
Jesse Morgan
If the extent of your downtown Portland shopping is picking up your family’s pharmaceuticals at the drugstore nearest your office, duck into some of Portland’s most unique shops during your next long lunch. From Native American artifacts to Belgian linens to skull buttons from Germany, you’ll find great stuff from around the world without ever leaving the city.
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.
Most couture designers end up with a garment only after months of sketching, pattern-making, fabric-cutting, sewing, fitting and embellishing with ribbons and beads. Not painter Sue Lau. She takes brushes loaded with thinned-down acrylics to canvases topped with archival tissue paper to create her dresses, each of which captures the essence of a place such as Paris or Barcelona.