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.
Most everybody has their own shopping circuit in the Pearl District, one of Portland’s most-vibrant arts districts. Bounded by the Willamette River on the north, N.W. Burnside on the south, N.W. Broadway on the east and I-405 on the west, the live-work-play neighborhood covers more than a mile, so it’s easy to not stray from what you know. To get beyond our usual haunts, we turned the minimalist in us loose in search of all things clean-lined.
Are you living without stools beneath the eating bar in your kitchen because you can’t decide between the LEM Piston or the Emeco navy stool? Wondering whether armrests are a must-have or an amenity to jettison? We asked a furniture maker and three designers to demystify how to end up with the right kitchen seating for your aesthetic, your space and your family. So practice saying, “Please be seated!”
Only a frenemy would put you up in a typical guest room. You know, the one with the lamp you can’t read by and the decades-old mattress with the ditchlike dip in the middle. How to be a Hostess with the Mostest to your overnight pals? Oregon Home asked two interior designers, a home-couture seamstress and a designer-builder for the elements you need to end up with a stylish retreat.
Turning 50 this spring was more than a daylong celebration for mixed-media artist Katherine Mead. To commemorate her milestone birthday, the Lake Oswego, Ore., artist spent the previous year creating 50 new works of art, which she unveiled at a show she called “50 at 50” in the gallery space of a Northwest Portland architecture firm in August.
David Piper is a man of many identities.
By day, as an associate at SRG Partnership Inc. in Portland, the architect juggles the design and building of commercial structures such as a hospital in Honolulu. By evening, he is husband to his architect-wife, a daddy to their 3½-year-old son and, once he heads down to his basement studio, the potter behind David N. Piper Ceramics.
In the mid-1980s, a corporate downsizing at U.S. Bank and a diagnosis that one of her three daughters had Rett Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disorder, led Sally Sellers to leave behind computer programming work and take up quilting contemporary textiles.
