First Friday Opening Reception and Golden Rule Gallery Grand Opening: August 6, 2010, 6-11 pm.
Golden Rule Gallery, 811 E. Burnside, Suite 122, Portland, OR 97214.
Show runs August 3rd through August 29th

Artist Statement

Howard Gillam has an alternate world: who wouldn’t want one? In his work, time and space seem to collapse into a flattened eternal present; alchemical signs abut Egyptian glyphs and Christian stags, in the bright, joyful coloration—and blank, often almost 2-D surface obsessiveness—of childhood drawings. Death, in a place like this, can be a subject only of sublime innocence.

Gillam uses old symbols, old metaphors, and old forms as if naïvely—divorced from their moorings in any specific mythology—and sets them down naked, surreal, and newly estranged: imbued with subliminal meaning. For Gillam, symbols are forces with a form, infinitely reactive. So while the simplicity of his marker-and-pen drawings might suggest folk art, these drawings represent a personal mythology belonging to the artist alone, inscribed in an ancient, almost forgotten visual language: eternally pouring water from a mirrored lion’s single mouth, hummingbirds horning in on Macedonian wasps, vital grass sprouting pell mell from any surface.

Almost as a rehabilitation of life itself, Gillam’s drawings take the dark, subterranean currents of the past and reconstruct them with a seriousness that remains nonetheless light in its step. An often disappointing real world is transfused with a brightness, even as the old dread is always present. (Much in a similar vein, he carries a tarot deck up his sleeve—minus the cards he doesn’t want for a future.) His Woodland Trinity takes an old German print (“Buch der Hieligen Treifaltigkeit, 15th Century”) and remakes it with Raccoon, Cat, and Fox as the three avatars of God. A goreless scene of a monster being hacked to bits is made heroic not only for the sword-wielding fighter but for the monster, whose severed head appears almost as sunlight itself; behind it, the sea looks less drawn than meticulously crafted, its waves so tactile they might as well be papier-mâché.

Gillam is prodigious not only in his creation of meticulous iterative detail but also in his sheer output: he has produced more than 40 pieces in the last year alone. In his most recent work, the focus has shifted to an almost classical composition in archaic form, a merging of pre-Renaissance and pre-Raphaelite in marker pen and ink. These drawings are not merely a vision of virtue but an embodiment of it—a place rebuilt as a system of virtue—a rich inner world immune to the ravages of time.

Gillam lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

All 40+ drawings by Howard Gillam are available for sale through Golden Rule, TUES-SAT, 12-6 p.m., or by appointment.
Please contact Wynde Dyer at (503) 863-1545 for additional information and pricing.