Northwest 13th Avenue is a road of some memory for me. In the early 1990s my studio was located on the top floor of the Gadsby Building, the gray structure just behind the large tree on the right, whose façade hasn't changed very much since those days. It's a really great building and one of the few structures left in that part of town that has been left to patina nicely. I remember in those days that the road was still gravel and had a railroad track that ran down its entire length. One night I got into a groove and spent the night there and recalled that there was a switch engine and a load of hops or barley that would come clanging down in the middle of the night to make its delivery to the Henry Weinhard's brewery that was converted a number of years ago into the "Brewery Blocks" development. Who was it that said there is nothing more certain in life and change?
I remember making my first serious painting in that space. It was an acrylic on cardboard, based on a simple subject by Henri Matisse. I thought at the time that the painting came out well but what struck me about it was that the corrugation of the cardboard showed through the entire image and helped to unify it. This attempt to unify an image stuck with me and continues in my work today.
It wasn't long after this that I took up residence in the Irving Street Lofts just down the street. One afternoon there in that building, a business was in the process of vacating a space. The working environment was made up of cubicles made entirely of brand-new "wafer board" or "OSB" oriented strand board. We all know this stuff, it's everywhere and mostly used to sheathe buildings. The room appeared like it was made out of gold! I was told, that if I wanted, I could have all of the material if I would remove it for them. When I did, I think I had about a half ton of what I thought was an amazing material.
The wafer board has some really unique properties. It's always recognizable as wafer board but each piece is as unique as a fingerprint as it's made up of thousands of wood pieces laminated together to create an unique surface whose color it seemed was ideal as an underpainting. I remember I began experimenting with different mediums on the surface and it took just about everything I threw at it! Not only did it take it, it took it really well and made for all kinds of visual expression. I really enjoyed starting a work with an architecture that preexisted. The surface of wafer board is a ready-made matrix for image making and for me, a metaphor for painting itself as each wafer somehow represents for me a brush mark but with a texture built in. The board itself, I feel, is a kind of print. The wood chips are pressed together under high pressure and not only creates a product through this process but also creates an image whether they meant to or not. I guess it's kind of a conceptual art. It reminded me of a lecture I attended by an architect when I was living in Seattle who had designed a 56 story skyscraper sheathed in aluminum and called it a "Northwest building." I think he qualified it by saying that because aluminum was made in great quantities here that aluminum gave it a regional feel. So I guess for me, wafer board identifies me as a Northwest artist. I don't know if you can say the same thing about somebody that uses canvas to paint on.
There is another unique byproduct to having used the wafer board to make my works. It literally took away 90% of the anxiety of beginning an artwork. I always had something to start with. There was always a dynamic in place. I believe that Pablo Picasso called this dynamic, lines of force that needed to be balanced. The artist makes a mark and feels compelled to make another mark somewhere to create a visual equilibrium. I guess all of this makes me a kind of postmodern artist. I am always thinking about how I think about the subject or why I like something. Perhaps I am a pop artist because I make images of things that I like as Andy Warhol did. Then again at the same time I feel that I deconstruct things so maybe I may deconstructionist. I guess that makes sense because I definitely feel that there is that quality in my work especially my current digital art. I am very aware of the layering of various elements in a piece even as they are fabricated and turned into mental prints, it is important that that feeling of layering remain in existence, especially in the near abstract work I am currently engaged in.
A paved NW 13th Ave. during last month's First Thursday art walk with the Gadsby Building.