Faculty Arts at MHCC: Visual Arts Gallery Exhibit

Paintings by Nathan Orosco, prominently 'The Spill', being observed by a student - Photo by Marisa Engelhard

Alma Perez

The Advocate

The annual Faculty Art exhibit was held in the MHCC Visual Arts Gallery from Sept. 22 through Oct. 30. All of the art presented in the showcase was created by our talented faculty members here at Mt. Hood.The individual faculty got the opportunity to present their hard work and passion for their art  with different forms of art – including calligraphy, sculptures, lithography, painting, charcoal, and more. These are impressive instructors, and if you are interested in pursuing the arts and learning more yourself, check out what art classes you can sign up for next term!

Artist Interview Q and A

Angelina Cox

'Love' by Angelina Cox - Photo by Marisa Engelhard

Q: Tell me a little about yourself: What do you do? Where are you from? What inspires you most as an artist? etc.

A: I am a calligrapher (with a full-time non-art job and a part-time art teaching job). I am from Hillsboro. I learned calligraphy in high school, pursued classes at Portland Community College and lived in London for a year where I earned a certificate in calligraphy at Roehampton University. My bachelor’s degree is in Art History from Portland State University. I continue to seek out calligraphy classes through the Portland Society for Calligraphy.

Calligraphy is a challenging art form: Not only are you focusing on the letters, but the overall piece is language – either your words, or another author’s message. You have a responsibility to convey the truth of the words, or your best interpretation of those words.

Q: What (or who) inspired this piece (“Love”), and what are you trying to communicate with it? 

A: This piece was inspired by Valentine’s Day, which is my favorite holiday. I spent more than a month choosing which words to use, arranging them in this column format, playing with the different letter styles (scripts), and arranging the words in different orders. I have stacks of rough drafts, each slightly different than the last.

Q: What emotions were you having while doing this one?

A: “Um... love?”

Q: What small details of your piece are your favorite, or least favorite?

A: When creating a word stack, it is challenging to get an overall balance, but I think I achieved a pleasing layout without any visual hot-spots or holes in the design.

Q: Anything else to add?

A: I am a member of the Portland Society for Calligraphy, one of the oldest calligraphy guilds in the USA. We welcome new members or visitors to attend our monthly meetings and art shows. We have an art show, “Welcome Words,” [displayed] at Mount Angel Abbey, Oct. 18 - Nov. 15. (For more: https://www.portlandsocietyforcalligraphy.org/ )

Kim Fink

Q: Tell me about yourself…

A: I am professor emeritus from the University of North Dakota, where I taught printmaking and directed “Sundog Multiples,” a printmaking studio/program that gave undergraduate and graduate art students the opportunity to work with regional, national and internationally recognized artists. I have returned to Oregon and teach drawing part-time at MHCC as well as maintain a studio along with my wife, Suzanne, a painter in Salem. I love teaching and I love art.

Q: Which artwork in the exhibit are you most proud of?

A: “Big Daddy,” a lithograph and watercolor print.

Q: What (or who) inspired this piece, and what are you trying to communicate with it?

A: It is a multilayered and multi-narrated piece that is inspired by social and political issues that we are currently experiencing.

Q: What emotions were you having while doing this one?

A: Concern

Q: What is your favorite thing about the medium you used?

A: Lithography is my medium of choice these days. I am proud to own a 19th century French star-wheel press that has a lot of amazing history behind it, including [being] owned and used by the first master printmaker at Tamarind Institute – the Mecca for lithographers. Also, the press was smuggled out of occupied Paris during the fall of Paris to the Nazi invasion. I cannot confirm this, but multiple previous owners tell me this, so I tend to believe the story. I am honored to be a caretaker of this unique machine.

Q: Can you walk me through your creative process, from concept to completion? A: I was trained as a painter and have a “painterly approach” to my printmaking processes. I begin with a general idea, usually have a few images chose to initially work with, and go from there. Once I lay an image down, I build the work up from there. It’s a bit scary, as there are often failures. Typically, printmakers have the image worked out completely before actually committing to the plate, stone or screen. I find that approach stifling. Q: What themes or messages do you find yourself drawn to in your art?

A: Very personal. One can look at my work similarly to looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs. I find images that mean something to me or give me tone of emotion. I use that and combine others to create a kind of personal messaging system. I do not expect anyone to understand what I say, but rather hope people can get their own meanings from the work. 

John Holsinger

Q: Tell me about yourself… etc. 

A: I was born in the Philippines, but I suppose I'd have to say I'm from Okinawa, Japan, because that's where I grew up, which is not at all what it might sound like, because my Japanese is in fact quite poor and, since I lived on an American military base for most of my stay there, conditions were such that I spent most of my time around other Americans. 

I am a painter, though I also spend a great deal of my creative efforts outside the domain of the visible, in music and audio production. In no obvious way do these two distinct practices converge, but I will say that their differences become fewer and smaller the deeper I go and that there is an exchange of ideas between them – as well as shared sensibilities – that bridge them in significant ways. 

There is a mimetic or imitative impulse in everything I do, a kind of realism that is inevitably coupled with a re-imagination of what's real. Life imitates art more than art imitates life, or so Oscar Wilde would have it, but there is nonetheless a kind of dialectic happening there – it's directional but circular. Broadly speaking, life and art are my inspirations. 

Q: What (or who) inspired this piece, and what are you trying to communicate with it? 

A: This drawing and its title were inspired in part by a mentor of mine, Scott Noel, but it is in equal part inspired by a book on Pissarro and Cézanne written by T.J. Clark, similarly titled, "If these Apples Should Fall." And it's that title that requires some unpacking: it doesn't come from Clark himself, it is actually a reference to a passage by Ernst Bloch, in which Bloch– prompted by his apprehension of Cézanne's apples (of which Cézanne painted many) – suggests, with some grandiosity, something of what is at stake in the enterprise of art. 

That is, what might happen should this artistic enterprise fall or fall apart, especially in times of great political volatility like his and. of course – one can't help but parallelize – our own. Rightly or wrongly, Bloch (and many of us [do] today) felt society was on the brink of some kind of political revolution and felt that intensity, that power, in art itself. Cézanne's apples (or in the case of this drawing, a pumpkin) teetering on the edge – ripe with potential – look as though they may drop, at which point, as Bloch put it, a "universal conflagration will ensue," and something significant, though we cannot know exactly what, will be inexorably set in motion. So, what about the parenthetical: the so-called "mentor's prison"? 

Well, that requires some unpacking, too. At the end of the day this drawing is manifestly a "still life," and despite the peculiar, perhaps slightly provocative title, the irony is that as an artwork it is likely to be perceived by most as just that: a mere still life – some kind of study or academic exercise, or perhaps worse, a cheap anachronism or pastiche – maybe some kind of decoration for Halloween, even.

But teaching drawing at Mt. Hood has prompted me to seriously engage with "The Still Life," which is kind of an odd thing to do, because, when it presents itself in the current day, it's not uncommon for it be unfairly maligned as irrelevant or out-of-touch. 

I am not quixotic enough to try and change this state of affairs; it is what it is. Some people are just going to see it and put this kind of work in a little box, a kind of prison, as it were, and it's just as well, but it's this dynamic that reminds me so much of a mentor of mine. 

When I studied under Scott Noel at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts – an accomplished painter and teacher who makes still lifes and traffics in all the standard academic and art historical trappings, having done so for about half a century – there was an unforgettable moment one day in which he, after putting up his drawings for all to see, turned to a small gathering of admiring students and in cautionary tones, gravely (though plausibly half-ironically) admonished us to never, whatever we do, end up like him. 

For a contemporary artist, no fate could be worse than to be one of the ones who got stuck making "traditional" art in an ivory tower, at the oldest art school in the country. So, in effect, the message was that if we knew what was good for us, we'd escape the prison of the academy, of so-called academic art, while we still could, while our relatively youthful minds were still flexible and adaptive. 

Of course, I always had a bad habit of not heeding his most foreboding warnings, which Scott would often whisper sinisterly in my ear as I drew in his class. I suppose without that, this drawing as it stands simply wouldn't exist. 

Q: Why did you pick this medium?  

 A: I wanted to work with the same basic materials I have my students use, so in a sense, this drawing is a demonstration, an example of how the instructor might make a still life. 

But I work with charcoal on paper all the time mostly because I like the look and experience of using those materials. And coming at it from the angle of a painter, charcoal gets me about as close as I can get to the experience of a wipe-out underpainting or grisaille. I practice "mass-drawing" almost exclusively these days, and charcoal allows you to quickly add and remove "spots" of tone and to dispense with lines almost entirely. 

It's also an incredibly ancient, readily available, cheap, and forgiving medium. If you are sensitive to it and its potential, it will teach you a lot about what you and a drawing can do. 

Q: What emotions were you having while doing this one? 

A: There is a persistent notion that artists are in the business of being entranced while they work, caught up in the very emotions that appear encapsulated in the artwork. And, of course, there is some truth to that, but what often goes neglected is just how often enough there is this peculiar disconnect between the mental states involved in making the piece and what emotions appear or are made to appear in the piece itself. 

Drawings can be awfully complicated, technical things, and in the process of making them an artist might be engaged in all kinds of thoughts and feelings that are not always evident in the work. For example, a great deal of strategy, analysis, comparison, and measurement – "left-brain" stuff – gets deployed in the service of constructing a drawing such as this, but that doesn't necessarily mean the drawing is going to look at all dispassionate. To the contrary, those cerebral, ostensibly unfeeling faculties can be crucial in getting the feeling in the picture just so. 

Of course, if you're not careful you can get lost in the analysis-paralysis of it all and that always runs the risk of overtaking and stunting what could have been a much more moving and vital drawing. A good drawing or painting will, one move after the next, reel you in deeper and deeper as you're making it, rendering you practically helpless to its demands. 

Few experiences in an artist's life can surpass that feeling. The key is to maintain it for as long as you can muster, to develop things in such a way that you are keeping the lure in clearer and clearer view while never quite catching it. 

The worst thing that can happen is for a promising drawing to suddenly lose its illusory appeal or for you to actually catch the bait, because at that point your motivation taps out and you'll either not know what to do or won't be able to bring yourself to make it happen. But from my perspective, drawings are never truly finished, and I personally never "fix" or seal them. They just get abandoned – for a time, and one day, perhaps, forever.