Watercolorist George Kettlewell has a fresh touch

Bouquets and landscapes done in watercolor by an artist on the Oregon Coast may not strike you, on the face of it, as substantial or inviting art. We've all seen enough frilly flower paintings and greeting-card sunsets to last us a lifetime. But in a show that runs through June 26 at the Karin Clarke Gallery, Eugene lawyer Roger Saydack has found an exceptional artist who paints in watercolor and indeed produces landscapes and flower paintings.

Saydack, who leads a dual life as a lawyer and an art connoisseur, discovered the work of George Kettlewell at a coastal gallery while visiting Cannon Beach. Fascinated with his work, Saydack met the artist and eventually curated this show of Kettlewell's recent watercolors for the Clarke Gallery. Kettlewell is a rare find, an artist who doesn't go out of his way to promote his career. He didn't show up for his own opening reception, and he declined to be interviewed for this story. He supports himself working as a janitor.

In a handwritten biographical note to the gallery, Kettlewell said he graduated in 1970 from Kent State University with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting. He moved to Oregon in 1972, and he and his wife ran a ceramics studio and gallery for 10 years in Cannon Beach. He has mostly been shown around Cannon Beach, except for a show at the late William Jamison's gallery in Portland.

The watercolors Saydack selected for the Clarke Gallery show are rough, brooding and full of emotional resonance. They are about evenly divided between landscapes, which somewhat resemble 19th century sepia colored photographs, and still lifes of cut flowers, which are casually thrown onto a surface or set into a glass of water. A few other paintings are of mushrooms and some, very dark and dramatic, are of tarts on plates.

Within this limited subject matter, Kettlewell has mastered the art of understatement. Watercolor so often encourages excess that gaudy colors and photographic detail have become the standard in much watercolor flower painting. Not here. Instead Kettlewell creates a mood and a presence that moves beyond mere details. Some of his flowers are even difficult to decipher as flowers, so broadly are they drawn. Even so, the painting is highly accurate, perfectly capturing the arrangement of light and shadow in each piece. The paintings of mushrooms seem to glow like ghosts.

Most of Kettlewell's work in this show is monochromatic or nearly so. The landscapes are done in warm tones of brown; the tarts are done in blacks. The flowers alone contribute their own colors to his work, but even here the color is muted. The overall effect, perhaps surprisingly, is one of lushness. These flowers are not pretty, but they are beautiful, and they get better and better with each viewing.

Kettlewell's painting has more in common with such earlier Northwest artists as Morris Graves and C.S. Price - on the latter artist, not coincidentally, Saydack is an acknowledged expert - than he does with contemporary Sunday flower painters.

Saydack's statement accompanying the show describes Kettlewell's work in tactile terms. Kettlewell's landscape paintings feel as if he made them with his bare hands, Saydack writes. What makes George Kettlewell's groups of cut flowers, thrown roughly on a tabletop, so engaging, is his touch.

June 20, 2004