Oregon Art Beat; #105

Oregon Artbeat, a look at the breathtaking artistry of Cirque du Soleil, as we preview the Salton Bonco program opening next week. We'll visit with Mary Catherine Lamb. Her home is as interesting as her amazing modern quilts. And CYC side artist Ron Pittard spent years trying to avoid publicity about his beautiful fish replicas. Oregon Artbeat is next. OPB thanks you, the members whose gifts of support made Oregon Artbeat possible. Good evening, I'm Mike Pipi of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, along with Casey Cowan. Welcome to Oregon Artbeat. And thanks also for all the nice letters and email about our new program. We love hearing what you like, or don't like about artbeat. So please keep those comments coming. We begin tonight with a Portland artist who is taking the traditional craft of quilt making in

entirely new directions. In fact, an esteemed collector says Mary Catherine Lamb is creating some of the most original and spirited work in the quilt medium today. Original, it definitely is, but Eric Cain says her outlandish quilts make perfect sense. Once you get to know, Mary Catherine. These are all metallics. A lot of them are, you know, were hideous things that, you know, I'd rather be shot in the foot than actually wear. The art world knows Mary Catherine Lamb for her striking depictions in fabric of religious subjects. Some of these are really quite old. She quilts them from the second hand materials, gleaned from thrift stores and teak shops in estate sales. These are all garments that have been embroidered. This shelf has a lot of really wacky stuff in it. It's a stockpile. Any vintage fabric collector would envy. These are tablecloths, vintage tablecloths, and these are kind of chint, drapery things. Yet fabrics are not all that she collects,

not by a long shot. There's a certain celebratory spirit that I respond to that I try to communicate in the way I arrange things. The fact is, these arrangements of found objects have a lot in common with her quilts. So much so, that a tour of her house may be the best introduction to this artist in her art. What I love about collecting is the thrill of the hunt. But for me, it's more than just finding that one object that I love. It's the subsequent placement of it with things that relate to it, so that these little vignettes spring up throughout the house. These are those browned, rotating window things that you can turn the thing, get some kind of information through the little window. You can find out what size knitting needles you need or how to improve your golf game, or how to

put out a car fire with baking soda. Quick, the car is on fire. Grab the baking soda wheel. I was at a state sale, and this guy had been a rock collector, and he had glued his polished rocks on everything in sight. You can hear the wheels turning. What else can I glue these rocks on? Oh, I know. How about this shoe form? A troop of sock monkeys holds cord on this window seat. Some of them are kind of dressed up. Some of them have hats. This poor thing. A sad case of Dowager's hump. No eyes. Ears way, way down here. They're not all monkeys, either. This one, one friend of mine called this the sock yam. It's very poignant to me to see this evidence of these

previous lives that these second -hand objects have. I mean, that's one reason I love them so much is they were important to someone. You know, they were handled. They were present for occasions. You know that somebody in the 40s or 50s had his copy of popular mechanics or something, and it had this direction for how to make a combination, Nicknack display, and lamp. The visual relationship between this Virgin of Guadalupe, which I bought in Oaxaca and these plastic cootie toys, couldn't be missed. I mean, I had to put them together. They're kind of configured around the Virgin as kind of this little heavenly host with our little proboscuses. In the mid -80s, after years of collecting and arranging, Mary Catherine began to explore quilting at what is now the Oregon College of Art and Craft. This was the first piece I made that really felt like

it was more than just following an assignment. All the fabrics in it are cut up draperies or dish towels or tablecloths. And I like how those cooties are funny in a way. I mean, they're comical, but they also have this kind of outer space menacing aspect. And it also got me started on the idea of doing a series of quilts based on the shapes of old toys. These are the Sockmucky panels, aren't they great? She was hooked on quilting. The religious themes that characterized her work today emerged after 1986. The year Mary Catherine lost her mother. Mary Catherine had been raised a Catholic and schooled by nuns, but had long since rejected the religion of her childhood. But as I've been looking through all my mothers and my families, ephemera, I found a lot of

Catholic mementos that really stirred me. It was a revelation to me to realize that I could embrace the images in a completely different way on my own terms. It could incorporate playfulness and irreverence. But it also has a little bit of grief and yearning for the security of the past. Saints, angels, and demons began to infuse her work. This is called the Archangel Michael Bidziu Aloha. The background fabric is a souvenir tablecloth from Hawaii. And her collecting expanded too. Being a collector, there was no stopping me. Several of these are from my own family, my grandmother, my mother. But most of them, they've been gifts or I've found ground. This one, just as a lover of folk art, I really love. Partly because the maker is so clearly, so proud of her accomplishment that her name

is absolutely gigantic. And I love the pose of Jesus lying there on the future instrument of his torture, kind of saluting. Hi everybody, guess what's going to happen to me later? This little guy in the corner is something of a counterpoint to the mood of solace and celestial peace. The long history of Christian art has provided plenty of subject material. This is the whore of Babylon, writing her seven headed beast holding up her cup of abominations, two of the heads, they're really pretty cute. These were a pair of old nylon pyjamas. This is the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You can see in this horse, here it is here. This is a Hawaii amumu with little surfers and

shark fins. I did a series of smaller pieces of beasts from medieval manuscripts. And when she found these images of the four evangelists from an old Celtic text, she knew she had to quilt them. This is John as the eagle, and this is the first one I did from the four images from the book of Kells. I used for the background a souvenir tablecloth from the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair. I just love the image, how fantastical it is, with gorgeously winged thing, with a halo with crosses in it, and funny big feet on this odd sort of cushioned footstool thing. This is the second one in the projected series of four, Mark as rampant lion. This was from a cotton circle skirt, screen printed

circle skirt from Mexico with gold ferns on it. This is a poultry fabric, this is an old chiffon scarf. The images on her quilts often appear broken and uneven. I'm interested in the composition of each individual square. In addition to the way it's a part of this whole, that's one reason I like this kind of fracturing effect, it's just a way of emphasizing their individuality by having them not match up. People have asked me about the spiritual content of these quilts. And for me, the spiritual aspect comes from the lives that these fabrics previously lived. I mean, these fabrics have soaked up human experience that we'll never know about. It's almost like they sort of whisper. What I do with the quilts and what I do by arranging these vignettes throughout the house, there's a real similarity in the process of creating a visual hole

from these things that came from far and wide. They do have that in common. Quilt making is a long process. So for more immediate gratification, Mary Catherine continues to work on smaller projects too. I'm now working on a series of mixed media collages based on anonymous snapshots. The new collages should fit right in around here and besides, oh god, what are these fake coral, fake turquoise? They're a good excuse to collect more of this stuff. Oh, bingo numbers, dice, majong, puket shells. I don't even know what these are. Colored golf teeth, wooden checkers, animal teeth, oh, good heavens, another whole section. Work by Mary Catherine Lamb will be included in an upcoming show of nationally recognized craft artists. Embellishment will be held July 14th through 16th

at the Oregon Convention Center. A solo show of her photographs, images of some old cemeteries, is planned for the month of June at 9 gallery in Northwest Portland. And that was just a little bit, just a teaser of what will undoubtedly be the hottest ticket in Oregon this next month. It's Cirque du Soleil, and joining me now is the artistic director for Cirque du Soleil. Pierre Parisien, thank you very much for joining us. And you are with the new show, which is Sultan Banco, is that I'm pronouncing it correctly? Yeah, yeah. Sultan Banco. Sultan Banco, tell me first of all, how Cirque du Soleil got started. It's not your typical circus. No, it started in 1984 by street performers who just decided to do a kind of festival and to put a show. And it started like that, and

16 years after we have seven shows running around the world. Now, this current show is in its second year of a three -year tour in Asia. Yeah, well, Sultan Banco was created in 1992. And we toured in America, Japan, and Europe. And we stopped the show for one year. And in 1998, we just decided to put the show again on the road for three years in Asia Pacific. We're very thrilled that it's come to Portland, that you didn't pass us by. We're very excited to be important. Tell us a little bit about the kinds of things the experience people will have when they go to Cirque du Soleil. I think they will have a unique experience. It's very difficult to describe, because it's different from the person when they come to Cirque du Soleil, their expectation is different, and they receive the show differently from one person to another. But this is something you have to

experiment. When I look at some of the acts, as we have right now, you think of most circuses as being very big and broad and spectacular. And a lot of these are very intimate kind of performances, aren't they? Yes. Is that kind of what you try to achieve and intimacy with the artists and the audience? We try to achieve a communication between the artists and the audience. Especially in Sultan Banco, the communication is very, very important. What does Sultan Banco mean? It means a street performer. Sultan Banco is an Italian word for street performers. And all of your shows have a theme or a motivation behind them. Tell us what this one is all about. Sultan Banco, the idea behind the show when we created the show in 1992, was urbanity, life in big cities. We were concerned about what will be the life in big cities, because we just realized that the more and more people were coming to live in big cities. And again this morning, I read in the newspaper that

in year 2 ,100, in 100 years, 80 % of the population on earth will live in cities. So that was the main concern when we started the creation of Sultan Banco. Thinking about just how crowded people feel in the earth. Yeah, yeah. And we wanted to give a positive vision of the cities. We didn't want to give a destroyed image or a black image of the city. We said, no, no, let's say that life in the cities could be nice, could be beautiful, could be luminous, positive. And that's what we created with Sultan Banco. You will never see the city in the show. We don't want to see the city. We want to evoke the cities, what could be a life in the cities. Now when you take a show, Alex Sultan Banco, all over the place, you're in all these different countries and yet is a universal language. So everybody can understand it and everybody can enjoy it? Yeah, everybody can understand

because we're talking about emotions. There's a lot of emotions in the show. We have like 18 different tablos. I'm not talking about X because we have a 10X plus two clown X. But we have different tablos, 18 different tablos. And each tablo as a personal emotion, a personal color is own color. That's wonderful. So this is universal. So Japan can appreciate it as well as... Japan can appreciate it as China can appreciate it as a canador. Porto de Oregon. Oh, Porto appreciate it. I'm sure they will. Tell me about the performers. You have 53 artists from 13 nations. Where do you find them? We have a casting department because the main office of Cirque du Soleil is based in Montreal. So there's a casting department that is in charge of finding all the unique talents honored and we receive a lot of videos of people and we have additions around the world. So there's no shortage of finding

people. I mean you're not in danger. I mean this looks like such specialized talent. It would seem to me very difficult to find people to do these things but apparently not. Well, it's not easy. It's not easy to find because there's a lot of people that want to join Cirque du Soleil. Well, first we're looking for high -collabor athletes and we ask them as well to be able to sing, dance and to express emotions. So the range is... It's extreme. Yeah. Now very briefly, you do not perform in a typical stage. You perform an attempt that you can bring along with you and set up. Yeah, we travel like a turtle. We travel and how does that do the whole experience, do you think? It's fantastic. It's fantastic because everywhere under the big tuck where you are seated, you can be in contact with somebody else. Really? It's not like a regular theater. When you go to a theater, when you go to see a a play or a film, you

are alone with the screen or with the stage. And this just surrounds you. Yeah, exactly. Under the big tap, you are part of the Big Celebration and Sultan Banqués the Big Celebration. Well, we're looking forward to singing. Thank you so much, Pierre. What's a pleasure for being with us. What's a pleasure? You can get your tickets to Cirque du Soleil. It will be here from May 11 through June 11. Now, Cirque du Soleil may be the biggest program of the week but there are lots of other things happening on the arts scene around the state. The 18th annual Ceramic Showcase continues through Sunday at the Portland Convention Center. This is the largest Ceramic Show in the nation A historical exhibit of organ pottery is also included. Bend Oregon is home to a brand new opera company of City and Opera. At this weekend, they present love songs from Broadway and Opera. The show runs through Sunday. Dancers Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk present The Collection, a program of their own choreography May 11 through the 14th in the new Bodyvox Dance Studio. Reservations are required, call 229 -0627 for tickets and information. And all next week, Portland

Community College celebrates the arts with a festival of art, dance, music, poetry, and theater. Coincidentally, also called Artbeat. This enthusiastic effort to make the arts accessible to all is free of charge. For a full schedule of events, visit our Artbeat website at opb .org and we'll link you to theirs. Now, most artists work hard to be discovered, but the subject of our next story became so well -known for his realistic reproductions of fish that he actually tried to make it difficult for new customers to find him. Jeff Douglas took up the challenge. We finally found Ron Pitter in his studio at seaside, putting the finishing touches on another of his fish replica. It reputation keeps him busy, even though he makes it very difficult to find him. It took us two weeks. Just two? That's terrible. That's almost a record. For years, I didn't even have a phone. I've got one now.

It's unlisted. Despite Ron's efforts to keep his whereabouts quiet, he still has more work than he wants. It seems his ability to make amazing reproductions is so good that his customers do all the advertising for him and the same people keep coming back. This fish is for one of his first customers. This reproduction is a 36 -inch chum salmon. Ron just needs to add teeth and eyes and it will be ready. When you look at the high quality of Ron's work, it's hard to imagine his artistic skill didn't come easily. I want to do portraits, but I could not make people look like people. But then I got into fish and I discovered it couldn't make fish look like fish, either without a lot of practice. So that's what it took. It's just been years and years of practice and spending every moment I could to work on it. Sounds crazy, but it was something I wanted to do. Lots of people thought Ron was crazy when he quit a good job after 19 and a half years to try to make a living as an artist. He credits his wife

with helping him through the lean years. She paid the rent and I paid the grocery bill. Sometimes we didn't eat. The pitards no longer miss meals, but it's taken years of experience to turn his hobby into a business. There's a lot of efficiencies I've had to develop because I could not make a living doing one of these at a time. I can do one fish a month if I saw all I focused my efforts on. So what I try to do is work with a group of 12, six to 12 fish and do common operations all together. Do all the casting of them, putting all the bodies together, make all the gills at the same time. There's 21 parts to each of these fish and if I work on the same thing over and over do you just naturally become a little more efficient. Efficient maybe, but each fish still requires an unbelievable amount of painstaking work. First there's the plaster mold of the fish, although nowadays he has so many molds he usually doesn't need to make a new one unless the customer demands it. I have just about all of our native fish in

the Pacific Northwest in molds in different lengths and sizes and 95 % of the time I have the fish that looks just exactly like the one he caught. Ron uses dental tools on the mold to repair any broken fins or missing scales. Each gill is carved by hand and inserted. Then the whole fish, all 21 parts is assembled using resin to bind it together. After sanding the hard part begins mixing paints to match the subtle colors of the fish and hand painting each scale about four times. Well there's about maybe 5 ,800 on each side and if you're working with char you're looking at a fish that has 10 to 15 ,000 scales on one side and maybe over them four times. It's a lot of time involved and you have to get fast to make it pay. Ron's attention to detail creates an

amazing reproduction but it does come at a price. I have a per inch cost. If I've taken it off one of the molds I've got in here it's $24 inch which would bring most average steel head into about a $700 price range say a 30 inch steel head. If someone just insists on killing that fish and bringing it to me which I prefer them not to do it will cost them $30 an inch. The crazy things people do to make a living but I sure like this. The idea is to make it glass I look like a real one. Around the eye you just

plot along and plot along and pretty soon they're done. A finished replica all that's left is to mount the fish. Hi Ron. Hey good to see you. Oh boy that's the chum huh. Jim Teenie is a few minutes early to pick up his fish. Yep that's the world record one. Oh isn't that beautiful. Boy that is a shaky. Well it looks like him. That's him isn't that a beautiful thing he lacks as a fly isn't it. For Jim Teenie who makes a living selling his own line of lures and fly lines Ron's reproductions are much better than stuffing the actual fish. They last longer and look better than the real thing. I've had taxidermists come up and look at the fish that we had on display that you had done and they told me they said well if I'm ever going to get a fish done for myself I'd like to have Ron do it. As a conservationist he likes getting a trophy from just a photograph. You get to release the fish you get the

satisfaction of that knowing it's going to continue plus you get your your amount. We need to reproduce a fish that a person is caught especially in the catch and release type of thing. It's just a photo of a good stream side snapshot in the length and maybe the girth of the fish. The final artistic touch is positioning the fish just right. Be careful of my charm Ron. Hey this is sturdy permanent forever. Oh god see how much better he looks with his tail down. I'm telling you that is so beautiful. The colors are really really neat. The fish replicas pay the bills and take a lot of time but Ron reserves some for his own projects. I am often thinking myself as an artist you see and there are a lot of things I want to do just because I want to do them. You can see Ron's fish reproductions on display at various places around the state. There's a

salmon life cycle display at the bondable fish hatchery and a mural at the seaside chamber of commerce and maybe Jim Teenie will show off the male chum featured in today's story at one of the upcoming sportsman shows. Absolutely it's the most beautiful chum I've ever seen. You know it's just I knew it was going to be good but you never know how good it's going to be because Ron is the best. Now since Jeff taped that story Ron has decided to concentrate on his fine art primarily wood sculpture. So he's turned over the fish replica work to an apprentice Dave Smith who Ron says does just as nice work. The good news is that now you can find Ron without having to search. Just click on the Oregon Artbeat website at opb .org and we'll get you in touch with either Ron or Dave or you can always write us at 7140 Southwest McCatum Portland 97219. You can also write or visit our website to let us know what you think of Oregon Artbeat. We'd love to hear from you. Next week we'll be in John Day wearing Graver Ernie Marsh makes what some collectors say are the finest bits and spurs being made

anywhere. Do jump theater will give us a sneak peek at their next Oregon show. If you haven't seen Do Jump yet don't miss it. And we'll meet the people behind artichoke music. They're partners in business, music and life. We'll see you next Friday at 930. And if you missed parts of tonight's program it will be repeated Sunday at 6 p .m. We leave you with some more of Mary Catherine Lam's unique collection of stuff. Thanks for watching. Good night. Anything you could possibly want for a little mixed media found object. Come on. Poked shells, colored seashells, more turquoise, little seed beads, multicolored pom -poms, beautiful sequins from the 20s summer glue.

Metal parts of old ugly jewelry, a lot of car.