The Legacy Of A Promise: 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act

I have been invited to show at the Douglas County Museum of History and Natural History in September/October 2014.  The show will be called The Legacy Of A Promise: 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act. Volunteers from several different organizations, such as the Umpqua Watersheds and the Umpqua National Forest are collaborating to bring together the show. Preparation for the exhibit will include conversations among the artists on the conceptual aspects of Wilderness in our culture.
I am excited to participate in this project. Over the past few years I have become more and more concerned with visually exploring our place in nature and the way we coexist. I feel some urgency about these questions. I try to give a voice to nature within the human context.


Having  wild places protected and set aside is essential to me. Wilderness has an intangible but profound effect on my spiritual, emotional and physical well-being. Just knowing that there are places left relatively untouched by human development gives me peace of mind. It makes me feel that we haven't gone too far astray as custodians of the planet; that there are banks of biodiversity to draw from and intact ecosystems to teach us. Human hubris continues to astonish me. In a small way the wild places protect ourselves from ourselves.


Since I was a child, I have spent a lot of time exploring and camping in various wildernesses. My parents shared their love of nature with me and taught me to hike and enjoy the wonder of it all. Spending time in the wilderness makes me feel small, and puts me back into perspective and balance with creation.  It is like going to church.

She Waits

I am working with an image of a great horned owl. High in her camouflaged aerie, wintry and waiting as she sits upon her eggs. I have observed her many times over the years at the old abandoned homestead in the Summer Lake Preserve. She patiently withstands the occasional birders and ATVs in order to raise her chicks in that food rich place. She is silent and powerful, a shadow of the night, perfectly colored to hide in the huge old winter-bare cottonwood tree that remains by the barn. Once I saw her fledged chicks perched in a row high on the top ridge of the barn, their fluffy feathers making them appear enormous. How they got there is a mystery to me. But then that is the thing about owls, the mystery.

Solstice...

Deep dormancy, channeling bear and waiting for the turn.

The big Jacobs Gallery show is finished now and I have settled back into a wealth of quiet private studio days. I have been thinking a lot about the season and the light, or the lack thereof. I feel like I am deep into the birth canal with little oxygen and lots of pressure from all directions but forward. I am not exactly stuck, but rather in limbo, pregnant and waiting.

It's funny how the light will begin to return before the season turns toward summer.  At Solstice, the days start to lengthen as we begin true winter. That has always seemed odd to me.  Likewise, the days are longest at the beginning of summer and wane as the days heat up. Never the less, it is the way of things in the northern hemisphere.

First Friday ArtWalk: Jacobs Gallery

Here is a link to a video of the Jacobs Gallery ArtWalk.  When you reach Hedda's blog, click on the youtube link to #1 HEDDA'S ARTWORKS CHANNEL.

 http://hedda-arts.blogspot.com/

Review,The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon

The Register-Guard, November 14, 2013

Organic Vision

By Bob Keefer


At last month's opening reception for the current exhibit at Eugene's Jacobs Gallery, the question on everyone's mind was this: Who is Nancy Watterson Scharf?


The show, which runs through Nov. 23, is called "Three Sides of a Coin". It features paintings by two artists- Scharf and Bets Cole- and ceramics by a third, Grace Sheese.


Everyone who looks at paintings around here knows Cole, who lives in the country west of Eugene.  She's a career landscape painter with a wide following.  She's active in local arts circles. And she's been shown all over town .


And some people know Sheese, the ceramicist, even though she now lives in Illinois. She has shown her work in the past at the Jacobs and at DIVA and taught some ceramics courses here in 2005 and 2006.


But Scharf, who lives in Elkton, seems to have appeared out of nowhere with her sophisticated collection of big conceptual paintings that interweave images of wild birds with urban scenes. Somehow a mature, serious artist has been working right under our noses- and no one noticed.


That's for a reason. Scharf explained in an interview. "Life takes a lot of turns," she said.


Scharf, now 64, studied drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, planning all the while to become an artist. But, as she says, life intervened. She got married, started a family, moved to Sisters and got herself a job teaching art at a middle school.


It wasn't until 13 or 14 years ago that Scharf was able to take the time to start making her own art again on a steady basis. After cutting back her teaching to part time, she started putting in regular studio hours, painting every day, and soon started showing her work locally.


She's now retired from teaching and living in Elkton with her husband, a jeweler.


In those first years of her return to art, she experimented a lot. "There was no pressure to show or to sell," she said. "And so it just developed."


Working by herself, without a teacher, she was able to find a direction she wanted to take with her painting and pursue it.


"Now I'm able to say what I want to say," Scharf said. "I know where I'm going. What I began doing was not like anyone else's work,. But I trusted it."


Her work, as seen at the Jacobs, is an interesting mix of conceptual art and good, well-grounded representational painting. The concept is straightforward: Before people showed up and began to cover the planet, nature reigned.


What if we visualize the natural past of some of our over-built places?


Thus, we see a painting such as Scharf's "Pilgrim's Progress," a big (30 by 60 inches)horizontal image that shows a line of eight tall, elegant sandhill cranes walking among the reeds of an Eastern Oregon marsh, their bright eyes alert. Superimposed on the cranes are nine people you might meet on the sidewalk of any contemporary city, dressed casually, checking their phones, drinking coffee in paper cups.


The cranes are painted in full color. The superimposed humans are drawn in outline, making them tend to disappear into the birdscape. The intersection of the two images is haunting and evocative, throwing conventional ideas of physical reality out of kilter. Do the people and the cranes exist in the same place? Are they in parallel universes? Are we looking and present and past?


As in the best conceptual art, the questions are not obvious and easy, but grow naturally out of the work.


Scharf is also interested in masks, those synthetic faces that separate and connect us. In a disturbing painting, "Getting By in Modern Times," a sidewalk balloon vendor makes an animal for a little girl in fairy wings. The vendor's face is obscured by a balloon mask, giving the man's figure a Stephen King sort of creepiness. Creepier still, salmon swim up the street, and a single crane stands by, watching mournfully over the entire absurd scene.


With landscapes from around the West by Cole and small ceramic pieces by Sheese, this is a show well worth seeing.

Art talk for my show "Three Sides of a Coin"

Let me tell you some of the history of my thinking and a little bit about why I approach my visual process the way that I do.

 For as long as I can remember I have had a sense that there is more to this world than meets the eye. Sometimes I get a hint, a glimpse out the corner of my eye, a ghost of something. Our eyes are the gateway to our concept of reality. What you see is what you get, right? They faithfully transmit to our brain and ta-da- we have our picture. But when you think about it, our eyes only discern a fraction of the light wave. What about the part we don’t see.  Does that mean it doesn’t exist?

Animals sense things that we do not. Some see better with their ears, or their skin. And plants don’t have eyes at all. Imagine for a minute what the world is like to a fish, or a 300 year old tree, or a 3 week old butterfly.  I think about that a lot. I especially think about how birds see reality. They exist among us in a world of their own, with their own unique agenda and cycles.

So here’s the big question: Are birds in our world or are we in theirs?

I am concerned about how we modern humans seem to feel separate from nature. After all, we are a part of nature as much as any animal or plant, but we don’t seem to know it.  Or maybe we just don’t remember. We have separated ourselves with our inventions and human constructs.

This body of work you see tonight reflects my investigation into the hidden connections and tensions between humans and the rest of nature.

The first bird to enter my paintings was a great blue heron. There are many herons along the Umpqua where I live. At some point I began to consider how herons are virtually the same today as they existed thousands of years ago before the human species came along. That is not hard to believe if you’ve ever heard their croak. These patient still watchers became the voice of nature in my work.

After while fish began migrating through my paintings, just as they migrate through the river by my studio. In thinking about the endless wheel of seasons and the bird and fish migrations my sense of time has shifted. The natural world is full of these quiet and ancient cycles that have become a symbol for me of longevity, history and the primal power of nature.

My most recent paintings have focused on wetlands. Watching birds has drawn me to these primitive stops on the annual bird migration routes. They are the fragile watering holes and nurseries for so many organisms. And often they are the flood control for streams and rivers. Yet they are so easy to zoom by in a car.  It is tempting to think of these essential places as less than desirable land, buggy bogs that should be altered in some way.

I ask a lot of questions in my work, and I offer no answers. There is no correct way to interpret one of my paintings. My hope is that you will be able to enter a piece with a little of yourself and find your own meaning. And through my process I like to think that I have honored our fellow travelers on this planet.

Announcing my new show at the Jacobs Gallery

The show opened Friday evening, October 11th and it was beautiful.  A large crowd attended to check out the show and hear the art talks. Grace lives in Illinois and was not able to make it, but Bets and I spoke and answered many questions.