Marion Mitchell: Finding Art & Love Together

50 Artists: 50 Years of Art in Springfield
Celebrating arts and culture in our community

Featured in The Springfield Beacon (October 31, 2007)


Marion Mitchell: Finding art and love the second time around

By Austin Berger
For the Beacon

It appears that on occasion, cupid will trade in his bow-and-arrow for something a little more practical. For Marion Mitchell, 74, of Springfield, it just so happened to be a paintbrush. In so doing, it confirms that age-old adage: it’s never too late for love.

Inspiration to begin: Like many people, art began as “something to do,” for Marion -- something to make friends with. In her earlier years, her main concern was dealing with something more serious than a muse. “I was born with cerebral palsy … the biggest thing for me was to learn how to walk.”

As a child, she was often shuttled between her home in Idaho to the Shriner’s Hospital in Portland. Eventually, Marion's family moved out to Eugene. While growing up, a local art teacher, Naomi Nelson, approached her and invited her to one of her classes. “I told her I couldn’t draw,” says Marion, but Nelson told her to come to her class anyway. Even today, her oil paintings from that time (which go back at least 35 years) still line her living room.

Busy with family, she put the oil painting down. One thing came up after the other, and soon there was no time at all for it. For 35 years, her painting faded into the background, uncertain of its reemergence.

Mentors: Fast forward to 2002. Marion’s first husband had just died. “I got very lonely…so I started going to the senior center.” Again, it was “something to do.” There, among other people, she met Bruce Mitchell, a local art teacher from the Emerald Art Center.

Although Marion regards him as her mentor, originally he didn’t teach her art, he taught her pinochle. That led, in turn, to Bruce doing some yard work for her; which led in turn to him installing fans in her house; which finally led him to seeing her oil paintings in her living room. He took notice of her skill and invited her to come to the gallery. That sewed the seeds for the rediscovering of her art, as well as something more.

At the art center, Bruce served as a guide for breaking her in to the world of acrylics and watercolors. “She’s a little bit more advanced in her ability to pick up on techniques than my other students.” he says. “Certain things she’s not receptive to, but others, she becomes a ball of fire.”

Art and Quality of life: Marion found two beginnings in two ways by following Bruce back to the art center. She rediscovered art, as well as found a new husband. “I married my art teacher,” says Marion with a hearty laugh. While painting a rose at the gallery, with Bruce teaching her, “I thought to myself “oh oh, I think I’m in love with him.” They married nearly three years ago. “When you get to be as old as we are, that’s a big decision to make.”

Her legacy as an artist: Marion is not too concerned, given that even at 74, she has just begun in a way. She looks perfectly contented taking lessons from her husband and painting. One thing, however, is that she makes it a point to never sell her originals, only prints. “Painting comes hard to me,” admits Marion, so she keeps all of her originals. If they fare like her oil paintings from 35 years ago, they will surely be around for a very long time.

"Roses" by Marion Mitchell

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About The Artist

Hometown: Pender, Nebraska

Media of Choice: Acrylics and Watercolors

Arts Education: Various Art Classes

Favorite place to do art: Emerald Art Center

Awards: Cash Awards from Mayor's Arts shows

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Janelle McMahon: Gemini sensibilities lend intrigue

50 Artists: 50 Years of Art in Springfield
Celebrating arts and culture in our community

Featured in The Springfield Beacon (October 24, 2007)


Janelle McMahon: Gemini sensibilities lend intrigue

By Austin Berger
For the Beacon

“Faces are interesting,” says Janelle McMahon (pronounced Mack-Mahan). “You can tell a lot from them. Good or bad vibes…and they come in all shapes.”

Her love of faces is evident right past the threshold of the door; masks from all over the world adorn their walls. It may be due in fact that she has two faces herself, in the astrological sense. She’s a Gemini.

The astrological sign of the twins, Janelle's Gemini sensibilities may also contribute to her love of the number two, for many things come in pairs at the McMahon house. Two Hemingway Estate cats (as distinguished by their number of toes), two Porsches, two spindles, two magazine articles of her work in the magazine for the National Knitters guild (you heard right, knitters have a guild.); as well as a two-step stairway that leads to her studio. “Two steps up. Two steps down,” she jokes when talking about her commute from her studio to her kiln, which is in the garage.

Her Gemini sensibilities may also lend intrigue towards the dichotomous characteristics of her favorite medium -- glass: a medium to which the 55-year-old Springfield native has been able to fashion into something so straightforward as beads and plates, or to the intricacy of knitted fabric.

Inspiration to begin: “It was a slow grow,” says McMahon when asked about her immersion into the art world. She’s tried her hand at many things, working in health institutions and running her own bookkeeping secretarial service, teaching, and being a mother. She picked up art again when her friend enticed her to come to a knitting class. “We were redoing the house, I had no job…it immediately clicked.” Although she can paint, knit, as well as sculpt, she found her true love in glass -- first in beads, saying that it has “ a warmth, yet a coldness” to it, not to mention it’s ability to catch energy reflected off of it’s surface.

Mentors: Some people would credit Picasso or Da Vinci, or some type of artists in their respective field. McMahon credits her troop leader. Before working with glass, Janelle was a knitter, something she attributes to her long stay in the Girl Scouts, and rightly attributes her longtime troop leader Dottie Venchura as an inspiration. Also, the lion to her twins, she also credits her husband and best friend Michael. And Leone Hanson, who Janelle ranked as a second mother in her life, was a person who would pull no punches about her opinion of what she did. “She was one of those people who’d tell me if I was screwing up…she was the kind of people you could call on.”

Art and the quality of life: Any random horoscope will describe a Gemini as a flighty type, whose dual personality leaves them prone to wandering, lacking a center. Whether this is true or not for people born in late May or early June is anyone’s guess. What is known is that Janelle became a moon of sorts to the art world, in that she found that it could be her center to revolve around. “I learned all different types of art. All different types of people, their reactions to art…it opened that world I didn’t have.”

Art serves as Janelle’s anchor, her center; something she acquired when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “I was always running to the coast…I needed to feel and create. I needed to be able to have something work.” In this trying time she found her soul being fed through her glass work. After winning a blue ribbon for one of her earliest glass works, “it was something where I could say: “Okay, this works.”

Her legacy as an artist: If there is one thing that Janelle loves most, it would be her family. Most of her family still remains in around the Eugene-Springfield area. Sooner or later, she plans on giving everyone of her family members a piece of her work. “I want them to have something of mine. It’s part of who I am.” As for the rest of her work, which ranges from jewelry to sushi sets to vases, whoever they go to, she expects some wear and tear. “I make functional art. It’s usable. I want it used.”

You can find her glass works and jewelry for sale at the Emerald Art Center and at the New Zone Gallery in Eugene.

"The Flower" by Janelle McMahon

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About The Artist

Hometown: Springfield, Oregon

Media of choice: Glass

Favorite place to do art: Her downstairs studio (a.k.a. “the eclectic dive”)

Awards: Several prizes -- Mayor's Art Shows in Springfield and Eugene

Favorite subjects: None (penchant for masks however)

Hobbies: Porsche Club

Art Organizations: Emerald Art Center, Springfield Arts Commission, New Zone Artists Collective
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Scott Wylie: Of two minds

50 Artists: 50 Years of Art in Springfield
Celebrating arts and culture in our community

Featured in The Springfield Beacon (October 17, 2007)


Scott Wylie: Of two minds

By Austin Berger
For the Beacon

Some call it symbiosis, or yin and yang, or balance. Anyway you cut it, it’s the making of distinct elements working together. It’s a task that gets added to someone working in the field of designing architecture. It’s doubly daunting to not only pull something out of the creative mists and put it to paper or canvas, but to also make it work in the real world, and give it function. Furthermore, one must balance the function to meet the individual’s needs. It requires a very humanistic touch.

From the Science Walk at the University of Oregon, to the brick work of the corner of Broadway and Willamette, to a house on High Street in Eugene, to parts of Bruce Berg’s photography studio on D Street, Scott Wylie, 61, of Springfield, pulls off the balancing act between form and function with great diligence.

Inspiration to begin:

“I always loved to draw,” says Wylie. A skill given to him by his parents; a father who found an artistic outlet through special effects lighting as a lighting engineer, and his aesthete mother who saw to it that he visited all the museums that the Boston area had to offer.

Growing up in an area which blended architecture from the modern times to the 1700’s, New England proved a great place to be inspired by architecture, prompting Scott to go to Rhode Island, and later to Rome to study. “It really had a powerful influence on my outlook on art and design from that point on…I had ideas awakening.”

With ideas still awakened after his year in Rome, he followed an old professor to the University of Oregon, a part of the country he often romanticized. Scott remembers riding in the back of a pickup truck around the Fall Creek area and how the air suddenly changed from dry firs that surrounded the outside of the Willamette wilderness. “The air went moist and sweet. Palpable as going into a curtain,” he said. After that, he became “very Oregonian.”

Up until 1998, he did all of his sketches by hand, until he was “liberated” by an Auto CAD class given to him by his wife as a gift. “It did everything I expected it to do.” Now the seemingly impossibly long designs, every individual brick and rock can be laid by a digital representation.

Mentors: Scoot Wylie's mentors in crafting his skill are also masters at the balancing act of different concepts. He cites Leonardo da Vinci, a man of science as well as a man of art, along with Pablo Picasso, who traversed between the figurative and the abstract. As for designers, he credits Frank Lloyd Wright, whose organic approach balanced the needs of the client and the natural environment surrounding the home. He also credits the Greene Brothers, whose bungalow style blended, along with architecture and landscape, the Arts and Crafts Movement with Asian design.

Art and quality of life: The contribution of the arts to quality of life has been great to Wylie. He says that he found his center in the art world, but there’s something more to it. It is within art itself that one can take multiple contradicting objects, theories, concepts, and make them work together. It is the art that is, as Wylie puts it, “the great unifier.” He feels a connection to other artists. “I like to think of them as my kin.” Oddly enough, art also turned him into a bit of a football fan. “It’s like an art … I love watching it being done really well. I love watching athletes enjoying it.”

His Legacy as an artist: Scott's legacy has been left in stone and brick for many of his works. While he wishes his legacy to be specific and clear, “something that somebody can take with them,” he wants his legacy to be something, in a word -- mathematical. Wylie knows a bit about math: graphical expressions of 4th and 5th and 6th dimensions, algorithms, the Fibonacci sequence, all sorts of things. Most importantly, he wishes that the next generation will see it in a “fractal” kind of way, that even at the very farthest and the very closest points, there’s something happening. “There's always something new to see.”

"Science Walk" by Scott Wylie

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About The Artist

Hometown: Danvers, Mass.

Favorite place to do art: Anywhere, for one can find seeds of inspiration “in the most Spartan of places.”

Favorite medium: “Anything I can draw with.”

Favorite Subjects: No job too big, no job too small.

Arts Organizations: Emerald Art Center; Springfield Arts Commission.

Awards: Six public commissions.
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DeVon Tanton: Nourishing the Inner Child

50 Artists: 50 Years of Art in Springfield
Celebrating arts and culture in our community

Featured in the Springfield Beacon (October 10, 2007)


DeVon Tanton
Nourishing the Inner Child

By Austin Berger
For the Beacon

Her work makes one think what would happen if Norman Rockwell moved out to Eastern Oregon during his prime; a plethora of cowboys, snuck kisses, curious kids, animals, and images of the Old West. Showcasing a Bull Elk at this years Mayor’s Art Show at the Emerald Art Center, DeVon Tanton of Jasper has honed her portraiture skills to precision with a near lackadaisical drive in the best way possible.

Inspiration to Begin

DeVon is the first to admit that her mind is the farthest thing from a business mindset. She’s won awards, but can’t really name any. She has mentors but has trouble remembering their names. Her answer to her art is simply this: “I love to draw.”

It’s reasonable to argue that DeVon's inclinations to art are encoded somewhere in her DNA; lying somewhere in the autonomous nervous system somewhere near the areas which tell her to breathe, and to keep a heartbeat, and all the things that our brain handles for us and never really give thought to.

DeVon's art skills came naturally as a child. No defining moment, no turning point; it simply was, and still simply is. Ever the conservationist, many of her earlier drawings as a child were done on ripped up brown paper bags from the grocery store. Many resulted from her anger because whenever she would do something good in her eyes she would later wish she had done it on appropriate drawing paper. For the Nevada native, it appears her art doesn’t require much conscious thought -- a practice that becomes so natural and constant to her as brushing teeth comes to others.

Important Mentors

The similarities between the nostalgia showcased in her work and Rockwell is no coincidence. Coming out of the era that he depicted, DeVon always had an affinity for Norman. “He made stories out of his pictures and he depicted humans when things were simple.” She also notes his love of painting children, a favorite of hers as well.

Value of Art in life

DeVon's art is her therapy, a muse born out of dream world imagery that sometimes borders on the macabre. It is her core, her release, her treat and her pastime.

“I used to have these dreams…where I hid a tiny baby in a cigar box.” These dreams went on for years, where she would come back to the box to find the baby dead and shriveled. One day she told a doctor about this dream. “He told me that the child was my talent and that I was hiding my talent.” She then went “off the deep end” as she put it, into the realm of portraiture, and in doing so fully exposed her “child” and kept the dreams at bay, so long as she was doing art.

Her artist’s legacy

Even at 69 she still finds herself the student, seeking to perfect her skills as a portrait artist, wishing to leave her mark with them. “I want to learn to do portraits (of people) so well that people are waiting for them to come alive. I want to put their soul into them.” Everything from life’s joys to its hardships, are written on a face, according to DeVon. She intends to capture it all.

"Bull Elk" By DeVon Tanton

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About The Artist

Birthplace: Elko, Nevada

Arts Education: Fashion Design, Modeling, various classes at Emerald Art Center

Media of choice: Oils, China Paints, Pastels, Acrylics

Favorite place to do art: Her work station in her living room, which has a view of the Willamette River and the Pleasant Hill area.

Favorite subjects to paint: Portraits, especially children

Arts organizations: Emerald Art Center

Currently Showing: Mayors Art Show (October, 2007) at Emerald Art Center

Nada Zawodny: Caricature artist turns hobby into retirement career

Featured in the Springfield Beacon (October 3, 2007)

50 Artists: 50 Years of Art in Springfield
Celebrating arts and culture in our community

Nada Zawodny

Caricature artist turns hobby into retirement career

By Austin Berger
Springfield Beacon

If you were at the Lane County Fair this summer, you probably saw Zada Zawodny's one dollar portraits under the arm of some kid -- probably one of the best deals found at a fair. Or you may have seen her full-scale portraits of other authors and painters. With a dollar and a few minutes, she can paint your portrait without hesitation. Even Lane County commissioner Peter Sorensen got one. What began as a small gig at a fair has now generated some buzz for the 81-year-old Springfield native.

Inspiration to begin: Her caricature drawings began in her words as, “one of those goofy things.” After graduating from the oldest accredited art college in the country, her quick draw caricatures became something of a hobby for her over the past 40-50 years, doing them whenever she was asked. Zawodny retired in the late ‘80s after a very respectable career in advertising design in the Eugene/Springfield area; working along the entire spectrum, from freelancer to art director.

After retirement, she became a director at the Emerald Art Center. After awhile, she decided she was much happier simply being a member and enjoying the classes. Last summer she was approached to set up shop at the Lane County Fair. It was her first time ever doing something like that. A local newspaper article generated a buzz for her, and now she’s taking her pencils and paper to golf courses, retirement homes, and to anyone who has got a buck or two and a few minutes of time.

Important mentor: Her mentor and inspiration to become an artist came to her at a very early age -- three to be exact. Visiting family on vacation in Louisiana, young Nada met her great aunt Norada Bond, a professional artist who would sketch her family while sitting down at the table. While Norada would watch the family, Nada would be watching her. “And I knew…I said ‘when I grow up’ I want to be an artist.” Much to her enjoyment, she made good on it.

Value of art in life: After making that agreement at age three, and following through on that promise for the better part of 78 years, it comes as no shock that Nada finds life without art as something existing in the realm of impossibility. “It’s our history. It is color, it is line, it is shadow. Without it, there wouldn’t be anything really.”

Her Legacy: As far as leaving a legacy, Zawodny hasn’t given much thought to it. She has two children who’ve done remarkably well. While her daughter has three degrees and works as a controller for a large non-profit, her son carries the artistic torch, making a name for himself as an architect. Her own drawings may go to her family and friends, but her drawings are like photographs -- capturing moments in time and pinned down onto paper -- awaiting the next generation of viewers.
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About The Artist

Birthplace: Rose Point, Montana

Arts education: Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising Design: Art Institute of Maryland; numerous classes from local art schools

Media of choice: Pen and Ink or Pastel

Favorite place to do art: A studio her son built for her at home.

Favorite subjects to paint: “If there are no people in it, the picture’s not a finished painting to me.”

Arts organizations: EEAA, Springfield Arts Commission
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