Soap Lake artist has new show in Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE — Brent Blake’s paintings line the walls of the Soap

Lake art museum as the artist is preparing to move them to Moses

Lake.

MOSES LAKE - Brent Blake's paintings line the walls of the Soap Lake art museum as the artist is preparing to move them to Moses Lake.

They range from hollow-core doors with paint pushed across them and dribbled on them to a portrait of a blue-faced old man. In his apartment are a series of pieces made from gluing dried paint chips onto a canvass.

These are just some of the paintings the Soap Lake resident plans to display at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center from Friday through Sept. 22. The museum is planning to hold a Big Deal Art Party to open the exhibit starting at 6 p.m. on Saturday.

The show is a retrospective of the artist's work. Blake's interest in art started while he was growing up in Moses Lake.

"We came to Moses Lake because they built the sugar factory," he said. "My father had worked for United Sugar Company most of his life, so when they built that refinery, they asked him to come back and work for the factory."

During his time in the city, Blake was inspired by Moses Lake art teacher Tom Knutson. Blake described him as a unique man, who had a presence and dynamic that "made him 10 feet tall."

"In an art class in junior high or high school, it's going to be pretty straight forward. You got a series of things you are going to do or going to experiment with," he said. "We were going to build something out of clay, and people were making little ashtrays or little bowls and man, I started building this monster."

When it was time to move onto another project, Knutson jumped up onto the table and told Blake to keep going with the vase, he said. The project continued for most of the year until it was three or four feet high.

"He kept thinking, ‘How are we going to fire this? We don't have a kiln big enough to fire this? We're going to have to go out in the desert and build a kiln and fire it,'" Blake said. "Then it was sitting on a piece of plywood and we'd pick it up every day and set it on a table and I'd get up on a table and work on it."

They stored it in a coat room, and one day Knutson used the back door and the vase broke, Blake said.

"I'm sure he was sick to have to face me," he said. "Somehow we both got over that. He was so apologetic, so sad that all that effort had gone to nought."

Blake started at Central Washington University intending to be an art teacher, he said, adding he was inspired by Knutson. While he was studying at the university, Blake received a book called "Art Today" with various types of art displayed.

"Then it got to the end of the book (there was) architecture," he said. "I got to that page and it showed Philip Johnson's glass house in New Canaan, Conn., and my brain lit up. It was like an epiphany."

After reading the book, he decided to go into architecture, eventually becoming an architect in Seattle. He worked on the interiors of commercial buildings.

"At the same time, while I was doing architecture, I'm drawing my drawings of my buildings and drawing details. The whole sheet is filled with a series of details showing how to build this building, each one of these details is an assembly of wood and metal and steel and concrete and everything."

As he looked at the details, he noticed each one looked beautiful, so he went home and drew the detail on a canvas, and taped the lines and painted them. After finishing 10 paintings, he had a show at the Collectors Gallery in Bellevue. After this he received commissions from Weyerhaeuser for 16 paintings for their corporate headquarters in Federal Way, Safeco Insurance and other companies.

"The linear abstractions were meticulously done to where there were no errors, no bleeding under the tape, no brush strokes; they were done to be perfect paintings," he said. "In fact, this was in the 70s, there was a huge amount of art being done that was hard edged work, but my work was unique in that it was tied very specifically to real details and real elements of architecture."

People raised in the architecture profession become perfectionists, he said, adding it makes life complicated because nothing is perfect. The drive for perfection led to Blake tiring of his style of painting.

"Now, I'm selling my architectural pieces, I'm selling them for more money than I could make in a couple months at that time," he said. "So there was a huge incentive for me to continue to do those paintings because they were popular ... But I couldn't. I put my brushes down."

He pointed to a picture taken next to a painting he made for Swedish Hospital in Seattle, saying the expression on his face shows he's tired of painting.

"That expression shows to the observer that I'm up to here with the agony and the ecstasy of doing these paintings," he said. "Because I'm working all day, I'm painting all night, trying to sleep on the weekends, trying to catch up, trying to raise a family, deal with all kinds of issues, and I finally said, ‘Regardless of the money ... I'm done.'"

So with seven commissions still left to complete, Blake stopped painting. After about five years, Blake decided he missed art and chose to pursue more abstract art.

"I just wanted to be painting. I wanted to be an artist," he said. "In fact, I think you have to be an artist before you can be an architect."

Blake described abstract painting as painting the paint, saying he pushes the paint around and ending up with pretty colors, compositions, shapes, forms, textures, patterns, which don't represent anything. He said the transition to "pushing the paint around" was a huge relief, but there is still some attention to the execution.

"Other times there's what we call a wonderful occurrence or so-called happenstance," he said. "Something happens in the execution where you're really free in terms of pushing the paint around: you go, ‘Oh gosh, that's cool.' Now you didn't intend to have that happen, but it happens and you gain great satisfaction from this happenstance."

People looking at abstract art often see different images in the painting, Blake said, adding a common human element to observing art is searching for what the painting is showing.

"I'm listening to all of this and none of those comments were the intention or the execution of the abstract," he said. "That's what the observer is seeing which doesn't exist other than in their minds, so the abstract allows that to happen."

Blake moved to Soap Lake in 2000 after doing archeology in Grant County. He purchased the Soap Lake Art Museum building and renovated it.

"I tell everyone I love the movie I'm living in here," he said. "The thing is it's like ‘Twin Peaks.' It's like a David Lynch movie. That's not a bad thing ... The cast of characters couldn't have been done any better in Hollywood than it's been done here naturally."

After roughly 25 years working as an architect, Blake was ready for a change, he said, adding he was becoming active in Eastern Washington and enthralled with the sunshine.

"So I thought, I'll just poke around here, do some archeology, paint paintings and ride my Harley," he said. "Then I failed retirement and continued to work and do things ... Then I had the opportunity to have the Soap Lake Art Museum and do shows and support the arts on this side of the mountains and that became a very, very important thing to me."

Along with running the museum, Blake is involved with other ways of promoting art, including the supporting the Columbia Basin Allied Arts and other art groups.

"If you're in a big urban environment, the arts are prevalent everywhere because there are galleries everywhere, there are museums everywhere, no matter where you work there's art hanging on the wall," he said. "In rural areas, it's less prevalent."

There is an amazing amount of support, Blake said, pointing out people coming to the museum's art shows.

"They're just here to be supportive of what the effort is that I'm trying to make here," he said. "It's kind of like an eye opener. I wanted to bring art that they necessarily wouldn't see on a regular basis."

At the Saturday show, Blake will be selling pieces of his work for $99. The various paintings can range in value from $99 to $2,500. The tickets will be available at MAC before and during part of the show.

"You're going to get an original work of art, you don't know what it is, which one it is and it may be priced at $99 or it might be priced at $2,500," he said. "Now you may get that painting and think, ‘Now what am I going to do with that?'"

Someone can come up to a person and trade pieces with them, so everyone ends up with original artwork by Blake.

"It's pricing the art so it's affordable, and art, in many ways, should be affordable so that more people can have it," he said. "It's supporting the artist. It's supporting the MAC. It's supporting the art community in general by becoming a patron."