Painter Kevin Noonan’s interest in art began in childhood. “My grandfather is a gifted folk-art painter, so I grew up around painting,” says the Connecticut native, who has a degree in Buddhist Studies from Antioch College in Ohio. “I got the chance to study in India and Burma, where I did meditation, but when I was there I also studied Buddhist iconography and modern Burmese painting. I even visited the state art school in Rangoon and talked to artists there.”
To look at artist Heidi Marie Balmaceda’s paintings, you’d never guess she once avoided working with color. “I was actually terrified of working with color,” she says. “I thought it was scary and complicated. Then about a year and a half ago, I got a 4-foot by 4-foot canvas and painted it metallic gold. I went to a crafts store and found some gold leaf and began to play with it.”
As a child, Hickory Mertsching was always drawing and painting. “I drew a lot of boy stuff like trucks, and even when I was a child, people seemed to respond to them,” he says.
An unexpected trip to Oregon in 1992 changed the trajectory of mixed-media artist Vicki Grayland’s life. “I was on my way to Venezuela on an environmental vacation and then the organization canceled the trip because of the political situation there,” says. “I looked for something else to fill the slot and came to a tai chi retreat in Southwestern Washington, and in my version of the classic Oregon story, I saw how incredibly beautiful it was here and started planning to come back.”
When painter Alison O’Donoghue was growing up, art was both a sibling bond and the basis for a bit of sibling rivalry.
Abstract artist Shannon Lewis organizes her paintings around the idea of space. “I’m interested in liminality, the spaces between things,”
When artist Jamee Linton moved to Portland five years ago, she chose the Rose City without visiting it.
While Dane Wilson’s painting called Andy’s Island looks like trees reflected in water, it’s more complicated than that. The trees and their reflection are the barcodes of books about Andy Warhol.
You can take an artist out of his hometown, but you can’t always take the hometown out of the artist. “I was born in a little town in Poland called Zamosc,” says Tomasz Misztal. “It’s an Italian Renaissance town: An Italian architect designed the architecture as a twin town to Padua, Italy. I just realized about 10 years ago how that little place explains the Renaissance tones in my art.”
