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In the Garden, an intricate watercolor and gouache painting brimming with garden life by Justin L’Amie, includes yellow dandelionlike flowers sprouting through empty space near a lingering house cat and a ladybug finding solace in a pot of herbs. In other paintings, moths flutter, arcing back and forth in the evening light as they look for floral nectar and sap in a cherry tree, as in Moth Resting. Climbing along a neighbor’s fence, a cobalt dahlia and peachy windflowers with extensive stems provide a base camp to an assembly of vermillion hatchlings in Spiderling. A serpent in The Snake of Warm Welcome slithers through the garden grounds, picking up fungi, lichen and insects along the way.
Dismal Nitch Polyphemus Moth is L’Amie’s eighth solo exhibition at PDX Contemporary Art, which opens Sept. 10 and runs through Oct. 4. He began showing with the gallery in 2009 and shortly afterward was added to its impressive roster of represented artists, including Marie Watt, Jeffrey Mitchell, Storm Tharp and James Lavadour.
When L’Amie was a student at Cornish College of the Arts, two of his closest friends brought him a dead, fully intact polyphemus moth they found at the Dismal Nitch rest stop, along the Washington side of the Columbia River.This preserved moth became a source of inspiration for him; he painted it continuously, hence the show’s title.
“I was very focused on abstraction, layering, and materials,” L’Amie said in a show statement. “I worked in that direction for a number of years, getting immersed in assemblage and sculptural ideations.”
The repetition had a transformative impact on L’Amie’s artistic approach, a shift from abstraction to a more naturalistic sensibility, and moths became a recurring motif in his luminescent watercolors. Insects, flowers, animals and various elements from the living world are touchstones in his paintings, and the colors used in Dismal Nitch Polyphemus Moth are anything but bland.
Pyramids have an implied hierarchy, but there is no ranking evident in Grouping. Inspired creatures, with shadows lingering, are neatly positioned in a trine formation. A dancing walking stick, a thorny hellraiser centipede with a sinister leer, and a sprite with claw hands and fiery hair commune. L’Amie’s creatures are captivating in part because they aren’t directly sourced like entomology. He takes in the world around him, and it is invariably altered through his creative lens, blurring reality with reverie.
In Moon Moth, a polyphemus moth with concentric eye spots and linear lavender markings on its wings lies on a branch with gemstone-hued wild flowers. L’Amie’s paintings touch on moths’ cultural associations—transformation, resilience and the ephemeral among them. Fluorescent pink coneflowers, ruffled stargazerlike lilies, and blushing paper-light poppy blooms are fantastically arranged in a vase in Flower Arrangement 61. A spider hangs carefree from a stem, five moths rest their weary wings. A soft shadow appears, exposing two peering eyes and ears. A troll swings by on a star-shaped flower, and a banana-shaped caterpillar gets ready to sink its teeth into the nearest petal. Throughout the arrangement, worms, beetles and flies (including one with coiffed jet-black hair) either dance, loiter or rest. Allowing time enough for long gazes at these tiny, bountiful details could be enough for viewers to immerse themselves in micro-kingdoms with imaginative stories.
L’Amie cites the Northwest Mystics, a group of Pacific Northwest artists in the 1930s and ’40s that referenced the natural elements of their surroundings and were inspired by traditional Japanese aesthetics, creating a distinctive regional style. Mark Tobey and Morris Graves are some of L’Amie’s formative influences. An underlying surrealist sensibility and unique folkloric narrative are explored through his meticulously detailed paintings.
Through Dismal Nitch Polyphemus Moth, L’Amie has continued to cultivate a whimsical visual language that is both heartwarming and mischievous. Dichotomy echoes in hiswork—the allure of light, the potential for destruction, and the balance of these forces in existence, and how they relate to the human condition. L’Amie’s paintings allow viewers an opportunity to consider the environment around them and how the world’s opposing forces still work together.
SEE IT: Dismal Nitch Polyphemus Moth by Justin L’Amie at PDX Contemporary Art, 1881 NW Vaughn St., 503-222-0063, pdxcontemporaryart.com. 10 am–6 pm Tuesday–Saturday, Sept. 10–Oct. 4.
