UKIAH, CA., 9/4/24 – The Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah will host a retrospective of painter Ray Strong’s Northern California landscapes, including paintings of Mendocino County. The exhibit opens Friday.
Here’s the official announcement:
Grace Hudson Museum’s new exhibit, “Earth Portraiture: Ray Strong’s Northern California Landscapes” opens this weekend with two special events. On Friday, guest curators Mark Humpal and Karen Holmes will host an opening reception from 5-8 p.m., with bassist Pierre Archain providing live music. On Saturday at 2 p.m., Humpal will give an illustrated talk titled “The Man Behind the Brush: Landscape Artist Ray Stanford Strong.”
Born and raised in a small town in Oregon in 1905, Ray Strong was a landscape painter, museum diorama artist, educator, art supply store proprietor, arts organizer and administrator. Affable and outgoing, he possessed an almost uncanny ability to read his times. He started painting at the age of nine and was still at it at 99 when Portland, Oregon-based gallerist Mark Humpal met up with him in Santa Barbara, where Strong had lived and taught for 40 years. Originally intending to write a book on Oregon Impressionist painters, Humpal was so taken by the elderly man’s vivacity and continuing dedication to art that Humpal rearranged his agenda so that he could spend more time with Strong. Humpal ended up researching and writing the painter’s biography.
“Painting every day for him was like eating and breathing,” Humpal says. “It was an urge that never waned.” The third of six children, young Strong was encouraged in his painting and given watercolor lessons. Tragedy struck when Strong went hiking with his older brother in an area called the Devil’s Punchbowl on Eagle Creek in the Columbia Gorge. Intent on taking a photo of a porcupine, his brother Hillman fell into a waterfall and died. Strong revisited this traumatic experience in his work for years to come.
In the mid-1920s Strong came to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts, later the San Francisco Art Institute. While he made many friends and connections, he became frustrated with the school’s director, Lee Randolph, who pushed the students toward modernism. Artists were eager to break with history and tradition after the ravages of World War I; abstraction eclipsed realism as a prevailing style. Strong “didn’t want to be compelled toward a certain philosophy,” Humpal comments.
Strong soon joined the Art Students League in New York, where he came under the influence of the teacher and painter Frank Vincent DuMond, who encouraged Strong to piece together different styles. DuMond loved his little Oregon paintings but commented, “Your foregrounds are like mush.” He gave Strong pointers to produce “punch” in the foregrounds, employing very definite brushstrokes in the post-Impressionistic vein of Van Gogh. The remarkable result, where each blade of grass seems to be vibrating with an innate life force, is clearly viewed in paintings such as “Morning Shadows” and “Mendocino City.”
In 1933, Strong and his wife, Betty, whom he had married in 1928, went back to live in San Francisco. They lived on Russian Hill and opened an art supply shop which Humpal calls “the Grand Central Station of art stores.” Strong also started an art school, and invited Western landscape painter Maynard Dixon to teach there. Dixon became Strong’s next mentor, encouraging him to reduce clutter and stylize forms in his compositions to achieve greater visual impact. Dixon employed a style called Precisionism, which involves breaking a field of vision into clean lines and painting flat planes of color. Strong’s “Tungsten Canyon” (1969), painted near Bishop on the east side of the Sierra, shows a jumble of craggy, irregular peaks surrounding a mysterious black gap in the mountains, creating a sense of dynamic movement amid a parched, deserted landscape.
The current exhibit came into existence when Humpal, the owner and proprietor of the Mark Humpal Fine Art Gallery in Portland, was co-curating an exhibit named “Artful Liaisons” at the Grace Hudson with then-museum curator Karen Holmes. Along with Hudson’s earlier work, “Artful Liaisons” featured the paintings of artists Edward Espey and Grafton Tyler Brown, both of whom lived and painted in Oregon as well as California. This led Holmes to realize a link with Ray Strong, “another important Oregon artist with California ties.” Once Humpal was secured to guest curate the current exhibit, Holmes signed on to organize the art checklist, assist with label copy, and spearhead the exhibit design. Given her vast knowledge of the museum’s collections, she also curated a section of several small Grace Hudson landscapes that supplement Strong’s larger and bolder pieces. Similarities between the two artists are striking. Both Hudson and Strong attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (known as the California School of Design in Hudson’s era). Both were strong-minded and independent artists who resisted the dominant trends of their time to forge their own sensibilities, which included paintings of Western landscapes as intimate as portraits. Strong died in Three Rivers, California, in 2009.
“Earth Portraiture: Ray Strong’s Northern California Landscapes” is on exhibit through January 19. Several other events are planned: an “Intro to Plein Air with Gouache” workshop with Sergio Lopez on October 5; “Below and Above the Earth,” an illustrated talk by Tim Buckner on the natural forces that shape the Northern California landscapes that Strong painted on November 16; and a screening of the 1948 film Johnny Belinda, which was filmed on the Mendocino Coast. Strong’s watercolor of the movie’s farmhouse is featured in the exhibition.The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah, open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. The museum is free to all on the first Friday of the month. Visit gracehudsonmusem.org or call (707) 467-2836 to learn more.