EUGENE — “Work work work work!”
Speaking to a packed auditorium on the University of Oregon campus, this was the advice James Lavadour offered to young artists. A self-taught artist whose daily practice involves heading to his Pendleton studio “before the sun comes up,” it is clear that Lavadour knows a thing or two about work.
It’s not just that his long list of accomplishments — the prestigious awards and commissions, the inclusions in prominent museum collections across the country, his influence on other artists as co-founder of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts — are clear indicators of a strong work ethic. It’s that you can see Lavadour’s work — the labor, the process, the contemplation, the rigor — in the paintings and prints on view in his most comprehensive career retrospective to date, James Lavadour: Land of Origin, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) in Eugene.
Lavadour describes his relationship to the land as a kind of symbiotic or constitutive work. It could be boiled down to a simple list: He is shaped by the land, it shapes him, and he paints it. However, this simplification fails to register both the depth and breadth of this relationship. It is not as if Lavadour is merely roaming the land in search of something to paint. He hikes, camps, drives, walks his dog, and even naps in the open space as a kind of praxis, a philosophical way of knowing through doing…