Document text
Exhibit showcases works by disabled artists Mail Tribune / Drew Fleming Rogue Gallery's 11th annual "No Boundaries" art show features Northwest artists who have disabilities. This piece of work, titled "Sacred Duck," is water media on rice paper and is selling for $1,600. The artist is d'Elain Johnson, who is partially blind. By BILL VARBLE Brett Hart suffered the permanent loss of some of his brain functions in a three-week coma in 1993. Since then, the act of painting has become more challenging, but it's also more rewarding, the 35-year-old artist says. "Something that has always shown in my work, despite my injury, is my passion for color and love of the medium," he says. Testifying to that is "Self-Portrait Number Three," an image that is so dominated by aggressive swatches of color that you almost have to gaze at it to make the face emerge from the patterns. Hart's bold self-portrait is just one of the paintings in "No Boundaries," a traveling exhibit by Northwest artists with disabilities. The exhibit opens today at the Rogue Gallery and Art Center in Medford. There's a reception at 5:30 tonight. The show, now in its 11th year, is an annual program of VSA Arts of Washington, a nonprofit agency providing arts opportunities. It features artists from Oregon, Washington and Montana. It's up through Oct. 17. "I love it because we're dealing with people of all kinds of disabilities," says artistic consultant Bitten Duggan of VSA's Seattle office. "From profound physical disabilities to unseen, subtle disabilities that affect them. I love how it reflects people's different realities." A painter herself as well as an administrator, Duggan leads art workshops for people with brain injuries. There are as many stories here as there are paintings. Mikki Brockman has cerebral palsy. Diagnosed deaf at age 50, he'd spent most of a lifetime being treated as if he were stupid. "He doesn't have graceful hand movements," Duggan says. "But he paints with such passion, just big strokes, so alive, so much in there, all this passion he needs to flood out." Brockman's watercolor entry is titled "Brown Calf." The show runs the gamut from naive treatments of unsophisticated themes to highly professional work. In d'Elain Johnson's "Ocean of Truth," for example, fantastic dolphins cavort with fish in the blues and greens of an unseen sea. Johnson learned scuba diving in the 1950s and dove with the likes of Jacques Cousteau. She became an art teacher, suffered partial blindness and developed a special water-based medium she applies to rice paper stretched on boards. The effect is that of watery space. Susan L. Arneson, diagnosed with mental illness in 1994, started drawing and kept her work in drawers for years. "I create because it helps me survive a world I don't understand and a mind that's in a constant state of inner confusion," she says. Among those facing the toughest challenges must be M. Jacob Schmalzriedt, who is a paraplegic. "I can't say that my injury affects my art," he says, "but my injury is the reason I am an artist." Schmalzriedt lays oil on canvas very thick. He works with the canvas, actually ripping apart paintings and weaving them back together. "To be able to destroy something in hopes of making something greater is always very trying," he says. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.