(Above: The Edge, one of 24 paintings by Eugene artist Margaret Coe in her new show, Light, Woods, and River Flow, at the Karin Clarke Gallery.)
By Randi Bjornstad
Eugene artist Margaret Coe says her new show, Light, Woods, and River Flow, is her first exhibit in at least two years, but the idea behind it goes back much further than that, as far as the changes that upended everyone’s lives with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in late 2019.
“Back then, I had planned to do another trip to paint in Italy,” Coe says, “but of course I had to cancel it.” So, instead of looking outward from that favorite painting locale, she had to bring her focus much closer to home.
“I had always known that at some point I would focus on the woods right around my own place, but I had always assumed that would be a decade or so away,” she says. “But with the pandemic, I realized that this was a subject that was just there to be had.”
She had read Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden, long ago, “and I always thought of it as a particularly American theme, with its emphasis on solitude and the companionship of the woods,” she says. “There’s also a spiritual aspect to it — an inner voice that I wanted to hear — and I realized I also wanted to overlap that idea with my regular landscape painting.”
She calls the result her personal version of plein air painting — capturing the essence of a scene as it exists — except that what she does is not so much about capturing an immediate sensation as allowing it to change and develop over time as she continues to watch it.
“I like paintings with strong light patterns, but I always want to give them more than my first impression,” Coe says. “My idea is to continue to look at a painting and then let it change, let it accomplish more.”
As for when she knows a painting is done, “I never want a painting to have an ‘overworked’ look,” Coe says. “When it pulls together, when it has enough interest and composition and with its own direct sensation — its own magic — that’s when I recognize it is done.”
Margaret Coe’s Tree Spirit honors two Douglas fir trees that she calls “parental” to her yard
In this case, she has had the luxury of spending years in her own landscape with what she lovingly calls her “two main subjects,” a pair of tall, dominant fir trees that provide a center of gravity surrounded by a landscape of other trees and plants along the edges before the landscape dips downhill into a wetland.
“When I look at those two trees, I see them as something so solid — almost parental to the landscape — and because they are so familiar to me they seem to have a presence, a life, and a role in the community which is their landscape,” she says.
Because of the importance of those trees in her surroundings and her life, Coe had to find a different way to portray them as a “forceful, powerful presence” in their landscape and her life.
“I didn’t want to use anything like the delicately brushed lines I might have used before, but present them as their own force of nature,” she says. “I would mix up some paint — largely black with some green — and use a roller to put it on the canvas in kind of a ‘football’ shape,” rather like the way abstract artist Robert Motherwell might have done, Coe says, “and then let it sit for seven or eight hours.”
After that, she carved out the spaces between the trees using her own thumbnail, preserving the solidity and darkness of the trunks before using more delicate brushwork to complete the lacier branches in the tableau.
It’s an approach that has become symbolic in her own life, since the death in 2016 of her husband Mark Clarke, also a much-venerated Pacific Northwest artist. After decades of togetherness — working, living, and raising a family — a more solitary life has provided its own lessons for her and her art, Coe says.
“Married life and family life were so important to me, but being alone also has given me a new appreciation for my life and my painting,” she says. “There is a richness in discovering a slow tempo in life, the experience of just living, of being like a long summer day without much drama and discovering that aspect of myself.
Of course, there’s also a negative and poignant side to being alone, Coe acknowledges.
“I have lost a lot in the sense of activity and closeness and communication with another person who was so important in my life,” she says. “But I realize something that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise, and that is having a part of me that can thrive in this tempo, and discovering in solitude a langorous feeling of belonging to the universe.”
Coe and Clarke’s daughter, Karin Clarke, owner of the Karin Clarke Gallery where both her parents’ works are shown frequently, recognizes the expanded direction that her mother’s life has taken and the impact it has had on both her philosophy and her art, describing the new show as “fantastic.”
“For me, I feel that at some point after the loss of my dad, she began this deep love affair with their surroundings,” Clarke says. “I feel she has processed her grief through her closer experience of the natural world, and of what she also experiences as the spiritual world.”
This new awareness also has resulted in a deepening of her mother’s artistic interpretation, Clarke believes.
“I know she would say that lying out on the grass the way she does, for a long time, and experiencing — communing, really — with the forest, is both healing to her and inspirational to her painting.”
Margaret Coe: Light, Woods, and River Flow
When: Through November 30, 2024
Opening reception: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26, with artist talk at 2:30 p.m.
Where: Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St., Eugene
Regular gallery hours: Noon to 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
Information: Telephone 541-684-7963; email karinclarkegalleries@gmail.com; online at karinclarkegallery.com
Bewitched, by Margaret Coe
