The engaging art of Charles Heaney

He painted the Eastern Oregon desert with its loneliness and drama, but also recorded city scenes in Portland. He traveled to Nevada and painted the desert and gold mines he found there. He loved fossils. He made hundred of prints. He may have been at his best showing small Oregon towns as settlements of the mind and heart, places found less in actual geography than on a map of memory and longing.

The Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University has mounted a show of Heaney's paintings and prints, pulling together works from the entire span of his career. Heaney was, by his own account, an awkward and lonely man. He never married, and was an early consumer of self-help books. In a 1948 photograph, he sits in front of his easel and grinds pigments, his eyes downcast. Wearing a clerk's eyeshade, dress shirt and neatly knotted necktie, he looks like a character out of a Rod Serling story.

He was a great friend and protege of C.S. Price, an older Portland artist of national reputation, and when the modest Heaney was interviewed at the end of his life, he often seemed to think his greatest accomplishment had simply been knowing Price. But Heaney was a masterful artist in his own right. He created hundreds of woodblock and linoleum prints and later etchings. He made scores of oil paintings, and later expanded into casein, with its softly luminous look. He worked in more unusual kinds of mixed media.

He was not afraid of the unusual. The oddest set of works in this show is Heaney's fossil paintings. Done in oil on plaster or sometimes encaustic - a mixture of wax and pigment - the fossil paintings are inspired by actual fossils but don't necessarily reproduce them. Heaney called them a "close union of paleontology and art." Despite the Disney-replica aspect of these works, they're actually quite convincing and can even be moving. In the early 1950s, they were even shown at a gallery in New York City, where critics took them somewhat less seriously than other works in a show of "Eight Oregon Artists," which also included Louis Bunce, Carl Morris and Michele Russo. "Their point escapes me,'' The New York Times critic said.

As idiosyncratic as the fossils are, Heaney's paintings are wonderful. He worked in a freely expressive but representational style that might be called Oregon modern. The strong forms and bold colors are reminiscent of the post-Impressionists. One of his favorite subjects was rural Oregon, and he painted communities from Metolius to Burns with an almost mythological sheen to their everyday appearance. Heaney, in fact, rarely finished a painting on site, but would take notes and make sketches and return to his Portland studio to paint. Hence his paintings of places in Oregon are less documentary than evocative.

Like many artists of the time, he ended up working for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. It was the WPA job that resulted in what is probably Heaney's best known painting, "The Mountain," which he did in 1937 for the newly created Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.

The large oil painting has a nearly abstract mountain that more than fills the frame, showing Heaney's massive reverence for the power of mountains.

"The Mountain" normally hangs in the lobby of the lodge, though it is on loan to the Hallie Ford for this show.

Well known during his lifetime in Oregon, Heaney brushed up against national fame as an artist, though his name never exactly became a household word. He exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948, and at the Sao Paolo Biennial of 1954.

The Hallie Ford exhibit includes Heaney's early woodblock and linoleum prints along with later aquatint etchings; a good assortment of oil and casein paintings; and, of course, the fossils.

It's a good, engaging exhibit with more than enough substance to make the drive from Eugene worthwhile.

Feb. 6, 2005