Harley Cowan is a photographer and practicing architect based in Portland. His interest in large format photography led to a research fellowship in heritage documentation where he photographed Cloud Cap Inn (built 1889) on Mount Hood and B Reactor (1944) at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington. Earlier this year, Harley was inducted into the Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective of photographers founded in 1987, dedicated to making visible all aspects of the nuclear age. He is its 38th member.

Harley has had solo exhibitions at Camerawork Gallery in Portland, the Manhattan Project National Historical Park visitor center, and Allied Arts in Richland, Washington. His work was featured in the 2018-19 Pacific Northwest Viewing Drawers at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland and Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Juries selected photographs for the “Life In Analog” national exhibition of film photography at Fort Works Art in Fort Worth, Texas, the “Lyceum Portland” exhibit of silver gelatin and alternative process at Jailhouse Studios in Portland, and “PDX 30” at LightBox Gallery in Astoria.

In 2018, Harley was the Artist-in-Residence at Oregon Caves National Monument, won the Access Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and was a speaker at the Portland Art Museum for the Photography Council’s Brown Bag Lecture Series. He lectured before University of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Program, DoCoMoMo Oregon, the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School, and the Society of Architectural Historians at their 2017 conference in Victoria, B.C. His work is published online in Archipedia, an encyclopedia of historic sites, and in print with the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation quarterly magazine This Place, Washington State University’s alumni quarterly Washington State Magazine, and the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s publication A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Washington State.

A graduate of Washington State University, for eight years, Harley was a member of the Professional Advisory Board for its School of Design & Construction. Early in his career, he spent six years in nuclear industry. His studies also took him to Far Eastern State Technical University in Vladivostok, Russia where he was the first and only western student to attend.    

Aja Ngo is a glass mosaic artist, visiting teacher, exhibition organizer and a community artist. She was introduced to mosaic art as a part of her everyday surrounding, growing up among medieval buildings in her native Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. Mosaic art came up again later in life as an introduction to a stepping stone project which she worked on with her son, and she never looked back. 

What drew her to mosaic art was the skills required to make a good artist: patience, perseverance, and attention to detail. Her favorite works are texturally intricate pieces that have somewhat bold impression at first glance and begin to reveal a number of hidden details upon a closer look. Her pieces primarily use glass, texture glass, confetti glass, tempered glass, glass beads, porcelain, precious stones, corals, and found objects. Apart from study in her native Czech Republic, she has also studied in Russia, England, Vietnam, China and Peru.

She become a member of the Society of American Mosaic Artist (SAMA) in 2014 and holds graduate degrees in World History, Russian Language and Literature, and Acupuncture. When she is not working on a mosaic she maintains her practice at Portland Traditional Acupuncture in SW Portland, and spends time with her husband and two sons. She enjoys cooking, reading, paddle boarding, hiking, biking, practicing bikram yoga, dancing Argentine tango and sitting in silence in Hoyt Arboretum.

Robin shares this personal story...

Aimee Erickson speaks French, held a summer job at a missile subsystems manufacturer, climbs trees, would like to own a pair of pants with a plastic sled built into the bottom, and has bicycled across America twice (well, almost twice). Favorite sport: soccer. Favorite chocolate: dark. Spirit animal: seahorse. She prefers analog, loves salt, and makes a mean crepe; she pieces by machine but quilts by hand, can juggle while unicycling but was never inclined to join the circus, and, like most humans, started painting at the age of three.

She was born in Paris to American parents; her father was working at the linear accelerator in Orsay. In May of 1968 during the height of les evenements—the student uprising—the family left for England, buying hoarded gasoline from the dentist and spending the night in their ’66 Volkswagen before catching the first air ferry across the Channel.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, the second of five children, she played the cello in a youth symphony under Art Barnes, who to her delight once paired the “Star Wars” theme with “La Forza del Destino” in the same concert. She cut her family’s hair from about the age of nine onward, and every Christmas made an elaborate gingerbread house from scratch, even going so far as to make stained-candy windows and wire a tiny light bulb inside to light them.

The pinnacle of her talent-show appearances was a skit wherein she sang the praises of Weight Watchers while her friend nodded and ate a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. Parties at her house are animated by songs around the player piano, often with her friends celebrated in original lyrics to popular melodies.

She turned pro after an office-job interview brought a moment of honest reflection. She rented an art studio in the Pearl; her second-ever portrait commission was the official gubernatorial portrait of Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts, which hangs in the Capitol in Salem. The pages of her sketchbooks hold drawings of people at bus stops, art museums, and cafes from Orkney to New Orleans. She earned a BFA in Visual Communication Design and has since studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Florence Academy of Art, as well as with various well-known artists. She lives in Portland and carries a sketchbook.
www.aimeeerickson.com 

After a long commercial career working as a black and white photographer, I discovered the beauty of the platinum print and began to teach myself this art over 14 years ago. I was drawn to the older alternative photo processes because of the hand made nature of the work and its inherent beauty. I find peace in my photographs, and mostly photograph things that present themselves voluntarily into my life. The images serve as visual reminders of moments and feelings I have experienced, signifying both the passage of time and the reverberation of consistency in all of our lives.
Ten years ago I began sharing my passion for platinum printing by teaching small workshops and found that I very much enjoyed the personal interaction that teaching offers. I strive to fill my students with excitement for this work, and to ensure their success in mastering the process.

Finding Beauty
Confessions of a photo romantic:

• I believe in the soothing nature of beautiful things

• I like making things with my hands and the inherent beauty of hand crafted platinum prints

• I am a purist

• I believe that artists have an important role in society

• For me, the act of photographing and the process of making prints is a deliberate, contemplative experience

• The process is as much a part of the resulting image as the subject itself

• I believe that beauty is in everything and every person

• I endeavor to reveal the beauty in ordinary things

• My work is important to me – it is an important part of me

• I get comfort out of knowing that other people view my work and make it part of their lives

A native of Boulder, Colorado Shawn Demarest lives in SE Portland, Oregon. She received a BFA from the University of Colorado with a focus on printmaking and painting. Her plein air painting skills were developed in Taos, NM, Colorado, and Lacoste, France. Demarest paints from observation and in the studio. Currently, this work explores Portland street views painted in oil.

In 2012 Demarest received a Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) Project Grant and two of her paintings were selected to join RACC's Portable Works Collection. Also in 2012 Demarest received a 4-week visual arts residency fellowship to Playa in Summer Lake, OR.

Reflecting her immediate surroundings by noticing and interpreting moments of beauty is the backbone of Demarest’s work. In Portland, this might mean headlights reflecting on a wet street, the deep blue evening sky reflected on the side of a car, or a string of cars receding into the distance along Burnside.

For more information view her website.

Eduardo Fernandez is a northwest artist working in the realist tradition and his primary modes of expression are drawing and oil painting.

Eduardo was commissioned by the Capitol Foundation to paint the official portrait of the Governor of Oregon Ted Kulongoski and by the Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs to paint the portraits of Medal of Honor Recipient Lt Cl Stan Adams and his wife Jean. The recently completed community center at The Veterans Home in The Dalles was named in their honor.

He is also a past recipient of an artist grant by The Celebration Foundation which supports Oregon artists basedon their creative vision. Eduardo has exhibited in several venues in the Northwest and has taught at the Portland Art Museum, Multnomah Arts Center as well as privately. While Eduardo’s focus is portraiture he is also enthusiastic about landscape and still-life painting.

Eduardo and his wife Alice live in NE Portland and are both looking forward to his residency at UC.

For more information about Mr. Fernandez please visit his website, please also view his blog: A Visual Diary of My Year as Artist-in-Residence at the University Club.

Thomas Jefferson Kitts is a native Oregonian, who, after earning his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1984, returned home to paint en plein air in the Pacific Northwest. Thomas is both inspired and exhilarated by the way light plays across the landscape and he has devoted 27 years to capturing it in oil. Thomas prefers to work directly from life for its honesty and immediacy, using alla prima methods and techniques of traditional oil painters such as Sargent, Sorolla, and Zorn. While Thomas lives in Portland, he is an active member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, the California Art Club, the Oil Painters of America, and the American Impressionist Society. Thomas travels nationally and maintains an active and distinguished exhibition history – which notably includes the Laguna Art Museum, Oil Painters of America’s National & Regional Shows, and the New York Art Expo. His work has been purchased by such entities as the Mariott Corporation, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and the Kaiser-Permanente Collection and his paintings may be found in many private Portland collections. From 1990 to 2000, Thomas taught painting, drawing, and illustration at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He currently offers individual and group workshops for the beginner to master-class painter.

For more information about Mr. Kitts please visit his website.

Lisa Caballero grew up in San Diego and took her first drawing class as a senior at Yale College. She continued her studies at the Art Student’s League of New York and the National Academy of Design School.

The paintings exhibited throughout the University Club show the variety of Ms. Caballero’s subject matter: from roses and traditional still lifes to people, seascapes, plastic bags and the decaying urban landscape. She paints her closely observed works from life, and says that realism involves “attending to a subject.” Her paintings demonstrate a contemporary sensibility, yet remain firmly rooted in the European painting tradition.

Ms. Caballero has exhibited in New York City and Portland, and was featured on the OPB program Oregon Art Beat. She is represented by The Sovereign Gallery and the Rental Sales Gallery of the Portland Art Museum.

She enjoys playing the violin and gardening.

For information about Ms. Caballero please visit her website or her blog.