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Photo by Roger Werth
Portland-based painter Lucinda Parker takes a break from her 40-by-10-foot mural, which will hang in Lower Columbia College's St. Rose Performing Arts Center next fall.Mural gives splash of energy to new LCC performing arts center
Friday, April 20, 2007 11:29 PM PDT
By Stephanie Mathieu
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E-mail this articlePortland artist Lucinda Parker draws her inspiration from energy, especially forces of nature, such as wind and water and fire.
The self-described energetic, "symbolic abstractionist" hopes the vibes from her 40-by-10-foot acrylic painting invigorate students and visitors who enter Lower Columbia College's future performing arts center, where it will hang above the building's visual art gallery. She's spent more than a year meticulously adding globs of color to the mural -- a loose representation of logs and water rushing into the Columbia River.
"I hope every time somebody sees this painting, they feel a real burst of excitement," Parker said. "They should feel like it's speaking to them."
The 64-year-old painter showed her collective side Thursday afternoon, standing in her high-ceilinged, sky-lit studio surrounded by shelves of paints and dozens of her other paintings. She looked down at the preliminary drawings laid out on the concrete floor.
It's a process, she said. "When you make a big project like this for an art committee, you need to have a story," Parker said. "There was a funneling of focus."
Her struggle was to make something that would keep her interest for the time she's spent on the project while producing art a whole community will appreciate.
"I look at this a lot, and I think, 'Where are the problems?'" she said. Then she gets a burst of energy and paints for a few hours. She stands on a scaffold to get up high and primarily uses a putty spatula and a paint roller instead of a brush. She lets some of her paint run down to give her paintings some character.
"This is not a photograph," Parker said. "There's some energy that's implied with the drips."
The project began in 2005, after she was selected by the Washington State Arts Commission, which has the authority to choose artists for public projects. Parker joined the commission's pool of potential artists more than a decade ago and had convinced herself that the commission wouldn't salivate over an Oregon artist.
She received the commission that September, "then I started thinking, what will I do?" She toured the Cowlitz County Historical Museum in Kelso for inspiration, and found it while learning about the logging industry's old use of splash damns.
Splash dams were used by the timber workers to hold logs until they were ready to send them downstream. At that point, the damns were dynamited, sending a gush of water and logs downhill.
"I was interested in the power of the image," she said. "It's a romantic, hydraulic image. ... It has a lot of rushing energy to it."
It also has a sense of danger, Parker said, and she was intrigued by the idea of a "tangled group of things" that the logs provided. She's named the mural, "Where Water Comes Together with Other Water," which is from a poem written by Clatskanie native Raymond Carver.
Her mural also includes a night-to-day theme. The left side is darker with a moon in the sky, the middle shows the midday sun, and a sun sets over the river on the left side of the mural.
The college has a $68,000 art budget for the project, and the 54,550-square foot Rose Center for the Arts is expected to cost a total of $24.6 million. The center will hold two auditoriums, a rehearsal hall, a visual arts gallery, and a pavilion outside. It is expected to be completed by October.
Parker's painting will rest above the entrance to the gallery and will be visible from campus through the building's large front windows. Parker is painting it on one canvas which will be rolled together like a scroll and transported to Longview.
"This is an abstract building in a lot of ways," Parker said, pointing out the hard lines and large windows on an artist rendering of the performing arts building, scheduled for completion in October.
Parker began painting at a young age and remembers spending family camping trips sketching rivers. She liked the challenge of trying to capture something that was moving.
"I like hiking all around in the woods," she said. "I've always like to draw waterfalls."
Parker earned a bachelors degree in painting through Reed College in Portland and a Master's of Fine Arts in painting at the Pratt Institute in New York. She works out of her Portland studio, located in Clear Creek Distillery, which is owned by her husband, Steve McCarthy. Parker's work can be viewed at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, and she also has a mural in the city's convention center and a painting in the Midland Library.
Including art from a Northwest painter is a great way to showcase local talent, said Janelle Runyon, Lower Columbia College's spokeswoman.
"We have many amazingly talented artists right here," Runyon said. "It will be a great addition to the new facility, and we are really looking forward to sharing it with the entire community."
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