(Above: Shadow Dance 03, by Paul Neevel)

Edited by Randi Bjornstad

Photographer Paul Neevel has been honing his skill with a camera for 60 years now, and a retrospective of images from all that time  — including at least one from 1962 and on up to the present — are included in the show on display through Nov. 26 at the Emerald Art Center in downtown Springfield.

Neevel portrait of Edwin Coleman Jr. — longtime Eugene resident, Black community leader, professional musician, University of Oregon professor — who died in 2017.

Neevel’s subjects vary from landscapes and examinations of various elements of nature such as trees, rocks, river, and sky to portraits of friends, family, and the people who are simply interesting for one reason or another.

He hails originally from International Falls, Minn., otherwise known as Icebox of the Nation, where he lived until sometime in high school, which he completed in Baldwin, Wis., and where his grandfather, Ed Neevel, was known as the “town photographer,” having opened his photo studio there in 1895.

It was at the University of Wisconsin that Paul Neevel discovered his own bug for photography, and he began frequenting the Madison Public Library for books on the subject, although he completed his degree in meteorology. He purchased his first camera and set up a darkroom while working on a graduate degree, and it was then that he began to exhibit and sell his photography.

In 1968, he was still living in Wisconsin, but he nonetheless put together images for a one-person photo show on East 13th Avenue in Eugene, at the Gross Gallery near the University of Oregon. He didn’t see that show in person, but two years later he had moved to Eugene, where the UO was one of few universities at the time that offered a degree in photography.

Although Neevel happened to be working toward degrees in journalism and fine arts, he also became a teaching fellow for UO photography professor Bernie Freemesser, who along with his students had originated the Photography at Oregon Gallery in the UO art museum in 1966.

Once in Eugene, Neevel started a camera-repair business operated out of his house for 20 years as well as photographing traveling art shows, documenting artwork by local artists, and many weddings. He joined the UO Photography at Oregon’s gallery committee in the mid-’70s until the university eliminated that gallery and Photography at Oregon became a freestanding group and began sponsoring shows in galleries throughout the community.

Since then, he has photographed and written for the Eugene Weekly (and its predecessor, What’s Happening), including profiles of area residents under the title, Happening People.

A reception for  the photographer will take place during the Second Friday Art Walk, and there will be a potluck reception at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 20.

In addition to Neevel’s November, the Emerald Art Center also is featuring work by three center members — Barbora Bakalarova, Karen Hubbard, and Cindy Marychild — plus new works by other center members. Bakalarova’s show is Through the Looking-Glass, photographs created by experimental techniques. As a self-taught artist, Hubbard first began drawing and painting and eventually became a designer, teacher, and how-to author, and “invented” her own technique for rendering fur and feathers in minute detail. Marychild creates “otherworlds,” past and future, that transcend reality, in the form of “landscapes of the heart, head, mind, and creativity.”

Now showing at the Emerald Art Center

When: Through Nov. 26, 2022

Where: 500 Main St., Springfield

Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday plus 5 p.m. to 7:3o p.m. during the Second Friday Art Walk on Nov. 11, 2022; the gallery will be closed Nov. 24 and 25

Information: 541-726-8595 or emeraldartcenter.org