IN THE STUDIO WITH...

Jim Meehan’s pioneering impact on today’s craft cocktail industry is undeniable. A two-time James Beard Award winner—for Outstanding Bar Program (2012) and for “Meehan’s Bartender Manual” (2018)—he has just finished his third book: “The Bartender’s Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar,” which is available for preorder now and will be published June 11, 2024.

From the first minute of our conversation this past fall, I was struck by his deep appreciation for the history of his craft and his commitment to surrounding himself with diverse sources of inspiration. Meehan gave me a tour of his studio (his house in Portland, Oregon) starting with the first place he looks when on the hunt for a new drink: old books. We talked about his creative process, how inventing cocktails differs from writing books, his work ethic, the necessity of collaboration, and why a cocktail depends so much on the room in which it is served.

Find his work here.

“Some of the best conversations that I’ve had are when I’m sitting down with a student and a piece of wood, and we just start whittling together.”

Sculptor Christopher B. Wagner loves to save wood from the scrap heap and carve it into something beautiful. His facility with wood is something to behold, the result of a big range of influences: early life as a farm kid in Kentucky to a fellowship studying under master carvers in Japan. He often uses those skills to depict relationships between people and animals, with a healthy dose of whimsy.

Wagner has lived and carved all over the United States, including a long stint in Oregon where he and I collaborated on several shows. Now he’s putting down roots in Virginia and making new work, some inspired by his new teaching job at the College of William & Mary near Colonial Williamsburg. As he gave me a tour of his new workspace, we covered lots of tips and tricks, including his favorite tools, how teaching helps his practice as an artist and how he keeps from checking his phone during precious studio time.

Find his work here.

“I mix paint a lot. I even save my palettes when I really like color combinations.”

Painter Renée Hartig has worked hard on her skill for color, and it shows in every painting. Her landscapes have a kind of electric buzz, the result of 17 years spent experimenting with how to mix paint for various effects. A Michigan native, she moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2008. Since then she’s been exploring and depicting every sandy cove and snowy mountain the great Pacific Northwest has to offer.

I visited her studio before Christmas 2023. We talked about her artistic process, of course, as well as some of the lesser known sides of painting life.

Find her work here.

“I’m starting off spontaneously, and then things emerge.”

Roberta Aylward paints abstract artworks using a big range of colors, tools and textures. What may start as an array of stainless steel washers may get the cut-paper stencil treatment, then a wash of acrylic paint before a squeegee rearranges the whole.

I visited Aylward’s Portland, Oregon, studio this fall where we talked about why she views her work as documentary in nature, why the hardware store is sometimes better than the art supply store, and what she’s looking for as she pushes and pulls her work between the abstract and the familiar.

Find her work here.

“I’m there just to facilitate other people doing great things.”

John Eisemann directs some of the most beautiful musical experiences in Portland. In 2019 he and his wife, Jen Milius, founded In Medio (which means “in the midst”), a choir of classically-trained young adults singing powerful music. Their range is wide. I’ve seen the group fill a bar with brash, beer-swilling sea chanties and grace a candle-lit church with holiday carols.

Eisemann recently invited me to his office at Grant High School (where in his day job he directs five youth choirs). We talked about how he chooses music and develops the programs his choirs sing, how he rehearses them and how he views his responsibilities as an artist. Bonus: in this video he quickly explains the origin point for virtually all the popular music we listen to today.

Find more about In Medio and their upcoming performances here.

“My superpower is storytelling.” Collagist Pepe Moscoso builds delightful little worlds that celebrate the freedom and joys of childhood. He combines photos of abandoned places, among other rich settings, with cartoon figures—usually children and animals—playing their hearts out.

Originally from Guantajuato, Mexico, Moscoso is fascinated by Americana: old buildings and cars, craggy rocks and lakes, the northern lights. He uses those locations as the inspiration for short stories that unfold between image, title, frame and the viewer’s own experience.

I recently visited his gallery, Blind Insect (2841 Alberta St. Portland, OR), and his studio space in the back to learn how his magic happens.

Find his work here.

Poet Brian Brodeur’s skill, work ethic and belief in the power of art have often helped spur my own work as a painter. Since meeting him in grad school two decades ago, I’ve been lucky enough to read most of his poems as they develop. His most recent book, Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), just won the New Criterion Prize, and long before that hit the presses, he was back at work on the next collection.

A critic, professor and historian of poetry, Brodeur created the online resource “How a Poem Happens,” a trove of more than 200 interviews with contemporary poets focusing on how each wrote one particular poem.

Usually he and I share work over the phone, but this summer I got to visit him in person, hear his big baritone laugh, see the many drafts he takes to finish a poem and ask about his insights on art in general.

Find his work here.

Sigfrido Oliva has been a fixture in the Italian art community since the late 1960s. At nearly 82 years old, he’s still painting, etching, drawing, writing and teaching. A native of Messina, Sicily, he took a boat to Rome in his teens, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, put down roots in the city center and never left.

I had a great time studying under him a few years ago—he’s never one to let a joke go untold—and finally, post-pandemic, I got to visit him again. As usual in these interviews, I had specific questions about his practice and his past as an artist, but he had his own ideas about what’s important in a studio tour. So I followed him around in my stumbly Italian and enjoyed the chance to laugh with him again. (I’m sure I’m missing things in my ham-fisted translation.)

Find his work here.

“Technical accidents are the best part of my art practice. They’re what I’m there for.” Portland painter Tatyana Ostapenko seems really curious about the rules we make for ourselves as artists. She’s always asking which rules matter—in a practical, aesthetic or other sense—or how she can pull new methods into her practice.

She was born and raised in Ukraine, and her work reflects an ongoing deep dialogue with the country and its traditions. Soon after the full scale invasion of the country last year, she began a fundraiser that has so far collected more than $70,000 for humanitarian relief.

We talked about the relative advantages in acrylic vs. oil painting, why she often uses unstretched canvases, the uses of contemporary technology to support a painter’s practice, and plenty more.

Find her work here.

“It really is about spinning all the plates. You have to be an amazing multitasker.” Chef Lisa Schroeder is the force behind Mother’s Bistro, an essential institution in downtown Portland for 23 years and counting. Among her many awards, she was just named Oregon’s Small Business Person of the Year by the SBA, an honor that last month took her to the White House to meet President Biden.

Schroeder let me follow her through her beautiful restaurant, where we talked about the many ways she works as an artist, directing everything from the visual details of the front lobby, through the changing flavors on the menu, to the logistics behind it all. Running a restaurant post-COVID has her “hustling, more hustling” as she puts it, collaborating with other artists to make experiences that pull people off the couch and back downtown.

Find her work here: https://www.mothersbistro.com

“The best artists are the ones who have dropped so many times that it becomes comfortable for them.” Enrico Solriso spins fire. He performs partner acrobatics and other amazing stunts at venues around the world. SolRiso gave me an introduction to juggling and object manipulation during nighttime rehearsals at Movement climbing gym, Portland. With a background in martial arts and skateboarding, his approach to his craft is rooted in bending mistakes to his advantage. He focused on the concept of flow as the not-so-secret key to juggling success and offered a quick lesson on the science behind the flow arts.

Find some fantastic photos and more of his work here.

“This is where I find a lot of magic: in the ghost.”

Printmaker Nanette Wallace specializes in monotypes. She paints in ink on a plexiglass plate, runs a single print, then uses the leftover image—the ghost—as a springboard to the next composition, and the next, until she finds an artistically satisfying composition. It’s a practice rooted in spontaneity rather than planning.

Wallace showed me around her Portland, Oregon, studio this spring and explained the ways she combines impeccable figure drawing technique, inspiration and chance to make beautiful scenes of people and the natural world.

Find her work here.

“There’s no replacement for just painting,” says William Park. “If it works, great. Go on and paint. If it doesn’t, great. Go on and paint.” Park has been a fixture in Portland’s visual art scene for three decades. A prolific, intuitive painter, he uses unrehearsed abstract brushstrokes to trigger unexpected moments on canvas that he compliments with a master draftsman’s skill. His paintings and prints echo the real world of human figures, crashing ocean waves, bowls, birds and more, while at the same time flowing with spontaneity.

In this interview, we toured his beautiful studio and talked about big things—from what he does when he’s stuck on a painting to a major life-altering event from which he is still recovering.

Park’s next solo show opens April 6, 2023, at Laura Vincent Design and Gallery, Portland. Find his work here and here.

“We’re the court jester. We’re allowed to say things that someone else would not get away with.”

Sister Indica is the writer, producer, director and music composer for the audio drama “Blazed All Our Lives.” It’s a surrealistic soap opera with a cast of drag queens, drag kings and professional audio actors: “Dynasty” meets “The Golden Girls,” as if filtered through John Waters’ twisted brain. Indica’s comedy aims to be as biting and black as possible, illuminating the dark corners of human relationships through a torrent of jokes. We talked about her production process, the power of drag as a medium for truth telling and where drag fits in American culture today.

Find it here (or wherever you get your podcasts).

Do you need a quarter-scale clay model replica of your cartoon caterpillar? A custom foosball table? A steel bannister?

Scott Foster is your guy. A sculptor of incredible range, Foster got his start doing special effects for TV commercials. Soon he was making stop-motion puppets for movies including Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Book Smart. I met him a decade ago when he was running Good: A Gallery in Portland’s Mississippi neighborhood. During the pandemic he relocated to a beautiful spot in the country, and he’s been hard at work creating an impressive, sprawling studio.

We talked about the various projects of his artistic past and present, as well as the pitfalls and adjustments in the creative process.

H. Joseph Ehrmann-known simply as H.-is a liquor and cocktail artist with a mile-long resume. He owns Elixir, the second-oldest saloon in San Francisco, which he remade into both a friendly watering hole and a serious stage for master distillers, brand ambassadors and the like to nerd out before lucky revelers like me. He travels the world developing new cocktails, teaching classes and consulting, and he operates Fresh Victor, a new cocktail mixer company, with products available soon at stores near you.

In this impromptu interview, H. shows my wife, Whitney, and me his garage lab, aka the “bar-rage,” the unassuming hideout where he invents incredible flavor combos. Find him on Instagram @cocktailambassadors and visit his bar when you’re in the Bay Area.

Leah Kohlenberg is not just the president of Portland Open Studios (and therefore an invaluable advocate for the visual arts throughout our weird city) and she's not just a former world-traveling journalist with great stories to tell. She’s mainly a bold painter of cityscapes, portraits, flora and fauna. (Take note of the drippy ferns and flowers throughout this video.) For the past 11 years, she’s also been teaching painting at The Roaming Studio (find it on YouTube). And she wrote a book about how to draw faces called, fittingly, “The Roaming Studio’s Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing Faces.”

Find her work here: https://www.leahkohlenberg.com

“I’m collecting puzzle pieces to put together an accurate perspective of the world that I’m in and the body that I’m in.”

Sienna Cenere makes detailed pictures out of data. She draws people, animals, plants, plate tectonics and more using hand-drawn numbers and equations in a version of pointillism. A year of research may go into one piece, along with 50 hours making tiny letters and numbers that, seen from a distance, cohere into evocative artworks.

In this interview she shows us around her impressive printmaking studio, where she goes down many a research rabbit hole, and she demonstrates the meticulous craft of numberism.

DJ Bryson Wallace draws on a delightfully wide musical palette reaching decades deep and around the world. Weekend mornings, from 9am to noon, he hosts “First Light with Bryson Wallace,” a cheerful, boundary-pushing jazz show on KMHD (89.1 FM for those near Portland, Oregon). And about six nights a week you can find him spinning vinyl at clubs and events all over our weird city. Wallace loves to educate his audience, and I enjoyed the chance to ask him how he navigates a three-hour set. We talked about how he loosely plans—then improvises—what he plays based on cues from the crowd, avoiding becoming the center of attention, preferring instead “to be a wingman for everybody.”

Read more about his radio show here. It’s available for streaming wherever you are, and follow him on Instagram: @brysonwallace.

Steve Mumford caught my attention as a combat painter during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars beginning in 2003. He was following in a rich tradition of artists risking their lives to depict the drama of war. (I wrote a whole chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation about his work.) Since then, Mumford has been a regular contributor to Harper’s magazine, traveling to cover a range of stories in “places where human emotions really come into play.” He has depicted the BP oil spill in Louisiana, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, rallies for then-candidate Donald Trump, the lives of wounded combat veterans and plenty more.

In May, 2022, I visited his studio in lower Manhattan where we talked about his two current lines of artistic exploration. I expected to see the first such body of work, his latest on-scene ink-and-watercolor drawings depicting the COVID response in New York, protests for racial justice in Portland, and the like. I didn’t expect to see studies for a series borne from his practice as a Catholic. It led to a great discussion. “I don’t think that you can go back to any kind of pure faith if you’ve grown up in a modernist atmosphere,” he said, “But I think it is possible to go to church and get some very powerful experience from it, even if you don’t subscribe to the whole mythology.”

Mumford’s work can be found at Postmasters Gallery, where he has been represented for many years. (https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/6e35b37f6c6080de555602/)

Practical advice for painters: “It shouldn’t feel like reinventing the wheel every morning,” Kevin Adams said when I visited his studio this past winter in the picturesque village of Washington, Virginia.

Adams has a well honed eye for depicting a scene, and he has used it all over the world, painting arctic glaciers, Cuban skies, national parks, a changing Chilean river, Russian cities, and many breathtaking views of the forests, farms, mountains and beaches of the American East Coast where lately he splits his time between Virginia and Massachusetts.

He served as a Marine Corps combat painter, which sparked my friendship with him more than a decade ago. (I was writing a dissertation on combat art.) The U.S. State Department has shown his work around the world, and he has been commissioned multiple times by the Department of the Interior and National River Conservation to document some of the most amazing landscapes in the Americas.

Find his work here: http://www.kevinhadams.com

Sculptor Philip A. Robinson, Jr. recently relocated to the West Coast after several years building his practice in New York and New Jersey. His pieces often combine carved wood with mirrored stainless steel, offering viewers a fluid, slightly warped, view of themselves looking at wood renderings of other people’s clothes and accessories—trying them on, in a way. I visited his studio this winter. We talked about this work, how changing communities is changing his career, and how he integrates his own artistic practice with his day job teaching fine art to middle and high schoolers.

Find his work here: https://www.philiparobinsonjr.com

“I use a lot of stories in my art to try to psychologically understand myself and my relationships with other people, which can get rather messy sometimes.” A she-wolf, a murder mystery, a hermaphrodite and more: Portland artist Jen Brown paints people—allegories, portraits and ancient myths—using a glazing technique inspired by the old masters (the likes of Titian and Caravaggio).

In this interview, we talk about her influences, her daily practice, the power of art—and a controversy involving Instagram and too many DMs.

Her solo show, Love, Sex and War, opens March 3, 2022, at Figure Ground Gallery, Seattle.

Find her work here: https://www.brownjen.com

Primarily a keys player, Daniel Clarke is a veteran musician in Richmond, Virginia, and has toured the world with Mandy Moore, Ryan Adams, Jason Mraz, Rachel Yamagata and the Dixie Chicks, to name a few. He’s been k.d. lang’s musical righthand man for more than a decade. (I’ve heard k.d. call him “the best musician I know” in front of thousands of people.) In this video Clarke explains his creative process. He plays his way into a rendition of “Deck the Halls”—we recorded this right before Christmas—and shows us around his home studio, full of fabulous things for playing, including a tea set for his daughters.

In a wide ranging conversation, we talk drum machines vs. computers, why lots of “starts” help him make good songs, the importance of playing music like a child, and plenty more.

Find more of his work here: https://spacebombgroup.com/artists/daniel-clarke

One of the most prolific artists I know, Christine Joy paints the glorious Pacific Northwest from her rustic studio in Oregon wine country. Since meeting her at an art fair in 2018, I’ve loved and respected Christine’s jubilant daily devotion to craft—and her work pays off: the paintings just keep getting stronger.

During our visit in fall 2021, she showed me her essential equipment for painting indoors and out, showed us evidence of her killer chops in the brushworks, reminded me that painting first thing in the morning is a fabulous way to live, and explained how she uses flowers to experiment with new techniques. (And—bonus!—we discovered she borrowed a favorite art book from me way back in the beforetimes.)

Find her work here: https://www.christinejoypaintings.me