David McCosh and the Promise of Oregon Karin Clarke Gallery, January 2005

David McCosh and the Promise of Oregon

January 2005

“IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO this summer that I had my first sight and taste of the Far West, most notably Oregon. I was hooked for life. . . .

“Sadly deprived is the American youth who never has known the wonder and delight of a first crossing by land of half the continent, better yet, the whole of it. From six miles up one does see, to be sure, weather and seat position permitting—something of the immense stretch of plain far below and, soon, of the jagged, menacing Rockies, but there is no sense of touch, of personal, physical involvement. . . .

“In the summer of 1939 . . . on (a) glorious two week trip (out west) in a friend’s road-weary DeSoto sedan . . . every mile . . . was terra incognito.

“The thrill of discovery is not reserved alone for the Columbuses, the Lewis & Clarks, the Amundsens of the world, those who first set eye or foot upon the Unknown. No matter that thousands of people, millions, even, had already seen the Badlands, the Black Hills, the Big Horns, Yellowstone Park . . . Mount Hood, the Columbia Gorge, Portland—no matter, I hadn’t seen them.

“All was new, wonderful, exciting. No ‘peak in Darien’ was the nameless spot from which I first looked out over the endless sweep of the Pacific Ocean, but Vasco Nuñez de Balboa could not have been more awed on that historic September day in 1513.”

From “One Trip West, Hooked for Life,” by Charles Duncan (August 4, 1989). Reprinted in An Orange for Christmas and Other Reflections (Guard Publishing Company, 1993).

Many of us who came here from “back east” never get over our first sight of Oregon. It may be the sky, so enormous and different from what we knew, the peculiar sharp angle the light can have this far north, or any of a thousand sights and experiences that we had only imagined before. We discover all of it in a great rush of excitement, and, like Charles Duncan, we revel ever after in the memory of those first days. David McCosh, who was from Iowa by way of Chicago, discovered this country gradually, closely, and intimately enough to paint it. Throughout all of his years here, no matter where else he traveled and without regard to the changing fashions of the art world, he painted the Oregon landscape. This landscape, returned to repeatedly, was the steady heartbeat that gave life to his art.

If you are mostly familiar with David McCosh’s later paintings, the patches of color and calligraphic lines that create dense tangles—not unlike the underbrush we have in these parts—you may think of him as an abstract painter. He didn’t think of himself that way at all. His painting was almost always based on his careful observation of some specific situation, as he would say, in the world around him. He said that when he painted something—a fir tree, for example—he worked to eliminate the usual, the ordinary, so he could focus instead on what is most extraordinary about that tree. The pieces in this show are especially vivid instances of McCosh painting what is extraordinary, with the fresh vision and thrill of discovery that characterizes his best work.

The show includes paintings from McCosh’s first days in Oregon—when everything was new and

Farmhouse on Millrace (Millrace with Horses), 1934 Oil on linen, 20 x 291/2 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; MMC.0035

exciting; a group of rarely seen works from a period of crisis for him—when his painting had gone stale and he struggled to find his art again on a sabbatical trip to Cohasset Beach in Washington; common street scenes in Eugene (that he made extraordinary); several views of Horse Creek—his favorite stream in the mountains near here; and some late and especially beautiful dense tangles of underbrush that are at once complex, yet strikingly simple.

“Learning to paint,” McCosh said “is learning to see—not to recognize only familiar things. We hope that others will try to see what we tried to see, and if a painting encourages that effort, it is a reasonable success.” If you give these paintings that chance, they will show you why McCosh chose to move here, why he stayed, and what it is about this place where we live that holds so much promise.

McKenzie Backwoods, 1970 Oil on linen, 311/2 x 391/4 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; MMC.0139

Wind at the Beach, n.d. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 141/4 inches Collection of Michael and Mary Adams

Horse Creek, after 1955 Ink on paper, 13 x 201/2 inches Collection of Eric Schabtach

Left Seaweed Tangle, circa 1949 Watercolor on paper, 21 x 19 inches Collection of Paul and Dana Skillern

Horse Creek, after 1955 Watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 inches Private Collection

Veneta (Second Version), 1936 Oil on linen, 251/4 x 351/8 inches Private Collection

Beached Stumps, 1949 Oil on canvas, 22 x 32 inches Private Collection