One measure of an artist’s success is numbers — how many attend an art exhibition or how many paintings sell, how many buy the book or attend productions of the play. Over the years, here’s where I’ve landed: How many people find an artist’s work doesn’t matter nearly as much as who encounters it — and then, the path it lays for them.
Take Clayton Sumner Price, one of Oregon’s most influential Modernist painters who emerged during the first half of the 20th century and whose work is the subject of a retrospective show this summer at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. In the case of C.S. Price, it matters that more than 60 years ago, a Michigan dad took his adolescent son to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit Industry murals loom large in that building, but those aren’t what piqued 12-year-old Roger Saydack’s interest during his visit. As a youth, he was enchanted by one of Price’s late paintings, The Fisherman…