Whiting Tennis, "Bitter Lake Compound", courtesy Greg Kucera Gallery/Portland Art Museum
This Thursday (March 11) the Portland Art Museum will host the latest in its ongoing series of artist talks, in which artists and other creatives select pieces in the museum’s permanent collection to talk about with an audience.
This time around, writer-editor Matthew Stadler will talk about two paintings by Seattle artists: Mark Tobey’s “Western Town (1944) and Whiting Tennis’ “Bitter Lake Compound” (2007).
Followers of the local art scene may remember that Whiting Tennis was the winner of the Arlene Schnitzer Prize from the Portland Art Museum's inaugural Contemporary Northwest Art Awards in 2008.
"Whiting Tennis’ early works chronicled the settling of Jamestown and infamous massacres of Native Americans, while recent paintings and sculptures reflect a nostalgic view of the abandoned detritus of the American experience, inspired by rural outbuildings, make-shift shelters, and mountains of discarded junk," explained Jennifer Gately, then PAM's curator of Northwest art, when the awards were announced.
Mark Tobey was a well regarded abstract expressionist who was regarded as one of the "mystic" Northwest painters and was an influence on the great Jackson Pollock. In a book about Tobey, author Chapin Seitz explains that the artist's painting "Western Town", which Stadler will talk about, "is a generalized city where architecture dematerializes into the mist of a central vortex. The compartments appear densely populated. Above and toward the center the atmosphere is electric with presences, yet not a figure is depicted."
"Both were painted in Seattle and display interesting compositional strategies that are somehow corollary to urban environments in that city at those two very different times,” Stadler says.
“In both cases, the painters were trying to create a compositional space and strategy that could refigure the urban environment around them into something legible and, somehow, dynamic. I will read the paintings, in part, as corollary to the urban environments that they were dealing with...Tobey's vortex of a centered city flying apart and Tennis's overall field of flat, dimensionless sprawl. I've had some interesting discussion with Whiting about this, and will share them, and I'm still going through the Tobey materials at PAM's library to find the ways he articulated his intentions with the city paintings.”
Stadler is a novelist who also has written about art and architecture for various publications, including Frieze, Artforum, and Dwell. He also was co-founder and editor of Clear Cut Press. Currently Stadler runs Publication Studio, a print-on-demand publisher and storefront in Portland, with Patricia No.
The artist talk series at PAM occurs the second Thursday of each month. All talks depart at 6pm from the Hoffman building lobby, and are followed by a social hour with the artist until 8pm with complimentary food and beverages. Free for members or with Museum admission. Reservations are not required, but space is limited to the first 60 attendees. To confirm attendance, advance tickets and group sales are available at the box office. Future artist talks will involve the great Oregon painter James Lavadour (April 8), writer-artist-curator Jeff Jahn (May 13), superlative painter Storm Tharp (June 10), and photographer Christopher Rauschenberg, son of the great Robert Rauschenberg (July 8).
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