There was a Crippled Man

Artwork copyright held by the artist

Artwork Information

Artist:

Jay Backstrand

Date:

1977

Media:

Triptych, Oil on Canvas

Size:

Location:

Cannell Library/e-Learning Lobby/Foyer

About the Artist:

Jay Backstrand studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he later taught art from 1975-1986. He also studied at the Slade School in London as a Fulbright fellow. He has exhibited his work since the 1960s, and in the 1970s was a co-founder of the Portland Center for Visual Arts. In 1984, he was honored with a 10-year retrospective at Marylhurst College, OR, and the Eighth Northwest Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2007. His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery, Washington, DC; the Oxford University Press Print Collection, England; the Portland Art Museum; the Seattle Art Museum; the Tacoma Art Museum; the Henry Gallery at University of Washington; and Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, Salem, OR. Awards include an NEA grant, an Oregon Arts Foundation grant, and a Smithsonian Institute purchase award. (From Russo Lee Gallery)

Artwork description:

"There was a Crippled Man was the first work done after the Fountain Gallery fire, and it represents a starting point for all the work in this show. It has to do with boundaries we set up. The kangaroos were really sentinels, a sort of protection, a kind of animal instinctual protection against things that are out there that are also kind of primitive. It was also about the transparency of all that, about that thin space between something being rational and being irrational, like membranes, like layers between dreams, layers between ideas. When I was working on There was a Crippled Man, I was looking at and becoming aware again of the fact that everything is a product of the mind. Asteroids and all that, for example, are really in a sense fictitious. We have construed their existence. We have observed phenomena and named them, but it is all based on what happens in the human mind. In my own way, I was dealing with that idea of the subjective construction of the whole world, trying to paint layers of information about phenomena occurring simultaneously, and trying to put them in an order that's readable and also to deal with the idea of movement from the subconscious to the conscious and to dream states, all that kind of stuff."

From "An Interview with Jay Backstrand" October 9, 1983, by Anne Griffin Johnson

Acquisition Information:

Donated by the Gates Estate in 2013. Allen taught music at Clark College and Yoko played the koto professionally. They moved from Vancouver in the early 80s. Before Yoko died at age 44 in 1988 and Allen in 1990 at the age of 47, the couple decided to loan their collection to Clark College. They were confident that the college would appreciate the art and it would be safe and loved.

Their daughter Joemy formally donated a large portion of the loaned artworks to Clark College in 2013.

“Clark was the first place my father thought of. He knew the college would display the art and take care of it. It was a natural fit to have the art at Clark College,” said Joemy.

Clark College - Home of the Penguin Nation