From my 8/13 posting “Botanical linocuts”, about some artworks
that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away [in the Great Dispossession].
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects.
And today I bring you McReynolds and Munson, with two very different approaches to penguins from the Pacific coast (with thanks to Robert Emery Smith, for supplying photographs of works not available on-line).
The SoCal surrealist. From Wikipedia (with biographical details added from other sources), in an entry that looks like a puffery from his publisher:
Cliff McReynolds [born in 1933] is an American visionary painter from California [currently living in La Jolla, a seaside neighborhood in San Diego]. Active since the 1950s and popularly known from the 1970s on, his work has been seen in one man shows and group exhibits in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Milwaukee, San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Oslo, Norway, New Delhi, India, and Tokyo, Japan. Since 1976, Pomegranate Publications has produced and distributed his work worldwide on posters, prints, cards, calendars, books and as picture puzzles.
You can judge his weirdness from this 1972 work of his (which, as far as I can tell, has no penguins in it):
(#1) “Landscape With Hand Grenade” (photo from his website); you could spend quite a bit of time trying to interpret what’s in the work
But on to the two penguin fantasies I had reproductions of, both from 1994.
(#2) “Reality is Normal / Penguins”; I can fly, I can fly (photo from his website)
(#3) “Act Normal / The Meeting”; let us gather in the snow (photo by Robert Emery Smith)
As a bonus, one more (also from 1994) that was new to me:
(#4) “Penguins With Tigers”; and ferns, lots of ferns (photo from his website)
The Portland flower-lover. With a story about how I came to have this huge (39 x 23 in.) reproduction. The work:
(#5) “A Wobble of Penguins” by PNW artist Ann Munson (photo by Robert Emery Smith)
On her “Ann Munson: Artist by Nature” website, the bio page is a history of her work; the first entry is
1973 BS in Art Education from University of Oregon
Then in 1988 she moved to a farm in West Linn OR (just outside of Portland); in 2006 she created The Artist’s Greenhouse on the farm. She worked in stained glass, colored pencil, steel, paint, and paper; and was especially devoted to the Oregon landscape, garden art, and to creatures, both domestic and exotic. She died in February 2025.
(#6) A characteristic photo of AM at The Artist’s Greenhouse (photo from the Greenhouse website)
How I came to have #5. I’ll start my story with this little tree sketch, one square in the “The images quilt” I posted about on 12/15/19:
(#7) Gaea Leinhardt’s tree
From that posting:
The tree sketch in the quilt is from 1991, the work of Gaea Leinhardt, who was a 1990-91 Fellow [at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences]
… That year, as in others, Fellows were given to walking on the trails along the ridge of the foothills. This tree was Gaea’s special favorite, so she turned it into a t-shirt.
[My guy] Jacques and I regularly walked on the trails after lunch, with Gaea and with Jeanne Altmann, and often with others as well.
(Gaea is now senior scientist and professor emerita in the Learning Research & Development Center at the Univ. of Pittsburgh; and Jeanne is now professor emerita and Eugene Higgins Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton Univ. [both have remarkable academic careers — Gaea on museums and other institutions of public education, Jeanne on the social lives of baboons])
And then: the Ann Munson print was a gift from Jeanne and Gaea to Jacques and me, to hang above our bed, in a land thick with (among other things) penguins. Aside from its being a loving and playful depiction on its own, it comes enveloped in memories of friendship, companionship, and excellent conversations.
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