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.

New Work-Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is my most recent painting. I have been steadily drawn to wetland habitats in my recent work. This fragile habitat is so easy to overlook and dismiss as a muddy bog when one glides by in their car. So much of our wetlands have been dried out and managed for human uses. Yet these habitats support a wealth of organisms and provide essential support for migrating birds that pass through on their ancient cycles.
In Four and Twenty Blackbirds I explored wetland reeds once again. I tried to convey my wonder at the power and beauty of nature. I put myself out on a limb in terms of technique as I did not begin with the bird images in the underpainting as I usually do. I also worked with the new palette of color I began with my previous painting, Pilgrims' Progress. I hoped to give a stronger voice to nature in this painting. The yellow headed  blackbirds give me a thrill when I look at them in their black masks. They are in charge of their world.

New work-Pilgrims' Progress

Finally, at long last I have finished my two new paintings.  With the first, Pilgrims' Progress, I started with a mental vision of color and a strong sense of the concept which led me all the way. I have been trying to loosen up my style a bit and reduce images and ideas to the essentials necessary elements. I feel really happy with this piece because I believe I accomplished that goal. It goes where I wanted it to go simply and succinctly.  And oh those Sandhill Cranes. They have an almost human quality to them, more than ordinary herons and cranes.  They are really huge and walk more like a turkey or a chicken. I was lucky to observe a pair in their elaborate mating dance at the Summer Lake Oregon reserve one winter. These mysterious migrating birds require the wetlands that are threatened all across the western United States.
Pilgrims' Progress is large, 30' x 60", and the images march right across.  I wanted it to seem a continuous flow, like a river of people and birds.

Baking pies

I baked an apple pie today to donate to a community auction.  I arrived with my pie and laid it with 40 or so other beautiful pies of a wide variety.  I had no trouble figuring out where the pie table was because there were women gathered looking over the pies with a proud and critical eye. Pies are serious business!
Every time I bake pies I am transported in time to my mother's kitchen, my grandmother's kitchen, my aunt's kitchen, our neighbor's kitchen. Suddenly I am a child watching and helping in one of those farm wives' domains where I spent my early years. Tying on an apron does it to me as well.  Hanging out laundry, canning fruit, collecting and drying herbs. I hear echoes, a whisper in my ear. A brief glimpse from the corner of my eye There is something in the act that is a particular kind of wisdom, a ritual performed over and over by women through the ages, their sure hands rolling and pinching and slicing.
I think about all those women whose creativity was limited to their daily routine. They are there beside me and behind me. Once again I am reminded that I am not separate, but rather a continuation and expression of all sisters who have come before.

Update:
I learned today that there were a total of 51 homemade pies donated to the fund raiser.  The pie auction brought in well over $2000 for our community center.  I do love our small town.