News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Kathy Deggendorfer is promoting art and agriculture.
A little piece of Sisters will hang from the White House Christmas tree next holiday season.
Kathy Deggendorfer will create the Oregon State ornament that will adorn the tree. Her creation will join those of artists from all 50 states and will be on display to White House visitors during the 2008 Christmas season.
Senator Gordon Smith announced the selection last week.
"Kathy is well known for her bright and colorful paintings that embody Oregon's remarkable beauty," Smith said. "I look forward to seeing her unique contribution on the White House tree this Christmas."
According to Deggendorfer, the selection came about in a roundabout way. The artist regularly donates a painting to fund-raisers for CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), a program that helps children whose parents are tangled in the legal system.
"One painting got purchased by one of the staff members from Gordon Smith's office," Deggendorfer said.
Smith liked the colorful, folk-art style of the painting and when First Lady Laura Bush tapped Smith to select one Oregon artist to create the 2008 state ornament, the Senator turned to Deggendorfer.
Deggendorfer says she's well-prepared to paint an ornament. Over the years she painted hundreds of wine glasses for the My Own Two Hands art party, a fund-raiser for the Sisters Folk Festival's Americana Project.
Deggendorfer will receive the ornament soon; the completed piece of work is due in October.
The theme is something of a state secret; the artists aren't supposed to talk about it until Laura Bush reveals the theme at the beginning of December.
However, regardless of the overarching theme, Deggendorfer has an idea of how she'll approach the work.
"I think I'll probably do some sort of Oregon ag theme," she said.
Art and agriculture have intersected in Deggendorfer's work from the beginning, but they are now intertwined in a project that is near and dear to the artist's heart: The Oregon Farms Project.
Over the past year, Deggendorfer has been visiting Oregon farms to explore their specialty products - and to paint. She led an expedition of painters to several wineries in the Willamette Valley in 2006, then struck out on her own to explore other operations that are finding a sustainable niche in agriculture.
It's important to her to depict the ways in which Oregon "has it right." Her initial impetus for the project came when she was one of 50 artists invited to Illinois to participate in an "Art in Agriculture" project.
She discovered a rich, beautiful farming landscape - with empty farmhouses. Farmers had left the land, leasing or selling to corporate farms, hammered by the stern economics of agriculture.
"I was appalled," she said. "There was a real beauty to the land, but it was sad, sad, sad.
"It's a new reality there," Deggendorfer explains. "Family farms have given way to corporate farming of soy and corn. Cow pastures are empty but confinement lots are full of cows and pigs. Farm families stop at Wal-Mart on the way home from other jobs and pick up bagged lettuce and canned fruit cocktail for dinner. The son of the family I stayed with got a good job at the landfill using his farm tractor skills to move piles of refuse. His mom went back to school to become a nurse at the local hospital specializing in gastric bypass surgeries."
Recognizing that Oregon still has a vibrant family farming tradition, with wholesome and flavorful products, Deggendorfer decided to depict that with her paintbrush to promote both the arts and sustainable agriculture.
She visited The Hatfield Ranch in Millican, where Doc and Connie Hatfield raise hormone-free cattle using spring runoff water and solar power and creating Country Natural Beef. The operation is more humane than feedlot beef production and creates a fine product.
"That was spectacular," she said. "It was stunning. If you're going to eat meat, that's what you should eat."
She's spent time at Stahlbush Island Farms in Corvallis, to see their organic produce operation, checked out the specialty cherries of the Lone Pine Ranch in Stayton and painted the strawberries of Boring's Liepold Farms.
Ultimately, she hopes to create a program where visiting artists will depict Oregon farms and ranches in a manner that will showcase both the farm and the artist - perhaps with a coffee table book - and create ancillary materials that can be used to promote Oregon agricultural products across the nation and overseas.
"That's where I'd love to see it go," she said.
In the meantime, Deggendorfer is poised to put in a plug for Oregon agriculture on another Oregon product - a giant Christmas tree. She feels honored to have the opportunity.
"I was excited about it," she said. "I mean, look at Sisters alone... there must be a zillion artists. It's nice that they picked me out."
For more information, visit http://www.kathydeggendorfer.com.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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