Mount Tabor Art Walk

This weekend, May 16 and 17^th, the annual Mount Tabor Art Walk is taking place in Southeast Portland, between 11 am and 5 pm Saturday and Sunday. The event is named after the extinct volcano in Mount Tabor Park, in the heart of the same posh residential neighborhood. It may well be the only posh residential neighborhood that contains an extinct volcano.

A couple weeks ago, I had picked up a map out of a wooden bin on the handmade artistic fence of a house in the neighborhood, and I took this map with me, although I ended up wandering around the neighborhood a bit aimlessly, in part because I found the big old houses so fascinating. In perhaps a crass moment, I came to the conclusion that artists living in this neighborhood must have day jobs as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and business execs, because their houses were so beautiful, obviously expensive and kept up, elegantly furnished, and spotlessly clean.

For the first few houses I saw with yellow “Art Walk signs by the sidewalk, I shyly walked past instead of going in to look; I had imagined tables out in the front yards, and as someone whose unemployment benefits have run out, I had no intention of buying anything. I walked past one house and eyed colorful glassware and a quilt draped over a chair, all visible through a large window inside an enclosed porch. I came to another house on which art photos were displayed on the wall of the porch, and a large painting was visible directly through the open front door, but after walking up the stoop I quietly stepped back down and returned to the sidewalk. However, as I got closer to the extinct volcano, in one of the more posh streets, I saw many pedestrians walking into artists’ houses, so I joined the crowd.

The first house for which I followed a small crowd involved slipping through a gate and walking up a path to a cute little fluffy black and white dog, a shih tzu, I believe. I saw cute little fluffy dogs like that in Tibet, where the Lhasa Apso in particular searched as a hot water bottle for centuries. But I digress. The dog stood on the stoop and looked up at me while wagging its tail. I held out my hand, and the critter not only sniffed it but also licked it, so I went ahead and petted it. The dog followed me into the house and on several occasions looked up, up at me expectantly. It reminded me of the friendly stray dogs in India, who must have been starved of attention.

I pet the dog several times, alternating that with looking at paintings. They were mostly oil landscapes, though some were painting in bright, vivid colors. In the dining room, a painting propped up on a chair by the door caught my eye: it was abstract and box-like, predominantly orange and red. Directly above it was a nontraditional landscape painting in much the same color scheme, a picture of the sunset over a river. If you’re going to paint landscapes, you may as well make them nontraditional and bright. At the closest end of the dining table were little trees displaying necklaces with wearable art: that is, tiny glass-covered versions of larger landscape paintings. I preferred those to most of the framed pictures.

I entered an early twentieth-century stucco house in which numerous rooms displayed paintings, and in the living room a guest artist had her display of handmade jewelry, including a salmon pink coral necklace in its natural, squiggly shape. The same room had more paintings, including over the fireplace. The paintings were well executed but mostly realistic landscapes, something I consider, well, bourgeois. I go for whimsical, not respectable or elegant, whether it’s my own art or someone else’s. I like art that does not belong in a doctor’s waiting room. Nonetheless, the work was well done (oil, I think) and a few of the paintings caught my eye. In general on this art walk, I seemed to encounter a lot of landscape art.

A large house with many visitors had pictures displayed on screens at the top of a steep driveway. The pictures included woodblock prints and collages. I have done a bit of collage and intend to do a lot more, so I took my time looking at these pictures made from homemade paper, dried leaves, and charms. A gate next to the house was open and guests were walking through it, so I followed, into an astonishing back yard. It was beautiful landscaped, with a large pink flowering tree and many flowers in the center. Straight ahead was a little house, an artist’s studio, with the door open in welcome, and across the yard was a veranda under a flowery arbor. Amid all this were pictures on display, and not all of them were landscapes. Inside the little studio-house was a plethora of homemade jewelry: necklaces (one of which had a pendant made of a chunk of turquoise) and earrings. Without piercings, I tend to ignore earrings, but the necklaces caught my attention.

At an enormous white house that like all the others I entered was perfectly furnished and spotless, I looked at pastel landscapes by two female artists. Some of the pictures caught my eye, in particular a lotus or water lily close-up. The house was amazing, and it was easy to walk on Persian carpets through large, spacious rooms with wide doorways. From the dining room, I saw a huge living room with more paintings, and I walked through the kitchen, which had an island in the middle like something out of an architectural magazine, and into the living room, with its enormous fireplace and Persian rug. This clearly was not the home of a starving artist. It truly weirded me out that artists could live like this, but at the same time I should make it clear that I don’t aspire to be filthy rich, though at the same time I don’t want to be evicted.

A room at the far end of this house (or perhaps it was another house!) was a small tidy studio with a slanted table in the center with a pastel work in progress on display. It was a view of pink flowers amid tall grass, and the artist had photographed the picture at several stages and lined the photos up in order. She had done the same with another picture that was displayed on the chair, and that picture was of a vividly painted orange and red porch. The artist kept the pastels for the pink floral picture in a small plastic canister full of rice to keep the chalk cleaner, and behind this was a box full of colored pencils. The walls were lined with more pictures. I was amazed that even her studio was so clean, in contrast with my apartment, where every room now looks like a very messy workroom. True, if I had an open house, I’d clean the place up.

I came to a modern duplex in which art was displayed in a garage, so I didn’t feel like I was barging into someone’s house this time. It was mostly brightly painted landscape art and equally bright illustrations of flowers, though the exception was an urban picture of rows of steps leading up to front doors. At the back of the garage was a door welcoming guests in, so I abandoned my sense of not barging into someone’s house…and barged in. I followed a narrow hallway into a couple of rooms, where some of the art was similar to what I had seen in the garage. However, I went back into a dining room where the art was quite different. There were paintings that used not only paint but also white melted wax on top of the paint. On the table were delightful homemade boxes covered with shiny textured fabric or paper, and centered on the lids were assemblage designs made from old costume jewelry. Most of the boxes were only fifteen dollars apiece, so if I were still receiving unemployment benefits I might have purchased one. As it was, I felt a bit inspired, for I got to thinking I could put some of my costume jewelry to use in assemblage.

After wandering through several houses, I was happy to simply wander down a sidewalk and gawk at impressive, big houses dating probably to the 1920s, possibly earlier, and surrounded by lush blooming flowers. On this particular street, the houses were farther apart and had larger yards. I turned a corner and saw Victorian houses, enormous and ornate. It was odd that I lived within walking distance of so much conspicuous consumption. I just hope everyone in that neighborhood who isn’t attempting to sell their homes (and quite a few were) has the mortgage paid off, given the current state of the economy.

I started heading back in the general direction of my apartment, and I was ready to go home, but I stopped at the whimsical home where I had picked up my Mount Tabor Art Walk map. The Art Walk signs led me to the separate garage and up a flight of steps into a room above the garage. On the wall just outside the room were two breathtaking Goddess shadowboxes that included clay faces by the female artist who lives there. Inside, the walls and tabletops were mostly dominated by the African-looking wooden masks that the male artist had created, decorating the main wooden piece with found items such as reflectors and forks. Along a couple of walls were haunting masks the woman had made; they were similar to the ones in the shrines. All the masks were made of clay, and many were decorated with beads. One even had feathers sticking out around the head. After I went back down the stairs, I admired the yard, not for the first time. Around the yard was a fence made of found objects and decorated with more of the African-looking masks. At one corner of the gate was a wooden cabinet containing another shadowbox or shrine. If I felt like living in a house, I would want the yard to be something like this, strange and whimsical and bursting with artistic expression.

Here is the url to the official Mt. Tabor Art Walk website:  http://www.mttaborartwalk.com/