Alaska News

Convergent spirits: Paintings by 2 hiking buddies express Alaska in realistic and abstract art

For many artists, few things beat a pleasurable day of painting with a fellow artist -- particularly if the setting is the great Alaska outdoors, where two or more people can look at the same view and create their own impressions of what they see.

In most cases those impressions will look fairly similar. But that's not the case with the paintings of Steven Gordon and James Temte in their two-man show "Parallel Experience," opening at Artique Ltd. on Aug. 7.

Longtime Alaskan Gordon is one of the state's best-established and most successful landscape artists. He excels in realistic depictions of glorious Alaska panoramas -- mountains, oceans, woodlands, flowers. His true-to-life renderings are tweaked by heightened colors that, though exciting and even emotional, are not out of line with what you might see while taking a walk when the light is just right. Looking at one of his big paintings of a piece of the Chugach Mountains, for instance, an experienced hiker may be able to tell exactly where Gordon was when he took the photo on which the painting is based.

(Gordon typically works in his home studio from photographic studies, but he sometimes works en plein air.)

Ebullient Temte appears to be the opposite of calm and focused Gordon. He paints abstracts, often with a strong geometric, almost mechanical, impulse. He says he's interested in "chaos and finding order within the chaos."

Gordon works with "strategically placed brush strokes" using equipment that would have been familiar to artists a hundred years ago or more. Temte's tools include a raft of caulk guns loaded with different colored paints, a 6-foot-long "spatula" that he uses to squeegee pigments across a wide swath of canvas in a single smear, and something he calls a "stripe-inator," basically a large T-square on rollers that is employed to make perfect vertical lines. He often revels in randomness, like putting a drop of mineral oil at the top of a painting and letting it trail down the face of the canvas.

Gordon, from Iowa, came to Alaska in the 1980s. He has taught at both Alaska Pacific University and the University of Alaska Anchorage and has had several solo shows over the years. He said he got into art as a kid when his family went on vacation to a remote cabin and "I didn't want to fish, so I painted." He's a Scout Master who has led at least 100 camping trips around Alaska and does art projects with kids at his church.

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Temte is a relatively new name on the Anchorage art scene. Raised in Wyoming, he said his first art memory "was in kindergarten when we were allowed to fingerpaint."

Except he didn't use his fingers. He used his knuckles because he liked the design it made. He went on to crayons, markers, pencil, acrylic paint, charcoal, pastels and "spray painting the side of the house."

Five years ago he moved to Alaska, where he'd long dreamed of living on account of the hiking, skiing and "so much nature for inspiration."

Temte met Gordon at church and started helping him out with projects such as a children's marionette show. When they discovered the depth of each other's artistic interest, a friendship began to form. Temte took some of Gordon's art classes at UAA and credited him with facilitating "my love of oil paint and also my growth as an artist, to reflect and incorporate the mental, spiritual and underlying feelings into my work."

"We're about the same age, we both have biology degrees," said Gordon. "As artists, we're both colorists and we like to work large, oil on canvas. We have a lot of interests in common."

One of those interests is hiking and using nature as the impetus for their art. This summer they paired up for trips to O'Malley Peak, Williwaw Lakes, along Turnagain Arm and Falls Creek.

"I thought it would be interesting to go to some spot and explore it together," Gordon said. "To compare and contrast how we responded on this day to this place. We shared field notes and looked at each other's photographs."

It was like having a second pair of eyes, Gordon suggested. "When you're with someone, you can see how they're looking at things," he said.

For instance, Gordon noticed Temte was taking a lot of close-ups of lichen formations and geometrically fractured rocks, as opposed to the wide-angle views that generally inform his own paintings. Temte said that his scientific studies -- he's currently pursuing a master's degree in environmental studies at UAA -- have taught him to look at things "through a microscope."

Gordon said the differences between the two artists aren't so much the difference of style -- realistic landscape versus abstract art -- but a difference in technique. Temte tends to use layers of paint one on top of another; Gordon mixes his colors, "wet onto wet."

The two plan to continue their excursions with winter trips. Temte said he was already excited about the contrast of black and white he expects to encounter.

The relationship between the paintings is not restricted to the physical time and place at which they were generated, Temte said, but is also rooted in the fact that they share their genesis in the same adventure. Capturing the view and colors are part of the creative process, but more important is expressing the experience, the process. Similarly, he finds building a frame and stretching the canvas as integral to making a painting as the painting itself. It "allows my mind to imagine," he said.

Temte's paintings may be abstracts, but when you look at one for a while, you can get the impression of trees or water. Work done with his mechanical stripe-inator has an uncanny similarity to Fairbanks landscape artist Kesler Woodward's paintings of birch stands.

"If you look at a forest, you see vertical lines, and layers -- so many layers," Temte said.

He hoped that viewers would look at his work and let their imaginations wander, much as one might wander in the alpine tundra of the Chugach on a free day and reflect on their own sensations, which probably won't be identical to the artist's.

"So much of the human experience is unique," he said. "But at the same time, so much of it is to be shared."

PARALLEL EXPERIENCE will open with a First Friday reception at 5 p.m. Aug. 7 at Artique Ltd., 314 G St.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham has been a reporter and editor at the ADN since 1994, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print.

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