Manzanita hosts arts trio
Manzanita’s Hoffman Center is a place that supports the arts community with gallery shows, workshops, talks and more. November’s events include a month-long gallery show and a lecture from one of the show’s featured artists.
The November show will feature works by Robert Gamblin, Peggy Biskar and Aimee Mattila.
An artists’ reception will be held from 3 to 5 pm this Saturday, Nov. 2, during which the artists will speak about their work and answer questions.
Gamblin will show his landscape paintings, which have been based on the Cascade
Head area since he moved there four years ago. His intention is to capture in color and share
the sublime, some might say transcendent, landscape of the Biosphere Reserve. Gamblin will
show his series’ “Vibration of Light” and “Sitka Portraits.”
Employing the “broken color” technique first used by impressionists, the “Vibration of Light” series is about standing on the edge of a huge open space, seeing and feeling the light that falls on the landscape and illuminates the atmosphere. In contrast, the “Sitka Portraits” series is very figural.
Biskar will show her quilted panels in “Stitched Gardens.” Made from recycled Japanese silk
scrap secured with embroidery thread, the panels began with the vision of large simple
shapes crowded into fields of thread-drawn, flower-like marks. However, the work is not all about
flowers; it is about research and recycling and drawing and stitching obsessively with thread.
This work has guided Biskar through two years of major surgeries. Throughout it
all, she stitched whenever she could.
Mattila is professionally trained as a jeweler and coppersmith and will show 3D works in the November show. Her work is partly driven by the medium itself. Coppersmithing is
a slow, labor-intensive process consisting of repeated rounds of annealing and hammering the
metal into a pleasing form.
Gamblin will also present the Hoffman Visual Arts Lecture, “Paintings from the Cascade Head Biosphere Reserve” this Friday, Nov. 1.
“My studio is on the Oregon Coast on Cascade Head, part of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve,” he said. “My subject matter is the landscape around me. My intention as an artist is to reach for the transcendent. In the biosphere reserve the transcendent is the normal, not the extraordinary. One must only come with senses wide open to experience it, to recognize nature as profound and powerful in and of itself.”
Gamblin will show slides and talk about the scope of this work and the influences that inform his practice. He is a founder of Gamblin Artists Colors, an international brand of oil painting and printmaking materials located in Portland.
The lecture begins at 7 pm, Admission is $15.
The Hoffman Gallery is located at 594 Laneda Avenue in Manzanita and is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 pm. For more information go to hoffmanarts.org or call 503-368-3846.