery. The members included Issac Allen (Isaka Shamsud-Din see Feb. 12 post), and a psychology student who had taken some art history.
    If  nationwide we do not support the arts and education, Muller would work to mae the arts a working part of the college's and the Portland public's culture.
    As secretary I recorded our ideas for a mission statement. Guided by Muller, we declared that we wanted to create bridges between the many academic departments at the college and the greater Portland public. The gallery would be in the student center in a highly visible hall leading to the caffeteria. Students would curate pieces from the college including revolving exhibits that would be shipped to the college from afar.  Jim Hibbard, a new instructor to the art department, also stepped up to help especially when we received traveling exhibits. He helped uncrate and then repackage delicate artwork. He also lectured to his elementary education students in the White Gallery.

All my Portland State College Courses and the White Gallery experiences impacted 55 years of my art choices

A demonstration at Corvallis Art Guild Clothesline Sale in the year, 2000 
from a visit to Humbug Creek 40 years after my plein air painting in 1960
Now hanging in the education room of the Oregon State Fish Hatchery and Research Center,
it is one painting in a grouping showing a family's involvement recording
artists' perspectives of the changes in Humbug Creek impacted by deforestation

     My seven page resume was organized to sell art, but could be organized differently to feature both my engagement in making a difference on the arts in my community as well as my frequent withdrawals. Often in the past my ideas are counter to the general culture and instead of pressing through, I give up. In addition I confess during some periods of my art journey I followed the notion that art making is only worthwhile if sold and somebody wants it enough to buy it. The first few years after graduation my mother was my agent and she sold so many paintings, I believed that my success would be to sell all that I make so I could keep on painting.
       On another level what is in accord with my education is illustrated in these Humbug Creek paintings. They are an example of one of my public displays. These paintings in a fish hatchery along with my mother's demonstrates our involvement in Humbug Creek's change from a vital fishery, its demise and restoration. I like to point to them as a healthy family activity when I am teaching watercolor at the Research Center's Art Festival.
     I am deeply sad that a classmate at Portland State College now speaks out against all education as being some brain washing machine stealing our freedom to see reality. I am sad that small colleges are shutting down.
     I believe empowerment of our ability to see as an artist begins early. If we are taught to stop thinking our perceptions are valid as toddlers, we are forever susceptible to being deceived. My topic next week will be letters I wrote to the editor where I was calling out educators who were wrongly using art to stop children from trusting their own seeing and believing an authority. These teachers did not have the good sense art for elementary teachers taught by Portland State College's Robert Colescott or Jim Hibbard.
    

by Diane; 1966 PSC graduate connecting with today's Portland State University's Art + Design School

The stench of the San Francisco Bay at low tide, smog in Los Angeles, and racial tensions among classmates at Portola Junior High School used to be vivid memories when I entered Portland State College January 1962.   I found faculty  had concerns that reinforced mine.  There was Robert Colescott who also came from the San Francisco Bay Area, and Florence Saltzman who had lived in Los Angeles. The Dean of Social Work, Dr. Gordon Hearn had taught at the University of California, Berkeley just before coming to Portland. Probably there were others from big cities who could see that  Portland was on its way to becoming a metropolis.  So the administration and faculty were motivated in taking part in shaping the growth of the college open to and involved in the growth of the city.

       My Freshman year in college I did a preparatory drawing for a painting that humanized the concrete freeway with a man on a stairway between merging lanes onto the Steel Bridge. The selection of my subject was a repetition of similar images that I did at Woodrow Wilson High School in Portland. The earlier Berkeley, California's freeways were memories.  My Portland State experience built on some of my concerns from having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The summer of 1962 the oil painting hung in the gallery facing the administration office. I was happy to sell it to the wife of an Oregon Health Science student.  This of course did not please my painting Professor Fredrick Heidel who thought students needed to keep their college work to inform for years to come their development as artists.

        I graduated from Portland State College in 1966.   Then I continued to be constatntly aware of my college memories. My formative years continue to feed who I am today as an artist and citizen.  February 7, Kailin Mooney and Alli Cleasby of the PSU Foundation came to Albany to share the direction of Portland State University's Graduate School of  Art+Design.  I  was delighted to learn that Portland State University's holistic encouraginging interdepartmental connection are healthy and growing despite devastating cuts in governmental support.

     Portland State College Portland community outreach increased during the 1960's.  I was privileged to know the Art and Architecture Department Chair Professor Heidel, and the Social Work Graduate School Dean Dr. Gordon Hearn, as well as making the acquaintance of the Chemistry Department's Chair Dr. Johnson. And I had limited contact with other departments that were all unified by PSC President Brandford Millar.  I had the good fortune of meeting PSC President Brandford Millar on several occasions while being a student and after my graduation at a wedding of one of Dr. Gordon Hearn's daughters. At the reception my mother bragged to President Millar that since graduation a year ago, I was selling most of my paintings. He made a face of disgust.  He said he wouldn't be impressed unless I was selling pieces for thousands of dollars each. The college's purpose was not to produce marketable artisans.

      Being friends with the Dean of Social Work's family, I was invited to serve tea at informal gatherings of students and faculty.  I met Social Work graduate students.  I met a music and math student  who was a friend of the Hearn's son, both majoring in math. My memory is hazy about who among my acquaintances was concerned about the rituals around death and thought about how the process of grieving and public memorials could be made without it being a business for profit.

"Opening Heart"
 in which parts of the continuously
encompassing knot dissolved.
It is #5 in a series
 of mathematical  topology knots. 

On a personal level since graduation the thread of my Portland State College art education runs a circuitous route both through my painting process choices and my conduct as an artist / citizen.

     PSC and my mother's example instilled in me the feeling of responsibility to share my art in community service.  Currently  I have an exhibit at the Albany Public Library through February. Then in March and April l will be showing on the ground south hall of the Corvallis Caring Place Assisted Living.  "Opening Heart" will be in the Corvallis Art Guild exhibit with about 20 pieces.

    I also volunteer to teach watercolor once a year at the Oregon State Fall Creek Fish Hatchery and Research Center's Arts Festival.

  When I am painting, I often listen to what I think my painting instructors  said.  Fredrick Heidel said to make it easy to set up yourself to paint.  My latest series of topology knots, was not going well so I listened to my memory of professor Fredrich Heidel saying,  “If a painting is not resolved, a transparent glaze can pull the painting together.” Heidel was fond of Shiva Rose Red. The Shiva company went out of business so I substituted a little Quinacridone Red in mostly Liquitex Gloss Medium.



My sore wrists and shortage of time is aided
by using a recycled cookie container and empty glass
Yoplait Yogurt containers. Thank you Heidel and his wife Florence Saltzman for recommending easy set ups.

 A few years after graduating from Portland State College, the art department sent out questionnaires asking what our transition was like going from academia to making art out in the world. I sent a cartoon of me in hiking gear with a camera tripod topped by a drawing board. 

To sum up my Portland State College experience, I carry with me memories of  my instructors and fellow students at Portland State College.  The experience continues to inform my art and my curiosity. While visiting Denmark and Norway I photographed their use of light in architecture and lighting fixtures.  In Paris last year, I traced the foot path of Henri Rousseau to the hot house gardens where he drew inspiration for his painting "The Dream." The banner for this blog is a detail of a painting intended to be a present day version of Rousseau's painting.