By Chip Dombrowski, Entertainment Editor

Museum offers a spread of western painters in Expressions West

COOS BAY — Happy Saturnalia!

It’s a few months early for the Roman festival of gluttony that was a pagan precursor to Christmas, but the Coos Art Museum is putting on a feast — of art. It’s Expressions West, the museum’s annual painting competition for artists in the western United States.

Juror and art historian Richard V. West dined on the full course of 404 submissions, finding it hard to narrow them to what could fit in the museum’s space, and harder still to choose just a few winners. But he’s confident that each of the 67 works by 64 artists that made the exhibit is a treat — much like the dishes in a holiday spread, which the top prize-winning painting evoked.

The biggest factor in the selection process was what the artists were trying to say, West said at the opening reception.

“It doesn’t matter if all they want to say is, ‘Hey, this is a beautiful color,’ or ‘I have a theory about the creation of the world,’” West said. “If they can convince me that what they’re saying rings true, then I’m looking at a work of art.”

West said the artists were all winners as he announced the prizes. The top prize of $1,000 went to Brian Paul Hoover of Cedar City, Utah, for “Girl With the Fantastic Hat IX (Saturnalia),” a portrait of a woman holding a wrapped Christmas present over a big feast. West explained the meaning of Saturnalia, noting “all these foods wouldn’t be on South Beach diet.” He also pointed to the contrast between the two parts of the painting: the meticulously detailed portrait and still life components are topped by the “fantastic hat,” which West described as an explosion.

Hoover said the explosion is central to his art process in the series he calls “splash” paintings, in which he starts with a splash of paint on canvas and proceeds to “Rorschach” images that reveal themselves in the splash. He said “Saturnalia” is his favorite painting in the series.

“Color, composition — it all kind of came together,” Hoover said in an e-mail. “I wanted to do a seasonal painting for a while because most people can associate warm thoughts or cheerful memories about that time of year.”

Though the scene is recognizably Christmas, Hoover said he chose the Roman holiday to make it less culturally specific.

Other winners are Brenna Helm of Pullman, Wash., for “An Exercise in the Whereabouts of a Few,” and Maron Resur of Snohomish, Wash., for “Squire Boone.”

Helm describes her work as mysterious objects in strange environments and landscapes of solitude that allow one to think.

Resur’s painting, a large close-up of a face, is actually a self-portrait that she named for Daniel Boone, comparing her recent journey from Southern Indiana to the Northwest to the explorers who settled the lower Midwest. Resur also said she painted quickly and with a limited color palette, in contrast to her earlier work.

Though the exhibit doesn’t have a theme, West said he saw two common threads running through it: landscapes of the West and “internalizing what the artist saw.”

Five other paintings received honorable mentions, including “Sun Going Down Over Sunset Bay” by Steven Thor Johanneson of Yamhill, whose tremendously detailed watercolors are familiar to local museumgoers. The only winning artist present at the reception was the one who traveled the farthest to be there — Laurie Lisonbee of Salem, Utah, who got an honorable mention for “Tree Pose Rose.”

Lisonbee said a coinciding visit to a nearby relative enabled her to make the trip for the reception, and she was glad to discover the area.

“This is a really nice art museum,” she said.

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