Eugene artist Richard Quigley takes his colorful faces to Mexico

Richard Quigley has steadily sold his work in Eugene for years, waiting to make his big break. The surrealist painter, known locally for his Salvador Dali-inspired landscapes, has shown in Eugene and on the Oregon Coast but hasn't quite been able to make the jump to the bright lights of Portland, Seattle and New York. Next month, though, he's packing up 15 of his recent paintings and heading south to a gallery called Galeria VallARTa - as in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Puerto Vallarta's a good fit for him and his work, Quigley says. He's got the sunny disposition that wears well in Mexico, along with a love of the country, from its tourist-oriented resorts and beaches to its easygoing people to the haunting ruins of its ancient civilizations. And then there's his art: Quigley makes big, bold, colorful paintings, not the subtle, dark, cloudy landscapes that so often line gallery walls in Eugene. His palette is far more Latin America than Eugene. "You know, even my colors make me feel alienated from the Northwest," he said recently, standing in front of a large, square acrylic painting of a bright yellow-orange face.

"There is nothing like this here in the Northwest. This face is the color of a mango. Those tropical colors! Being a colorist, I really love working with intense colors."

Quigley's work has lately moved toward these strange faces: large, riotous faces of uncertain but exotic ethnicity - faces that are large-lipped, with exaggerated features, but no particular heritage. They might be statues from an ancient civilization; they might be a guy you saw last week at the airport. These new acrylic paintings, often done on 3-foot square canvases, grow naturally out of the artist's longtime fascination with landscape and architecture: a forehead looks like a distant mountain, and eyebrows are low foliage. In some paintings the faces melt into one another like mountains.

These faces are a new direction for the 53-year-old artist. "The faces happened when I went to a show of Chuck Close," Quigley says. "He is probably the most successful artist to come out of the Northwest. I've admired Close forever. And I have always loved his portraits." Quigley doesn't use models for the paintings. In fact, he says, many of them are probably self portraits. "They're all Quigs and Quigettes," he jokes. "They are all composition and creativeness, instead of exactness."

The artist has been traveling to Mexico since 1993, sometimes leading art tours and sometimes going on his own. Puerto Vallarta, he says, is a great art town, with dozens of galleries that cater to a high-rolling international set of customers. "Puerto Vallarta is the second-largest gallery market in Mexico, outside Mexico D.F. (Mexico City), he said. "And when you're in Vallarta you've got a business clientele of people from around the world: I am talking to Irish people and Chinese and Spanish and Germans there, and they are all having beautiful homes built there. So why not concentrate my marketing there?"

His show, called "Seeing Eyes," runs from Nov. 10 through Nov. 24 at the Galeria VallARTa, which is on Calle Juarez near the old crowned Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe downtown. Quigley hopes to make a killing on sales. And if he doesn't?

"I'll just head for another gallery down there," he said. "I'm not giving up."

Oct. 24, 2004