John Valls has spent the past year photographing a cookbook featuring the best of Oregon’s food. “Having previously met these chefs in their restaurant kitchens, I was surprised to find how delightfully small and simple their home spaces are,” says Valls, who has three cookbooks under his belt. “It goes to show that it’s not a fancy space that makes great food.”
Brian Libby is a Portland-based writer, photographer, and award-winning filmmaker. He has published in The New York Times, Dwell, The Oregonian and Metropolitan Home, among others. He also is the author of Tales From the Oregon Ducks Sideline, a history of his beloved college football team that is being republished this fall.
Robin Doussard
April-May 2011 issue
Hands seem to sink into solid walls. Giant people appear to climb in and out of high windows. A building looks as if it is turning and clicking into new shapes like a kid’s Transformer toy. “Projected light media” doesn’t quite capture the etheral magic of this relatively new art form. A gathering at Portland … Read more
You see it every day: Passers-by hold up a cellphone and snap a digital shot of something they want to remember—a dress in a storefront window, a just-delivered plate at a spendy restaurant or a too-cute pug puppy. Then there’s mixed-media artist Tom Prochaska. Relying only on his memory, he perfectly renders 20-inch-tall by 7-inch-wide papier-mâché figures that bring to life people he last cast his eyes on fortysomething years ago.
If the harvest moon wanted its luminosity perfectly captured, it would seek out glass artist Laurene Howell to cast its portrait.
Born in Idaho and raised in Portland, Howell, 64, was a dental hygienist for six years before she decided to go to medical school at age 29 and become an ear, nose and throat surgeon. “I’ve been interested in art since grade school, but I didn’t start taking art classes until 15 years ago,” she says. “I took a watercolor class that took me to the Greek island of Mykonos, where I discovered watercolor wasn’t my medium. Then I lasted a day and a half in a three-day painting class. I’d play with collage and embellishments from time to time. I’ve always been fascinated with glass art, but when I was practicing medicine, I couldn’t do anything with glass because I couldn’t risk cutting my hands.”
Native peoples living on the islands in the South Pacific would recognize a kindred artist if they saw the bas-relief works of Ballston, Ore., woodcarver Totem Shriver.
He takes hand tools to thick planks of Oregon big leaf maple, ash, spruce, cedar, black walnut and Oregon white oak to create neo-primitive woodcarvings.
If you like to pop an all-black outfit with one crazy piece of jewelry, you’ll love the attention-getting rings, earrings, cuffs, brooches and necklaces that Sarah Fox fabricates.
