Artist inspired art

Ben Rosenberg’s Thank You For Having Me is a love letter to the wandering collections of guest lecturers who helped him form what is now a formidable artistic identity. Hung close together, the paintings line each wall of the gallery in a single ribbon, accompanied by the sandwich board where each piece once hung outside and a slide show of photographs commemorating the series of lectures that occurred at PSU over the past year and inspired the pieces.

The series of 52 paintings is one to which Rosenberg has committed a year of his life. He began work on it after graduating from Portland State’s MFA program and began adjunct teaching at several area colleges. In his artist’s statement, he said that he thrives on having assignments and was inspired by the paintings of Scottish artist Peter Doig, which were later shown in the 2006 Whitney Biennial in New York, where Rosenberg saw them on a trip with fellow students.

While still an MFA student, Rosenberg recalled in a recent interview, he looked forward to the weekly lectures, which are open to the public but also designed to help MFA students, who are responsible for picking up visiting artists from the airport and who get together after the lecture for dinner with the artist. The visiting lecturers also do studio visits in the MFA student studios, offering their perspective on the student work as well as an invaluable glimpse into how working artists get by.

Rosenberg remembers looking forward to the weekly lecture series, which was started by PSU professor Harrell Fletcher. As a student, he built a sandwich board to put outside the lecture venue and would see the flyers hanging there each week, sometimes dripping with rain. The idea to do the Thank You For Having Me series was developed by Rosenberg and Fletcher after the former’s graduation as a way to keep working even with a hectic teaching schedule, and also as a way to continue to challenge Rosenberg and keep him working outside of his comfort zone.

“I wanted to break away from how I knew how to paint,” said Rosenberg, commenting that the time limitations, which forced him to complete two paintings a week, and the fact that he often knew little or nothing about each artist before hand, made the project difficult enough to keep it fresh and to force his own creativity.

“A lot of it had to do with things I had around the studio,” he said, adding, “I ran out of canvases so I started cutting up wood.”

Rosenberg committed many of the paintings to wooden panels and used innovative materials, such as ink on wood in a painting for Storm Tharp’s lecture and fabric in one for Marie Watt, who uses textiles in her own work.

The pieces all have the same dimensions, but many have three-dimensional components, such as the clown face rising out a piece for Young-hae Chang’s group Heavy Industries, which primarily produces digital art. Many of the works are based on Rosenberg’s frantic research the week before the paintings had to be ready, and come out of the traces each artist has left online: Web sites, press blurbs and images all added to the impressions of the artists Rosenberg had to work with before meeting them in person.

The unfamiliar territory Rosenberg was dealing with during the course of the yearlong project became even more daunting in the spring term when he was faced with a teaching assignment that prevented him from attending the lectures in person. Instead of giving up the project, Rosenberg made paper masks of his photograph and asked friends in the art department to stand in for him by wearing the mask to the Monday lecture and taking his customary photograph with the artist after the talk was over.

The gallery contains several of these masks, along with a large folding table with a black and white notebook for comments, postcards, an artist’s statement and a long list of “thank yous,” making it look very much like a working gallery for a project that is over but will never be finished, the way a short period of close friendship can lead to years of getting-to-know-you-again chatter.

And the paintings do chatter, telling as much of Rosenberg’s process and changing moods throughout the year as they do of the weather that week, the buzz before the artist’s lecture and the perceptions that change as a stranger becomes an acquaintance.

Thank You For Having Me MK Gallery, located on the second floor of the Art Building at Fifth and Jackson Runs until Oct. 30, with a reception for the artist from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23