Artist Steven Oshatz's fate intertwined with a turning point in U.S. history

WHEN STEVEN Oshatz was 19 years old, he met a girl he wanted to impress. So he invited her to sit for a portrait he would paint at the beach near Malibu. He had it all planned out: the lunch, the wine, the perfect seductive mood. What he hadn't planned for was the wind that sometimes blasts the Southern California coast. Lunch was peppered with beach grit. His model was freezing. And, in the end, the painting toppled off its easel, landing wet paint down in the sand. Oshatz sat down on a rock and began - what else remained for a sensitive young artist? - to sulk.

At that moment a man with long, wild hair came walking along, carrying a handful of junk he'd collected on the beach. "It's hard to get the whole universe into one canvas, isn't it?" the beachcomber teased. The girl vanished from Oshatz's life. But the beachcomber proved to be painter and assemblage artist Gordon Wagner, a lesser known member of the L.A. artistic set that included Edward Kienholz and George Herms.

Wagner, who invited the young artist to his Topanga Canyon home, would go on to become a lifelong friend and mentor, showing Oshatz that art was possible not just as a career, but as a life. Such giddy, real-life surrealism has surrounded Steven Oshatz since he was a boy growing up in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, a Jewish-intellectual-artistic cloister amid the city's bland boulevards and sunny skies.

His father was a salesman. His mother was a vaudeville dancer who had worked with Gypsy Rose Lee. Oshatz, from as early as he can remember, knew he was an artist. Now 58, Oshatz - a tall, graceful and graying man - has lived in or near Eugene since 1969, developing a varied artistic career that's included everything from traditional easel painting to avant garde installations to printing fine silk scarves. As an artist, he is hard to pin down. He has known celebrities from Frank Zappa to Dennis Hopper. He has bridged cultures from the late 1950s Beats to today's decorative arts.

Although he rarely shows in Eugene, one narrow slice of his work can be seen at the Provenance Gallery, 25 E. Eighth Ave., which has mounted an exhibit of recent - and some not so recent - paintings and prints through October. You also can see some of Oshatz's work on stage at the Hult Center. He helped design the set for Eugene Ballet's `Silk and Steel,' which debuted this weekend on the same program as `The Skinwalkers.'

If any single story frames Oshatz's life, it's his tale of refusing the draft during the Vietnam War, a profoundly simple act with completely unexpected repercussions. It was 1965. He was 24 years old and traveling with his wife, Penelope, a Canadian citizen. He was in New York when he heard from his parents that he had been ordered to report for induction back in Los Angeles. He knew he wasn't going to go.

"We had just come from Montreal," he says. "My instinct was to go back to Montreal and become an expatriate. There was no question of going into the army. "We were staying with a friend in the East Village. I was very depressed. He said, `You should go see my friend in New Jersey. He's a conscientious objector." Oshatz went to see the friend. He took what amounted to a crash course in Selective Service law, got up the gumption to fight the problem head-on instead of fleeing to Canada and headed home to Southern California - where his newfound resolve immediately failed and he tried to put the entire thing out of his mind.

Weeks went by; Oshatz did nothing. His mother began to nag. Finally, she made an appointment with a draft counselor, a fellow named David Larry, a man who would one day run, not successfully, to be the sheriff of Lane County, Oregon.

Oshatz walked in to meet Larry and found him sitting in front of a poster of the surrealist artist Man Ray, a favorite of Oshatz's. Oshatz knew he'd found the right guy, a draft counselor who knew about art. But Larry said the guy Oshatz really had to meet was J.B. Tietz.

Tietz, as Oshatz would learn, was one of the unsung heroes of the draft resistance movement. A flamboyant, popular lawyer, a gun collector and a student of the art of war, Tietz had, while calling them bleeding-heart liberals, been defending draft resisters since he had gone to work for the American Civil Liberties Union. He had been assigned to represent conscientious objectors during the Korean War. Tietz was good, perhaps the best there was. He argued cases - and won - all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He also was expensive. Oshatz went down to Tietz's office in downtown Los Angeles and found the waiting room full. "There was a line of people there," he says. "Very well-to-do people, I might add."

Every once in a while he was startled by the sound of gunfire from inside Tietz' office.

Finally, the young artist was admitted to the lawyer's inner sanctum, where Tietz liked to entertain himself during the work day by firing a handgun into a metal box. After 15 minutes of fast-paced conversation, the lawyer handed him a piece of paper. "I think I can help you,' Tietz said. `Here's a contract. If you don't like it, I have other ones." Oshatz read the fine print. In it, the lawyer agreed to represent him for paintings.

Paintings? "I couldn't believe what I was reading," he says.

"If you don't want to use your paintings, we can always work with money," the lawyer said with a smile.

Oshatz's life now turned into black comedy. Carefully prepared by Tietz, the young man showed up for and politely refused induction, following the lawyer's thorough script - a script that allowed military officials to trample his Constitutional rights, walking straight into Tietz's trap. From the moment he walked out of the induction center, Oshatz was under investigation by the FBI. Agents Downs and Matthews - Oshatz remembers them today for their kind civility - staked out Oshatz's home. Penelope gave the lawmen tea and cookies and allowed them to use the couple's bathroom.

When it came time for Downs and Matthews to arrest Oshatz, they allowed him to finish his shift as a cab driver before taking him, no handcuffs required, to the county jail for booking. He was quickly released on his own recognizance.

Finally, Oshatz had his day in court, in an assembly-line group trial, no jury, with three Jehovah's Witnesses he'd never met as fellow defendants. In a matter of moments, as Tietz already had warned, the artist found himself convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison. "I thought I was emotionally prepared for the experience," he says. "I wasn't." Instead, still free pending appeal, he drove around and around Los Angeles in his Yellow Cab, ignoring radio calls, his mind in a fog. He finally picked up a fare at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a woman who climbed into his cab and asked where she could get some marijuana.

Her second question was more interesting: "What do you think about Vietnam?" Oshatz pulled the cab over, leaned across the seat and told his passenger exactly how his week had gone.

The woman, as it happened, was a writer for the Toronto Star. Their visit resulted in a two-part series in the Canadian newspaper, headlined, "He'd rather go to jail than flee" and, "Warm, friendly Steve - and the three-year prison term he faces."

Oshatz's artistic career moved right along in spite of the time he spent in the company of FBI agents and lawyers. He and his wife lived in Silverlake, near downtown Los Angeles, in a small house they had turned into an ongoing art installation. "I had a room with maybe 10 theater seats,' he says. `All wired. And filled with assemblages and constructions that were all kinetic. It really took off. People used to bring people to see it. It became a scene."

Of Oshatz's house, Kenneth Stone, son of novelist Irving Stone, wrote this in 1968 in a tiny magazine he published called The Mask & The Grail: "The outside world loses its reality as the incredility of his rooms overwhelms the stop block of our own imaginations and we disappear from being. ...'

Oshatz showed his work in Los Angeles galleries and in his own rented space. He got to know musician Frank Zappa, later to become famous with the Mothers of Invention. He met Dennis Hopper, an artist and photographer before he was known as a movie star. At his parents' insistence - Oshatz believed all he ever needed to do was paint - he went to art school. He hated Los Angeles Trade Tech, where he tried commercial art, doing better with Choinard Art Institute, which Disney later bought and turned into the California Institute of the Arts.

And he exhibited. From one show Oshatz made enough money to travel with Penelope across Canada, figuring on reaching Paris, the artist's mecca. They ran out of money in New York. That's where he found out he'd been drafted.

Tietz, in the end, was right, though Oshatz nearly lost his nerve along the way. The lawyer won Oshatz's case through a brilliant and unconventional blend of meticulous law and outrageous politics. Throughout the months that his case dragged on, Oshatz found himself frequently invited to lunch by his lawyer, who always managed to seat the two of them at a fine restaurant near a table full of judges. Soon, introductions would be made, and eventually Oshatz found himself on a first-name basis with half the Southern California bar. "It was wonderful,' Oshatz says. "Tietz was so well respected by the judges and attorneys; I would go to lunch with him and sit with the judges who would soon be judging me and prosecutors who would be prosecuting me. I began to think that all my notions of art were kind of lame compared to the reality of society. Surrealism didn't even begin to touch it."

When Oshatz's appeal finally came up before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Tietz told the artist and his wife to show up for the hearing. In a bizarre touch, the lawyer had Oshatz unfurl a large painting right there in court - an appeals court, no less, where judges are rarely disturbed by even the presence of defendants, much less their art work. "I didn't know what he was doing," Oshatz says. "It didn't quite make sense. The judges knew me by then. I knew every one of them and they knew me by name. So I unroll this thing. The judges are just aghast."

Predictably, they bawled out Tietz for his unprofessional conduct, leaving Oshatz with a growing sense of doom. "These are very fair men," the lawyer later explained to his skeptical client. "Right now they are very, very prejudiced against you. And so right now they are looking at our brief with a microscope to make sure they do absolutely nothing unfair."

By the time the decision came down, Oshatz was back in Canada, wondering, once again, if he shouldn't just stay. It was there that his daughter, Tanya, was born. The next day the phone rang. It was Tietz. "Congratulations," the lawyer said. "They ruled in your favor. You're a free man."

Victory, in the end, was depressing. Oshatz had won a precedent-setting case that would allow others, including his own brother, to escape the draft. But meanwhile there he was, in Canada, with a wife and new baby, having all but decided to stay north of the border and become an expatriate. Now he was free to go home, dead broke, able to do what he wanted, no longer with an excuse for not doing it. So the family lit out, looking for a place to make art. Vancouver, B.C. Seattle. Nothing seemed to fit. He felt they were on a long, dull skid back to Los Angeles.

Finally he called David Larry, the draft counselor, who by then was living in Vida on the McKenzie River. "About 5 in the morning we went up the McKenzie Highway,' Oshatz says, "and the McKenzie River was the most glorious thing I'd ever seen."

The couple bought a house on the river in 1971. Tietz came for a visit a few years later and bought the house across the road. "He'd decided L.A. was about to go into social uprise," Oshatz says. "When it didn't, he kept it as a vacation house." In 1982, Tietz was visiting Oshatz; the two of them were in the apple orchard. Out of the blue, the lawyer says, "You and I should go into business. You figure a business out and I'll be your silent partner."

Thus was born Tancho Images, the business that pays the bills. Run out of a basement studio in Oshatz's hillside home, Tancho does fine art printing on silk for clients such as the Seattle Art Museum gift shop.

Gordon Wagner, the artist Oshatz had met on the California beach, continued to be a mentor and friend. He visited often, arranging a 1976 show of both their works at the Chelsea Gallery in Los Angeles when Oshatz sorely needed a boost. On their opening day, Man Ray died - a surreal omen appreciated by both men. "Gordon pointed a direction for me," Oshatz says. "He was an inspiration. He was a living and actual example of who and what he wanted to be, which was very impressive to me. He became a model for me. A spirit. An energy that was in contrast to the academic structure of art school."

Oshatz and his wife live today in a house filled by his art: paintings, prints, assemblages, a collection of work that you'd hardly recognize as being by a single artist. On the living room wall is `Lenada,' a huge oil painting named after a poem by Kenneth Patchen, a triptych of three 4-foot-square panels that explode in a shifting celebration of light. Painted when he was new to Oregon, it has odd, mechanical shapes woven into a naturalistic tapestry. "It deals with a magical space," Oshatz says. "I would take my goats up onto the mountain on an old logging trail. For me it was a primeval forest. Now I know it was second or third growth. There were these things that broke the spell, like the sound of the highway, and when I looked down I would see these things - a badminton birdie, wire, strange little grid work, things dropped here from another story that wasn't necessarily mine."

In another set of paintings, now hanging on the wall at home, Oshatz has managed to bring his past full circle. At the age of 22, he went out painting with another woman - this one named Penelope. He brought two canvases, covered them both with abstract images and put them away. Needless to say, this date was more successful than that day years earlier on the beach outside Los Angeles.

A few years ago he decided to unroll the canvases. Next thing, he wanted to paint them some more. "I wondered," he says, "could I get back into that energy? That energy of being 21, 22?" He picked up brushes. On the radio, Nat King Cole began singing "Just Smooching."

"It was like going into a time machine," he says. "It's one thing to paint on top of something. It's another to move back into that state of energy, that state of being you once had about yourself."

The pair of canvases hang together on the wall now at Oshatz's home. `Just Smooching in Paradise,' he calls them.

Oct. 24, 1999