RawHound Productions

 
This week’s Portland trip included a visit to the studio of RawHound Productions and a sneak peek at their latest projects. In 2025 they won an Audience Choice award at the Portland Festival of Cinema.

The Portland Art Museum

When I travel, I always try to make time to visit local art museums. I especially like to go to museums that are smaller, less well known, etc. I often discover real treasures, from excellent regional work, artists who should be better known and even works from very famous artists that never make the art books and travelling blockbuster museum shows. Santa Barbara, Long Beach, Tucson, Boise, just point me to the art museum.

I get up to Portland now and then but realized it has been 18 years since I visited the Portland Art Museum. The museum has tripled in size since my last visit.  This is an example where more exhibition space is better (that is not always the case).

It is always satisfying to see a lot of local artists featured in a museum. The Inkling Studio show is an excellent showcase of local printmaking.  Mark Rothko was a local artist, but most of the blockbuster work is elsewhere. As an artist, I found seeing some of his early work fascinating. There is a beach scene that reminded me of Chaïm Soutine.  The museum has Soutine’s The Little Pastry Cook — a pleasure to see as we do not have any of his work on display in the Bay Area. The photography of the Kenji Nakahashi was also well curated, it is shown with contemporary Japanese ceramics.

I must be sure not to wait 18 years to go back.

Visiting the Portland Correspondence Coop

On my visit to Portland, I got to attend the Portland Correspondence Coop monthly meeting. It was a real treat.
The meetings are hosted in this amazing place called Cargo. 
Cargo is sort of like an antique mall but for artists and makers.  Instead of antiques, you have booths filled with all kinds of groovy stuff.  Some of the artists represented are even San Francisco refugees.
How I wish we could have a space like this in San Francisco. But alas, pretty much any big warehouse like this would be snapped up by some tech company to make another useless app.   I ❤️ Portland.

City Stickers

Stickers covering the backs of street signs are not unique to any community. It happens in a lot of places. But the stickers themselves are often unique.
Can we create a portrait of a community by just looking at what gets stuck on the street signs, electrical boxes and mailboxes, buildings, etc.?  Well, let’s start with Portland, Oregon and see what we get.

Map of the Pacific Northwest

Map of the Pacific Northwest, mixed media on canvas, 12”x12”

Just one last piece for my upcoming show Landscape + Collage = Collagescapes.   All pieces of old maps, postage stamps, postcards and more to help map out the Pacific Northwest. 

Greener than Green

Columbia Gorge Collagescape, mixed media on board, 12”x12”

It seems every time a friend returns from a visit to Washington or Oregon they always pretty much say the same thing, “It’s so green up there.”  Up in the Pacific Northwest they seem to take the green for granted – well at least west of the Cascades.  And you know, it really is green up there.  Even California’s wettest winters and greenest springs are different from the green up north.  The dense lush grass on every roadside, the skies that quickly go from blue to lead gray, the muted light – it is striking how a place that is not that far away can be so different.

I wanted to capture some of that green for the Collagescape Series.  I chose one of my favorite places in the Pacific Northwest — the Columbia River Gorge just east of Portland.  It’s one of those over-the-top landscapes that the Western United States does so well.  But unlike the arid West, up north it’s green, so many shades of green with occasional break of a tall, narrow waterfall and the blue flow of the river itself.

This is another work to be included in my Collagescape show opening in August.  In the meantime, prints and additional items with this image are also available from Society 6.