Art+Culture

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Jo Hamilton: Crochet artist

A wall of yarn is her palette, a steel hook her brush. With these, Portland artist Jo Hamilton crochets a new twist on an ancient craft with elaborate cityscapes and portraits that unravel crochet as granny craft. By painting in yarn, Scottish-born Hamilton, 41, blends fine art training from the Glasgow School of Art with the craft she learned from her “gran.” She moved to Portland in 1996, and painted in oil and watercolor for almost twenty years, but says, “I hadn’t found my medium.” In 2006, inspiration struck at a nontraditional show of tapestry, sewing and embroidery at the Contemporary Craft Museum (now the Museum of Contemporary Craft). She went home, picked up the crochet hook and began a cityscape of Portland that took years to complete. Next were the portraits—friends, coworkers and even dogs. “Portland excites and inspires me to do unsanctioned things and not think about what…

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Darren Orange: Painter

A video of Darren Orange spraying, wiping, smearing and throwing paint on a canvas matches his own description of how he works: fast and furiously. Part of a small exhibit at the Newport Visual Arts Center in January, the video conveys a feverish quality. Red, orange, black and white streak across the canvas, capturing a moment in time and place. “I paint where I live, and where I live permeates what I paint,” he says. Raised on an apple orchard in Yakima, educated at Western Washington University in studio painting and now a resident of Astoria, the 38-year-old painter finds inspiration in windmills, fishing villages, shipwrecks and broken down cars. “I’m drawn to marks that man has left on the environment—ruined architectural elements, discarded things and reminders of the obsolete,” he says. They’re his window to history, the human scale in the natural environment. Abandoned railroad tracks, the bow of…

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Scott Henry: Trellis System Designer

Syndi Henry Beavers tells the story of going wine tasting with her dad, Scott Henry. After the tour, her dad handed his credit card to the young man behind the counter to buy wine. The man glanced at the name on it and said, “Did you know there’s a trellis system named for Scott Henry?” “Almost immediately, the light went on,” Beavers says. “He [the cashier] was so excited that Scott Henry was standing in front of him, he pulled a book off the shelves and showed my dad the well-thumbed page marked with the Henry trellis system.” In 1972, Henry planted grapes on his family homestead in the Umpqua Valley near Roseburg—the start of Henry Estate Winery, one of Oregon’s oldest. Educated at Oregon State University as an engineer, Henry’s background proved helpful in the early years, when the vineyards produced a crowded bunch of grapes that were prone…

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Memorable Faces

One Oregon artist seeks meaning and familiarity in the faces of others.

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Nike’s Oregon Project

History was in the making in the London chill, but it wouldn’t include the usual favorites.

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From Where I Stand: Gaston

1859’s From Where I Stand feature heads to Gaston, a small hamlet 30 miles outside of Portland.

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Anna Fritz’s The Gospel of Tree Bark

Anna Fritz wrote most of her new album, “The Gospel of Tree Bark,” in a little cabin in the coastal mountains of Southern Oregon with only the birds and the water from nearby creeks to lull her to sleep. Sounds like an album for a bunch of pagan back-to the-land-types, right? Maybe… but she grows so far past this parody both lyrically and musically on “Bark,” that she might be spending more time in the spotlight this year than she anticipated.