Painter of the Rain Coast
April 28, 2009
Story and Artwork by Erik Sandgren
We live on a lee shore—pounding waves, big trees, big fish, big water, First Peoples, confluences, and tectonic movement. William Blake’s Nobodaddy erupts anew from ancient deeps. Look: Sea stacks on the outer shore rhyme with the vertical accents of old cannery pilings and abandoned docks. They rhyme with remnant snags of old logging shows, rhyme with the standing runestones of snuff-dipping Swede forbearers. Conflicting claims and the booms and busts of extraction economies are incised into the landscape. Headlands stretch westward into the mammalian sea roads. Around them are otters, oystercatchers, grebes, guillemots, cormorants, herons, gulls, plovers, sea lions, dunlins, sanderlings, and beached Humboldt Squid. Layers of stuff and duff are nutrients to the present growth.
Living this landscape—how do you set about to make a picture that teams with what you know, what you see, and what you half remember?
These temperate rainforests, the old growth, are more densely biotic than anything on earth. There’s nothing like it. There are places you can hop out of your car and be swallowed by it—most other bits have been pushed far enough up and back and away that you are forced to earn your contact with the primeval. Europe has its cathedrals. We have trees and nurse logs as miraculous, and runs of big quick strong fish with DNA as venerable. Pilgrimages to them have a different flavor, to be sure—ministered by ravens, ouzels, wrens, and voles.
Moving waters; rarely is there a quiet moment in the drool and drip and sizzle—always going somewhere, and not a little spooky. Owls are not the tame icon of conventional wisdom here—more likely to be a Quinault death vision or a fighting word over the timber set-aside that impacts livelihoods and school funding. The artist’s aqueous media are perfectly suitable here: watercolor outdoors in the stay-damp about-to rain mode and acrylics or oils for the winter ceremonials—tucked away indoors for long grey months.
I moved back to the Pacific Northwest with family to a timber town best known for its hard times to teach art, of all things, at the small college marked by its chainsawn choker setter mascot at the highway entrance. Here I am close to country both different than and deeply familiar to my Willamette Valley upbringing: Doug firs, rain-shrouded mountains, rivers, mink-oiled boots, four wheel drives, Filson, Goretex, big bonfires on the beaches, and winter steelhead. We raised a child in this cradle of mists, among artists, skilled working people, family, and teachers—beautiful specimens of each—and more.
Our first year here one hundred and thirteen inches of rain beat down on our shakebutt roof and house of roughsawn timber. We can just see a squint of the Chehalis river from the front room—shiny mud and bright grays, and the ridges ragged with logging. When we arrived twenty years ago, the A-lines and C-lines were open to hunters, not yet gated against tweakers and dumpers. There were inordinate numbers of Scandinavians and rivers new to me: the Bone, Palix, Johns, Elk, Bogachiel, Hoh, Queets, Quinault—each with complex networks of tributary streams. Still to be had for the price of a walk are clearcuts, tidefalls, clamming beaches, cobbled shores, headlands, spruces, chantrelles, and tall trees tickling water droplets out of wispy mists curling back on themselves like green wood shavings fresh off the knife.
My father, Nelson Sandgren, couldn’t show me how to fish, instead we painted outdoors together—wet and cold sometimes—and living like kings in a glory of health and light, warming after by a roaring fire. Never turn your back on the sea, son. Every so often a sneaker wave comes in all the way from China. And don’t be playing on these beach-logs. It may only take an inch to flip those tons of wood.
So all these years its been painting on the beach, from the headlands, perched on rocks, and ducking the wind behind piles of big silvery wood. Painting in the boatyards, I am still seduced into pure description by the splendid curves of boats bred to their waters and specialized by fishery: trawlers, trollers, bow pickers, long liners, crabbers, and still a few multi–purpose double enders from the 1930s. They have known the power of the sea and the resilience of sailors’ boundless faith in their sea-bounding shapes of wood.
It is both humbling and satisfying to express oneself with a set of skills common to a long-valued profession. There are several strands a-weaving. My father’s teachers at the University of Oregon were Andrew Vincent, David McCosh, and Jack Wilkinson. McCosh had come west from studying with Grant Wood and developed here in the Northwest a freshly abstracted response to his newly familiar landscape. Through travel, books, and discussion in a home filled with painters and a perfume of coffee and turpentine, we also nurtured a deep familiarity with the art of Europe. Then, of course, there was the excitement of the Northwest School as they were being discovered: Tobey, Graves, Callahan, and others making special reference to the Pacific.
My first introduction to the complexities and nuanced variety of Northwest Coast art came from collections at the Portland Art Museum and the carvings of George Kosanovic—not knowing then how that work would eventually inform my own. Studying at Yale I found that my love of light and landscape and a certain ability to find their equivalents in shapes and color—everything I had unwittingly brought with me to college—was supported, critiqued, and honed by other teachers. It found a new basis there in history and intellect. And then what? To paint, to show, to travel and to teach—what is there to paint that matters? The answer is a life of painting light and water.
The rain coast of Canada and Alaska is boisterously populated by Raven, the boreal bird of significance to any who know it first hand. As Emblem of thought and memory for the Norse, Raven is a tricky omnivore for the Northwest First Peoples who spin out creation as rising from his omnivorous selfishness—a paean to the universal laws of unintended consequences. You can see this world through the lens of their stories, reminded by glyphs cut into the surfaces of stone: prototypes of the ovoid form lines of later coastal art. Tendrils of finger-wide grooves depict familiar fish and mythical creatures in a sinuous language of incised characters. They reach from the Chinese side of the Pacific suggesting venerable dragons of transformative energies. Their significance are extensions of the very places you find them, unique to each spot—on a particular boulder, on this special stretch of beach, above that one particular twist of stone and water: Sproat Lake, Nanaimo, Gabriola and Denman Islands, Chrome Island (next to the lighthouse), Cape Alava, and Kuleet Bay, among others.
Anthropologist Franz Boas points out that the old Northwest Coast art offers a special fusion of the demonic and the sacred—qualities usually separate in European culture. The relevance of this fusion has appeared to me gradually, as if emerging from mist. This particularly grand crash of land and sea continues to toss up inspiring polarities. Here we are, perched for a moment on the edge of a continent, on a slim and slippery sliver of time and space, painting something of the heart and something of the mind. Paraphrasing Gary Snyder: the artists’ job is to represent that part of the old mythologies that are relevant today. What isn’t already ancient in a throwaway culture? Let the moving waters guide your answer. All along this coast you can watch the sea as it was a thousand years ago and more, pounding the living rock. You hear the same strong suck and push of forces rockin’ the rim.
I have painted the rain coast bits and pieces at a time over the years alone or with friends, from Arcata to Sitka. The redwood coast feels different than the rest of California. The Northwest really begins somewhere above Mendecino. In Southeast Alaska one sees a mix of first peoples, extraction economies and tourism familiar from the Juneau photographs of Winter and Pond taken a century ago.
In the art context, Barry Herem and Mary Randlett have “given me eyes,” as Mary says, for aspects of the Rain Coast. I paint alongside Mark Clarke and a whole clutch of hardy outdoor painters who show up each summer on the Oregon Coast. We respond in paint to familiar bits of landscape in changeable light, weather, tides, and feeling. My father’s heritage as painter and teacher is part workshop, part gathering: an ongoing study in the dialectics of variable and constant.
Last summer I found a small black and white photo of myself taken at eighteen months, stick in hand, toddling up the path from the beach at Seal Rock. On sharing it, a friend said, “Ah, how rare these days to see a man walk in the footsteps of his childhood.” One could take that several ways but I choose to treasure it as a blessing. That and big trees, big fish, mountains, mists, and moving waters.
Painter and printmaker Erik Sandgren is tenured art faculty at Grays Harbor College. His work may be viewed at eriksandgren.com.
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