She Paints What She Sees
by Rosalie V. Grafe
Quaker Abbey Press, LLC
Portland, OR
When I was sixteen years old, I painted a three-panel mural of nature scenes at the Oregon Centennial Exposition. This was such a big honor in the eyes of my relatives that all kept a copy of the newspaper article with my picture and the caption: “She Paints What She Sees”. When these aunts and uncles pass on and their effects are redistributed through the family, in the packet of pictures I receive which contains images of my parents or of myself that the relative had retained, inevitably I receive yet another copy of the Oregon Journal article “She Paints What She Sees”. There I stand, large and blurry (much like the present time) against a backdrop of Mt. Hood from Lost Lake. The twelve foot high panels on each side were of Crater Lake and Cape Kiwanda respectively. The whole wall was the exterior of the KGW Radio booth. On the other side of my artwork, Red Robins and others manned the mike as music went out on the airwaves. It was 1959 and the huge mural by Louis Bunce graced the front of the building and sparked a lively debate about “Modern” vs. “Representational” art. As what I was depicting with the use of my largest oil painting brush and torn pieces of carwash sponge was based on calendar pictures tacked to the wood of the panel dividers, my teenage effort was definitely aimed at the latter category. Genius was never my burden. Exploring my minor talent was my joy and privilege and even at that age, I knew the difference.
One day while I was stirring up some of the powdered pigment entrepreneur Jack Matlock had taken me to purchase, while “Ave Maria” played from the booth featuring a tapestry representation of “The Last Supper” across the aisle and as the nicest of the teenage boys was hawking Ohio Smoked Sausage a few booths away, a reporter approached me with a notepad in hand. He had a battered fedora and a seedy tweed jacket and wrinkled shirt. The primary judgment point on any human for me at age sixteen was whether they were taller or shorter than my unfashionable 5’9”. This “Jimmy Olsen” was both shorter and thinner than I. Very untactful of him! Looking back from my current advanced age, I realize he must have been in his twenties. When I was sixteen that was beyond even curiosity as to age. It was all part of the “them” of the adult world. So there we stood, between “Ave Maria” and smoked sausage with Oregon scenery painted on wood behind my back. Flecks of tempera paint of red and blue spotted the hem of my white woven paint shirt and I worried about how oily my hair might look in its carefully piled waves as this reporter-whippet flashed the picture that now returns to me from the dead.
The interview was scarcely different from others for the “Oregon Journal Youth Page” on other subjects. Stock questions posed by an oppressed legman—delegated by the main office to cover this obscure and temporary feature of our state’s historical pageant, its hundred- year anniversary—the man took notes on my answers to his questions and wove them into a piece with some sort of journalistic continuity. The printed piece did not resemble what I thought I said or what I hoped to emphasize. Since then, I’ve learned to avoid reporters and to keep my words to them as a minimum. My own stereotypical thinking was revealed in my answer to his question of whether I meant to make art my career. “I don’t want to starve in a garret.” I said.
These days people don’t know what a “garret” is. It’s a studio apartment of usually one room without amenities and located under the eaves of a boarding house. Students would rent this space (and artists too), as it was the cheapest available. Food was the next challenge and was more of an option than shelter. The poor artist struggling without food in order to buy paint and canvas was still the image of the genius before discovery. The other mental picture of this figure was of his work being retrieved from the garret room after his death and suddenly being worth millions…partially for the very reason that the creator was no longer living! No, the talent that let me pile paint on vertical plywood with a sponge and brush was not sufficient to even pay for a garret room or for subsequent discovery of my work as having deathless significance. I was a sixteen-year-old high school art student at Clackamas High School. I got this gig because my teacher Robert Boardwell had a booth at the Centennial for his group of satellite trackers who watched the orbit of Sputnik. He saw an opportunity for one of his students to paint this mural and chose me for the job because I was in his summer school class at Milwaukie High School that year and had the time available and could perform this task with great pleasure.
When the reporter finished taking his notes, he slanted away through the crowd and disappeared just as a Hawaiian shirted man turned to his wife behind my back and said: “Look Mother, she’s painting with a sponge!” and then to me: “Do you give lessons in how to do that?” I replied that since the space was so large to fill with paint, this was the best way to “make bushes”. “Ohhh, I see.” I didn’t offer to let him sponge in a bit. The 12’ by 85’ three panel mural—that took me all summer to paint—was sold by my art teacher for several hundred dollars. Before the purchaser could pick it up (after the Centennial closed at the ER Center), workmen destroyed the wall while disassembling the KGW Radio booth. My work had been all volunteer on this my first job and now the only profit from it was in my memory and in the memories of all those who visited with me as I painted. I should have let them help. Wouldn’t have hurt anything.
My teacher at Clackamas High School reported that the great local artist Louis Bunce, whom he knew, stopped by to look at my work one day after I left for home on the bus. He was reported to have said: “Crowd pleaser!” I took that as a great compliment, not because it was derisively spoken by a controversial artist whose work was debated by supporters of the real thing vs. people who “like what they see” (or not), but rather because he even stopped to comment on my work. I knew this would be the only real notice I would receive from a genuine artist and was glad to have any notice at all. So that is the epitaph of my painting career. “Crowd pleaser.” Not so bad really.
See Oregon Journal Youth Page, September 1, 1959
