Viz City interviewed Keith Achepohl on Sat. Jan. 23, 2018 for a broadcast date of Wed. Feb. 21, 2018
You’re listening to Viz City, KLCC’s Arts Review program. Today we’re talking to Keith Achepohl, who has a terrific show at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Walking into the exhibit is like walking into a forest. According to Achepohl, "It relates to a certain extent to my own experience in moving out here ten years ago. The Northwest was here, but I had never been here...so I wasn’t prepared as I should have been to be able to finally be totally immersed in what the Northwest landscape was."
Keith spent three weeks at the Morris Graves Foundation Artist Residency, “The Lake,” in Loleta, California. He says that that period of uninterrupted work profoundly affected him:
"The magic of it, in looking at his work, living in his studio, absorbing what I thought was Graves, was that no matter how much you look at it, you really have to keep coming back..."
So Keith kept coming back to the same scenes and trees that you see painted in such detail in the show:
"You can look a tree but unless you walk around it and start realizing that every couple of inches of it as you move around presents you with a different landscape. I thought that was pretty damn magic!"
Because Keith was inspired by Morris Graves, he was asked to curate a companion exhibit of drawings by Graves, which you can view in the Morris Graves Gallery. Called “Morris Graves: Layers of Time,” Keith’s selection focuses on Graves’s symbolic use of vessel imagery over the course of his life.
Keith Achepohl’s exhibit shows through April 29, but the Morris Graves companion show closes March 18, so go early to catch both.
Viz City is co-produced by Terry Way and Sandy Brown Jensen.
