Art Making

There’s always art hanging in the corridor leading to terminal A at the Eugene Airport. Whenever I travel through, I stop to look at it, intrigued by the artists’ personalities, the originality, the courage, and the talent. The artists are represented by Oregon Supported Living Programs, or OSLP. Most of them are developmentally challenged in one way or another. A few years ago, I fell in love with a painting by Terry Johnson and decided to buy it:

When I went to OSLP’s gallery to pick it up, I learned more about Terry. He was born in 1949. His mother — in labor with triplets — was denied emergency care at an Oregon hospital because of the color of her skin. Terry and his brother Perry were born with severe disabilities as a result. Their brother Jerry grew up in a way that most of us would call normal. Terry could not speak or hear. Perry had limited speech. Both could paint.

I look at this painting almost every morning when I stand in front of it and stretch my aging spine. In tree pose, I compare my up-stretched arms with Terry’s perfectly crooked lines. It’s as if his smiling car is forgiving me for not being able to get my arms up straight.

I love this painting. It’s alive with humor and confidence without pretense or artifice. When I look at it, I want to paint too. What a gift that is from him to me.

Terry has painted this car a thousand times apparently. His autism causes him to repeat, then repeat again and again. No doubt each version is a little different. Better, or not. It doesn’t matter.

Yesterday, while taking a walk on Oregon State’s campus, I stopped for something to drink at the Student Union. On the wall outside the coffee shop, there was an exhibit of sketches and paintings by Frank Eugene Kowing, an artist I’d never heard of. In his Artist’s Statement, he said something that made a lot of sense to me:

Resolution of the work is like a healing process: there are symptoms that evoke anxiety and a desire for completion/harmony. The evolution of the painting leads to healing.

I felt this last night when I tried to paint a mountain bluebird from a photo I took years ago. The first try wasn’t so good, so I tried again. Better. I could go to bed feeling like I hadn’t given up.