The point of art is to make it. It's a fundamental principle that's easy to forget in the Internet art age, where making something is secondary to the virtual arts of social networking.
But if you want to reconnect with the commitment of making something, especially the abstract form rendered with glorious adroitness, then visit Harry Widman's retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. This exhibit of 38 paintings and 17 works on paper spanning 60 years is more than a munificent bear hug of this artist crucial to Oregon art since 1954. The show, "Harry Widman: Image, Myth and Modernism," also is a celebration of a robust middle 20th-century spirit that shouldn't be dismissed as nostalgic even as we advance into the 21st century art universe.
Widman studied at the University of Oregon in the '50s and then taught at the Museum Art School, now the Pacific Northwest College of Art, from 1961 to 1997. In the '50s, everyone was crossing paint brushes with Abstract Expressionism and its voyage to free art from the conventions and strictures of realism.
But by the late '60s, the vanguard had moved on to other movements that reacted against or further refined Expressionism. Not Widman. He remained entrusted to it, expanding and burnishing that language, for better and worse. He found liberation in it.
The specifics of that liberation are enlarged by the show, curated by Willamette University professor Roger Hull and including a book on Widman's life and art. The 38 paintings cover most of Widman's career, and they outline the artist's early artistic conversation with other artists, both local and the internationally famous. There's the calligraphic marks of "Deep Garden Valley" from 1962, for instance, which sings softly of the Northwest Mystics and Widman's University of Oregon teacher David McCosh of the so-called Willamette Valley style. The mysterious sobriety of "The Secret Music," a 1963 painting that places Widman, metaphorically, in the same studio as Robert Motherwell and other Abstract Expressionists; and the "Humor of Shapes #2" from 1966, which displays the gaiety and lightness of the Spaniard Joan Miro.
These paintings are different stylistically from one another but work within a guiding principle of an artist always daring to explore and respond to other artists, especially those in the center of the art world at the time, New York. (Yes, artists were following the modishness of New York even before Oregon's current generation began catching the affections of the East Coast establishment.)
Still, when we think of Widman's art, we think of a recognizable visual language involving color-field and figure. In these paintings, the figure is often an abstract human body, or a kind of floating biomorphically shaped island. "Male Female" from 1989, for example, is a confident pairing of two sensuously curved human bodies spotted by lush blacks, reds and grays, and situated against a background of milkiness dotted by subtle markings that resemble scuff marks on a wall.
Or "Orange Magician" from 1984, where Widman's light purple and blue vertical marks frame a gold-and-black leaflike shape bordered by a buzzing red. This spooky foliage shape that resembles a moth spreading its wings is a recurring one which Widman calls the "Magician."
Indeed, Widman sees his art career as one ongoing story; he's always the seeker, the curious magician. To others, however, Widman seems stuck on the same compelling theme. Look at the cache of works on paper Widman made over the years. Widman burrows variations on a single idea, but what noble, graceful lines this man can draw.
Ultimately, there's truth in both assessments. But also a separate explanation.
Like a lot of Abstract Expressionists, Widman was undercutting realism's artistic and social values, which explains the occasionally cheesy, socially conscious messages Widman painted at times. But that over-the-top drive spelled out a Widman ethos: Abstract Expressionism was tough, and so were its painters. They were committed.
For Widman, that commitment meant making and following his own devotional road, albeit a sometimes narrow one. His recent paintings aren't too dissimilar from those 40 years ago, though always, the promise and enthusiasm to make and draw exceedingly well never wavers.
What is the 79-year-old Widman's artistic legacy? Hull describes Widman as a visionary. That's overstatement. Rather, Widman had a vision. And as the years passed, and as new art movements emerged and flamed out, and as other artists opened and closed their studios or sunk into half-heartedness, this man stuck to it without reservation.