On Diving Deep with Artist Gary Westford
Westford's LIFELINE (phases of the moon) at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon runs through mid-November.
One of the highlights of my year was the opportunity last winter to get acquainted with Salem artist Gary Westford. He was scheduled to have a show at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, and ordinarily this is something I’d have likely covered for Oregon ArtsWatch. But something happened in late 2023 that took that off the table—a conflict-of-interest thing.
Last December, the HFMA approached me about writing a booklet for the exhibition that would open in May.
I didn’t hesitate, though I confess to wondering if I could do it justice after I said “yes!” So after the holidays, I started prepping for a sit-down with Gary, a process I wrote about here. The entire project was a terrific experience: the preliminary work, the collaboration with Gary, the actual writing of the piece, and working the HFMA’s director John Olbrantz and Nick Allison, an editor up in Washington.
Gary’s show, exhibited in the intimate Study Gallery upstairs where the low roar of ocean waves crashing on the beach provides the aural ambience, runs through Nov. 16. With the HFMA’s permission, I’m reprinting below the entire text of the show’s booklet.
I’d planned to also publish photos of all the paintings, but decided to present just a sampling so as to not give away the store. Hopefully, local readers will take the opportunity to see Gary’s work in the flesh while it’s at the Hallie Ford. If you go, you can also check out the show that opened there this weekend, Indie Folk: New Art and Sound from the Pacific Northwest, which runs through Dec. 21. I’ll report on that one for ArtsWatch later this fall.
So, huge thanks to John at the Hallie Ford for letting me unfurl this here, and also to Gary for opening his artistic life up to me last winter. And now, I give you: LIFELINE (phases of the moon):
The moon, the Indian poet Musifer writes, “fascinates us in her simplicity.” And yet over many millennia, that simple orb has encompassed a cosmos of meaning.
“The moon takes us out of our game,” muses Salem artist Gary Westford, who vividly recalls first seeing it through a telescope as a ten-year-old. Linger on the imagery in LIFELINE (phases of the moon) and one finds it embedded in a narrative that speaks to both the optimism and precariousness of the American Experiment.
Westford retired from teaching in 2013, and now, in his seventies, is able to devote himself fully to painting. LIFLINE, like the work he’s shown in nearly three dozen regional, national, and international juried exhibitions since 2018, is the product of a lifetime spent immersed in the arts—painting, obviously, but also cinema, music, and literature. Tug a thread from any narrative, conceptual, or visual component of his paintings and you’ll often find the other end attached to a poem, a film, a piece of music, or another painting that made an impression on him—sometimes decades earlier.
Born in postwar California, Westford grew up in the Bay Area and was poised to study sociology at San Francisco State University when he encountered an “intellectual gladiator” who introduced him to the joy of poetry, particularly that of W. H. Auden.
“I would leave his classes in creative writing or mass media, and everything was crystal clear,” Westford recalls. While he was living in the Haight-Ashbury district in the late 1960s, a path to the artistic life beckoned. It wound through the epicenter of the American counterculture and the Bay Area Figurative Movement, the latter of which found Southern California artists marrying the Abstract Expressionism that was all the rage in New York with recognizable figurative and landscape imagery.
Westford’s painting, from the monochromatic pieces he began with about ten years ago to the fuller color spectrum in his current work (including the paintings in LIFELINE embodies that carefree instinct to make it weird but keep it real.
Westford went on to study with some of the contemporary art world’s heavy hitters at the University of California, Berkeley. From the figurative movement, he painted with Joan Brown and spent a year drawing with Elmer Bischoff. He took graduate seminars with the African-American painter Robert Colescott of Portland, who was a visiting professor there at the time. His interest in surrealism and conceptual art was nurtured by postwar artists Gerald Gooch and Robert Moon. “I thrived in their classes,” he said.
His studies took him to the great museums across the United States and in Europe. Intellectually omnivorous, he was particularly drawn to the singular vision of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, whose works, for Westford, “make time stop and eternity rush in.” Surrealism, he continues, affords opportunities for “the shock of recognition.”
“Magritte’s notion to use shocking juxtapositions to create ‘object lessons’ in his paintings has haunted me for years,” Westford says. “It also struck me that given the tumultuous events of our present world disorder, all of us were and are in need of a collective ‘lifeline’ that might be cast out to us.”
Prior to the paintings in LIFELINE, the object lessons Westford explored in an exhibition entitled Miraculous Occurrences were embodied in spheres and orbs floating through scenes both realistic and fantastical. One included in LIFELINE is titled Waterfall: The Source (magic moon). When the Hallie Ford Museum of Art’s Maribeth Collins Director John Olbrantz asked Westford to mount the exhibition that became Lifeline, Westford decided to make that sphere approximately 239,000 miles away a significant compositional and metaphorical component of a meditation on modern America.
The moon—the only physical object that virtually every human who has ever lived has seen—is thought to have first appeared in Western art in Jan van Eyck’s Renaissance-era painting The Crucifixion. But our lunar neighbor was rendered by the ancient Egyptians and even Babylonians in carved images that incorporated the imaginal. The artworks in LIFELINE, then, manifest a tradition going back many millennia.
The moon in the paintings in Lifeline appears in scenes that occasionally include surrealist juxtapositions. Thus, a rising moon barely visible though the muted purples and pinks of clouds at dusk appears like a ghost over an inexplicable scene: a 1948 Buick perched perilously on a rickety raft that is occupied by a half-dozen desperate travelers.
If the scene looks familiar, that’s because Westford’s inspiration for The Raft (evening moon rising) was French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault's famous The Raft of the Medusa, a stunning, life-sized representation of a particularly nightmarish French naval disaster in 1816. Géricault was immersed in this painting when he was twenty-six years old, which was Westford’s age when he encountered it. “When I saw that painting at the Louvre, it rocked my world, just the epic nature of it,” he said. “I was dumbfounded and thunderstruck by its spectacular power.”
Westford’s The Raft is less macabre than Géricault’s; everyone depicted here has survived. But one is left to ask why a 1948 Buick—symbolic of American culture at its postwar zenith—is adrift at sea in the first place. And yet the survivors see a symbol of hope in the distance, beneath that evening moon: the Statue of Liberty.
The artworks in Lifeline are—conceptually and aesthetically—in dialogue with each other. Coupled with lunar imagery that sometimes is barely visible through a cloudy haze, several works imply a story unfolding on water. Lady Liberty is barely visible in The Raft, but she looms large in Horizon (harvest moon), mounted on an early-twentieth-century wood trunk of the type that was often used by immigrants seeking a new life in America.
The shock of recognition here is forced by the artist’s perspective: the viewer recognizes an iconic image from behind, as it would be seen from New Jersey, not the view typically seen in photographs nor one that would have greeted immigrants arriving by boat in New York. Westford’s harvest moon, meanwhile, shines not on Manhattan and Brooklyn, but on a wheat field.
That piece of hammered-copper Americana is echoed by another: Purification (silver moon—a dream) is a realistic rendering of Mount Rushmore juxtaposed in sublime fashion with a shower of pink roses—every bit as strange as The Raft, but in a different surreal register that is evocative of Magritte’s unusual pairings.
Westford’s meditation on national iconography finds its fullest expression in Moonlight Mandala: The wheat-field yellow of Horizon here frames a circular smorgasbord of nineteen mid-twentieth-century felt pennant travel flags. The title borrows from the Sanskrit-derived maṇḍala, a geometric image used for meditation in some cultures. The marriage of symmetry with a broad spectrum of color here evokes psychedelic art, the aesthetic that emerged at the precise moment and place Westford was turning to the art life. Not coincidentally, he has quite the collection of old posters from San Francisco that, like LIFELINE, has also made an appearance at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.
All paintings represent the imaginal made manifest, but two of the paintings in LIFELINE deliberately put a piece of the imaginal outside the temporality of the image. In You Will Soon Witness a Miracle, an evening moon is visible during daylight on a cloudy day, but in this otherwise simple image, the rift appears as text within the frame, as if swiped from a Chinese fortune cookie. A promise to those who pay attention to things, perhaps? This appears to be what the figure in New Horizons (blue moon) is doing as he rows toward the horizon in another cryptically simple image. But he’s not looking at the moon to his right; something to the left, outside the frame, has his attention . . . a miracle, possibly.
One of Westford’s favorite types of miracles is the shock and awe of encountering a work of art that touches one so deeply that “eternity rushes in.” Randall Jarrell’s poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner was one such work for him. Westford—whose father and stepmother served in the military—read it in 1970 as the Vietnam War raged. The poem stuck in his craw and functioned as the seed that would become the Lifelines painting B-17 Ball Turret Gunner (early morning full moon).
If the violence and unrest of the mid-twentieth century world that birthed this painting seems pale in comparison to the present state of things, Westford’s optimism seems to come from a confidence in his ability to confront turmoil artistically, with wisdom, imagination, and beauty.
“I’m at the top of my game as an artist, and it just so happens that it comes late in my life,” Westford says. “The work I’m doing now is the sum total of all my experiences coming together in a way that I’m in command of. I understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. It’s like putting pieces of the puzzle together.” Or, he adds, employing the analogy of another art form he loves: “I’m making my own movies.”
© 2024 by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, reprinted with permission.
EPILOGUE — Gary continues to paint in his downtown Salem studio, and tells me he’ll have a painting included in the 45th Anniversary Blackfish Gallery Group Exhibition in Portland this December. He was a member there 1989-1995.