Eugene Weekly : Culture : 06.09.05

Visual Arts:

Ghostly Magic


Artist Kathleen Bryson blurs realities.

Gardening:

A Rare Find


Lewisia and Rogue River thrills

Ghostly Magic

Artist Kathleen Bryson blurs realities.

BY MELISSA BEARNS

Denali Sunrise 2003

Speaking with a hint of a British accent picked up from more than a decade living in London, Corvallis artist Kathleen Bryson makes it pretty clear pretty quickly that in the game of "Which one of these is not like the other?," she's the pick. It's not really anything specific that she says. It's the way she likes to blur the lines most people draw with indelible marker, the lines and divisions that help stabilize our own unique definitions of reality.

Bryson paints richly textured, multilayered images that whisper "Magic is real." She explores other realms of existence that leave the viewer with the somewhat unsettling, slightly euphoric feeling that comes from believing, if only for a second, that realities beyond what we can see or feel do actually exist.

Kathleen Bryson

Her paintings imply as much as they leave out, the way the absence of noise can tell you something's wrong. Swirls of pale blues and shadows of barely-there trees are set against a whitened background with wispy air, falling snow and a cyborg lying on the ground staring up at the pallor of the sky. Werewolves, mermaids, gorgons and more otherworldy creatures populate her drawings, all alchemical distillations of two fantastical beasts blended, like her paints, into one.

With bottle-blonde hair swept into a braid away from her high cheekbones, full lips painted blood red, and slate gray eyes, it's hard to imagine this woman, who's dressed like an urban glamour girl in a smart black and white shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal lots of cleavage, living in Corvallis. She grew up in Alaska, spent some time as a student in Sweden and spent the last decade in London.

But now that she's moved to Corvallis to be with her long-term girlfriend, who recently started working at OSU, she plans to be in Oregon for a while. She's trying to adjust to a slower, less urban lifestyle, and seems to find the quirkiness of small-town life delightful. "Where slowness was something I longed for in London, I think I'm somewhat in culture shock," she says.

Northern Lights 2004

In addition to painting, she's (hopefully) about to finalize a deal for a book she describes as "anti-chicklit," less "lesbian" than her last book, Mush, and "kind of wicked, funny and accessible to more people." Meanwhile Bryson continues to work on multiple paintings at once, using glitter, lipstick and Wite-Out along with traditional paints. Playing with a world of ambiguity, she delves deeply into the gray area of muted sexuality, portraying creatures that are both and none. More recently she has been painting things that are half there — ghosts, shadows, clouds.

Bryson, who holds two passports, speculates that her transition to the barely-there images is probably a shimmering reflection, her own personal mirage, of how she's feeling these days and how the world around her feels. "It's a subtraction rather than an addition," she explains. "Because ghosts are half, not whole. There's been a lot of upheaval for me lately. I have two passports (U.S. and British), so I feel split in two a lot. And the world feels very tenuous."

Bryson's work is displayed in her eighth solo exhibit, titled "Lucky Charms," at Interzone in Corvallis through June 30.

A Rare Find

Lewisia and Rogue River thrills

BY RACHEL FOSTER

Last year, my spouse and I viewed the banks of the Rogue River from a raft, marveling (between regular soakings) at the variety of terrain and vegetation. This May we returned on foot, to take a closer look.

Hiking the Rogue River Trail in spring is a feast for plant fanciers. Within the first few miles we saw scarlet larkspur, banks of lavender-pink cat's ear and yellow Iris innominata veined in purple. The color of the iris changed constantly as we moved down river, to our endless surprise and delight. The trail was constructed by Chinese labor in the late 1800s for pack mules. The gardeners in our group hike lagged behind, oohing and aahing over every new plant find.

By day three we found fewer novelties and the pace picked up a bit. But I was stopped in my tracks by a lewisia growing right at my feet. We were walking along an exposed portion of the trail in a narrow canyon, at a place called Inspiration Point. Plants were scarce on the sheer rock face of the canyon wall, so the vividly pink, candy-striped flowers the size of quarters, emerging on stems a few inches high from small, succulent rosettes, were hard to miss. In all, I saw fewer than a dozen plants, in company with the blue-gray native Sedum spathulifolium and some rock ferns.

The genus Lewisia, named in honor of Lewis of Lewis and Clark, grows only in western North America, and L. cotyledon is restricted to an area about 100 miles long and 70 miles wide in rocky and mountainous areas of northern California and southwestern Oregon. That makes it a pretty rare plant. When I got home I e-mailed a photograph and some questions to Loren Russell, alpine plant hound and Corvallis rock gardener par excellence. "What a thrill!" he responded. "You were fortunate to find Lewisia cotyledon var. howellii. Distinguished by the fluted leaf margins, this is probably the least common of the three varieties of L. cotyledon in Oregon. It's also quite representative of the commercial seed strains of L. cotyledon in local nurseries."

"Lewisia cotyledon is the showiest of the seven or eight species of lewisia native to Oregon," he continued. "A lewisia in full bloom is always beautiful, and I'm sure that many gardeners buy plants on impulse at a garden center, then aren't sure what to do with them." Loren went on to say, "L. cotyledon is easy to grow, and also easy to kill. It's important to understand that this is a succulent, able to store water and survive drought, and also that it is very subject to rot if the rosette or stem base stays wet."

So don't over-water, don't let other plants flop over the lewisia, do plant in well-drained soil. For beginners, my advice is to grow lewisias in containers, ideally hypertufa troughs. Large terracotta pots also work well, but pots smaller than about 10" diameter typically dry out too fast and so retard growth of the lewisia.

"Use very freely draining soil or compost and add 50 percent grit or gravel to a good planting mix. Plant high, leaving the rosette about one inch or more above the soil, then work gravel mulch under the rosette. Lewisias respond well to balanced or low-nitrogen fertilizer. To get a second bloom, I generally water with soluble 10-10-10 just after bloom, then a week later. If grown in containers or rock gardens with very good drainage, and if kept clear of fallen leaves and other debris, lewisias tolerate our normal winter moisture. Summer moisture is another matter."

Garden Tours

Don't miss these inspirational gardens.

Open Gardens: Members of the Emerald Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society. Saturday, 6/11. Call Holly for addresses and times: 345-9103

Music in the Garden: A self-guided tour of five country gardens (also a fund-raiser for the Eugene Symphony). Sunday 6/12, 11am – 5 pm. Call 485-4837 or 687-9487 for more information.

The 12th Annual KLCC Garden Tour: From Humble Roots...Nine Transformed Gardens Sunday, 6/26, 9 am - 5 pm. Call KLCC 541-463-6000 / 800-922-3682 for more information