Golden Gallery gives senior artists a venue for expression

By Stover E Harger III

The Beaverton Valley Times, Aug 6, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jaime Valdez / The Beaverton Valley Times

SHOW TIME — Golden Gallery curator Darlene Schaper holds an Alice Van Leunen piece that will be featured at Beaverton Lodge.

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After decades of working within their respective artistic disciplines, Kelly Gill Holland and Alice Van Leunen had inspiration hit this year in an unexpected and completely electrifying way.

The long-time friends and life-long artists – Gill Holland a Portland poet and Van Leunen a visual artist living in Amity – saw a chance to combine their talents in a unique melding of color and words – creating visual poems that use words to hint at, but not explicitly say, the meanings behind the images.

An exhibit of this new collaboration, “Passages,” will premiere at 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Beaverton Lodge’s Golden Gallery – a space for senior artists to exhibit their work.

“We just said, ‘Hey, why don’t we actually weave these two disciplines together,’” Gill Holland said. “So we got down to brass tacks with it and we tossed ideas back and forth. It’s a very collaborative way to work.”

Neither Gill Holland, 75, or Van Leunen, 66, consider themselves “senior artists.” Seniors, yes, that title can’t be denied, but they believe their art stands on its own.

“I’m me, and I don’t see me being anything but me, no matter how many years get tacked on,” said Gill Holland.

“Here we are showing at a gallery that’s basically for seniors,” Van Leunen said. “We’ve just fallen into that category.”

But they are happy to contribute to the gallery that both agree gives older artists a chance to get their work shown in an often youth-oriented art scene.

“People are constantly wanting to get involved with the younger, trendier artists,” Van Leunen said. “I’m not saying anything bad about younger, trendier artists, but I do think there is a little bit of an age bias.”

The two artists met in the mid-1970s and have always flirted with the idea of collaborating. They have inspired each other in the past, but nothing to this extent.

Each piece in “Passages” is created uniquely. Sometimes it will be a poem by Gill Holland that will be the starting point, other times a certain visual idea by Van Leunen will kick things off.

Van Leunen’s mixed-media pieces – often using woven paper, metallic foil or stitching, along with paint – present meaning with color and shape. In “Passages,” Gill Holland’s words are melded with the canvas in varying materials.

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