(Above: Tales from Blair Castle by Margaret Coe evokes a painting trip the artist took to Scotland.)
By Randi Bjornstad
Eugene artist Margaret Coe views her new show at the Karin Clarke Gallery — titled Visions — as “ambitious.”
“It’s something different for me, but at the same time there are some elements that fit in with my previous work,” Coe said. “At 78, I feel that I am painting from the heart more than ever.”
Those who know her oeuvre well might notice that the color saturation “is cranked up a little,” she said. “I used to do warm and cool, but lately I’ve been saturating even my blues to get more impact, to play off the warmer colors in a different way.”
Visions includes work Coe has created in distinctly different settings during the past several years, including the Oregon coast, Scotland, and her own back yard, a place “that had gone into blackberries eight feet tall — a jungle — before I had someone come and dig it all out by the roots,” she said. “I ended up with a field and woods, a lovely place to go out and paint.”
The new show features mostly large paintings, gallerist Karin Clarke said, some as big as 48×36 inches. Clarke knows the work intimately. Coe is her mother, and at least one show each year at the gallery is dedicated to her work, with another devoted to paintings by Clarke’s late father, Mark Clarke.
Artist Margaret Coe’s drawing of Dunrobin Castle in Scotland, which gave rise to her painting, Reverie (at bottom)
Painting on location is one of Coe’s favorite ways of expressing her art. “I have done so many trips to paint — I have made 15 European trips to date.”
On those jaunts, she sometimes paints plein air, setting up an easel, a stool, and a small table for the palette she carries with her.
Other times, she does drawings that she later turns into paintings in her studio. This show includes both paintings and, in some cases, the original drawings from which they evolved.
Usually when she travels, Coe packs pieces of canvas for working en scene along with three sizes of stretcher bars. “Each night, I stretch canvas to use the next day and prepare it for painting,” she said. “At the end of the day I can take them off and stretch more canvas for the following day. Most people these days use prestretched canvas, but I like to do my own. I cut pieces that will lie flat in the bottom of my suitcase, and I take several tubes that I can roll the painted canvases into to bring them home.”
Since the 9-11 attacks in the United States, that routine definitely has becoming more challenging, the artist acknowledged. “I can’t take paint thinners any more, so I have to find an art supply store wherever I go to buy those. Logistics are always on my mind.”
Carrying a backpack that turns into a stool as well as a fold-up easel and the tubes she needs to transport painted canvases means that “I almost always get selected to as a person to check going through security,” Coe said.
“Once they weren’t going to let me on a flight, but they said they would ask the steward on the plane, and he could make the decision,” she recalled. “So I talked to him and explained what I do, and he said it was okay. He had a daughter who was studying to be a painter, and he understood why it was important.”
She admits to looking a bit scruffy during her painting journeys. “My clothes are all about comfort, not style — my hat has a paint stain on it — and I never look up to snuff,” Coe said with a laugh. “But I go to paint, that’s what’s important. I like to come back with 15 or 16 paintings. Some are done, some might have elements that need to be resolved or changed, but I like the immediate quality.”
She usually paints three or four hours at a time, “five max,” Coe said. “I do like to paint until something is done, and I think because I’ve been doing this for 50 years, even my older body is capable of keeping going for quite long periods.”
Maybe to a fault. Coe recalls one trip to Cummins Creek on the Oregon coast — a favorite painting spot of her late husband’s, when she had to clamber over rocks with all her gear, “and I sort of fell.”
The Arrival of Spring, a painting from the artist’s own back woods, explores the form and color of the landscape
“I got up and went on to paint for three hours, and then I packed up and went home — I had completely forgotten about falling,” she said.
“A few days later, I put up a canvas to paint, and I had this really severe pain in my side that wouldn’t go away. I was afraid it was something really serious, so at 3 a.m. I called 9-1-1. They came and checked me over and said everything seemed to be fine in terms of my general health, but then one of the (paramedics) saw my side with a bunch of big, rough bruises that I couldn’t see, and that’s when I remembered what had happened.”
When she paints, “I get really intense about what I”m doing, and I just don’t remember,” Coe said. “It’s kind of a mode — a strange consciousness that’s kind of hypnotic.”
Her solo show includes 15 or 16 paintings with at least 10 related drawings. Three of the large paintings are from her backyard woods, “and they reflect how I see that landscape in terms of the structure of the place and its splashes of color,” she said. It’s something of an homage to artist David McCosh, with whom she and Mark Clarke both studied during their student days at the University of Oregon.
“But all of these large paintings are of things I really had a personal response to, and some are titled to give clues as to that experience,” she said. “My hope for this show is for people to have the same emotional reaction that I felt.”
At this point in her life, Coe said she’s not interested in promotion of her work, but in sharing.
“Who do I need to impress?” she asked. “My goal is to be in a full, rich state of consciousness and to live in solitude with beauty around me. For me at this point, painting is a kind of divinity, a spirituality that is deeper than religion — it’s more fundamental, more intuitive. That mystical aspect of life is where I am. I hope that sharing my feelings through what I paint will be my legacy.”
Reverie by Margaret Coe, based on a visit to Dunrobin Castle in Scotland and completed from a drawing (see above) that she did of the scene and describes here: “There is a formal garden below the castle with a walkway that extends a great distance and ends at a huge decorative wrought iron gate that is greenish. There is a short stretch of grassy land on the other side that butts up against the open sea. There is no beach. It is like the top of the cliff but not a great distance from the land line. One wonders if the land gets flooded on occasion. Well, I leaned against the fence sitting down on the ground to make the drawing …. I wanted to express the feeling of reverie in being there for maybe a couple of hours between a great sea and a lush garden looking up at a magical looking castle silhouetted against the sky all while nestled up against a really gorgeous gate. I was in my own fantasy world …”
Visions
When: Oct. 30 through Nov. 30; opening reception 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 1
Where: Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St., Eugene
Hours: Noon to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
Information: 541-684-7963 or karinclarkegallery.com
