Ray Stanford Strong: West Coast Landscape Artist by Mark Humpal

Abstract

135 Reviews RAY STANFORD STRONG: WEST COAST LANDSCAPE ARTIST by Mark Humpal University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2017. Photographs, notes, index. 396 pages. $45.00 cloth. Intricately detailed, this illustrated walk-through of the artist’s life and times provides a personalized view of the rapidly changing American West Coast. Simultaneously, it establishes a dialectic on the twentieth-century shift in American art from representation to abstraction. The text is populated by beautiful color reproductions of Ray Sanford Strong’s simply painted, gorgeous, factual interpretations of the majestic Oregon, California, and inter-mountain West landscape. Mark Humpal tells the story of the artist’s life and work in considerable, well-researched detail. The author describes Strong’s struggles, both aesthetic and socioeconomic , throughout the book and clearly articulates the artist’s view of a rapidly changing society. An advantage provided to the author was that of spending days with Strong and his family near the end of the artist’s life. Long conversations enabled Humpal to understand Strong’s evolution as a painter, to discuss the artist’s influences, and to imbue this biography with the artist’s powerful, positive spirit. The Great Depression, the New Deal, World Wars I and II, the dawning of an ecological consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, all played a role in Strong’s work. Humpal uses his friendship with the artist and his family, often quoting directly from interviews and letters, to capture and bring to life that history. The book is so well researched and documented that one feels the author’s hovering, omniscient presence throughout. Especially interesting to students of painting and to art historians is that most of the challenges faced by artists in the twentieth century are discussed throughout the text. The pressures of conforming to the latest trends were considered by Strong intellectually, but never followed, and the text builds the thesis that being true to one’s core principles triumphs eventually. Strong was a conventional, conservative landscape painter who was deeply aware of modernist trends but chose instead to work in a representational style, straightforwardly depicting the countryside he loved. He chose to (primarily ) paint outdoors, surrounded by the West Coast’s stunning landscape. Strong employed minor stylization in his paintings, which included simplification of form and pushing the intensity of his color palette, while never straying far from direct observation of local color. Perhaps surprisingly for lovers of landscape painting, until late in his career Strong met formidable opposition to his aesthetic, especially in the academic and museum world where Modernism was being championed. Like many artists, Strong struggled to earn a decent living and the book drives that point home relentlessly, detailing exhibition history and sales, commissions won and lost, and teaching positions beginning and ending sometimes too abruptly. Due to the difficulty of earning an income from painting sales, Strong found other avenues for his art to generate revenue. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing throughout his career, Strong earned numerous commissions for murals and dioramas. Because he was able to faithfully record the landscape, he often collaborated with scientists and natural history museums. Humpal’s carefully researched record of the artist’s sales and commissions percolates through the text, reminding students of painting that little has changed in our new century and that willingness to collaborate and flexibility are traits to be espoused. Finally, Ray Stanford Strong: West Coast Landscape Artist is much more than a beautiful coffee table book — although it is that. It is a, nearly, day-to-day history of how one artist fit into the twentieth century, from 1905, when the artist was born, to his death in 2006. From his youth on a large berry farm in Oregon through his life in California, it is a tightly crafted year-toyear history of how the effect of social interaction , politics, and the economy formed the life of an important, previously underrecognized, West Coast artist. Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson Portland Art Museum (retired) ...