art beat / By Linda Mitchell

One Big Show

(Sept. 13, 2007)  It was a powerful, wildly successful show, with unprecedented sales and community support, yet Jim McVicker described his recent exhibit at the Cody-Pettit Gallery as a roller coaster of emotion. “The response to the show was completely amazing, but the whole week was a blur,” he said. “Nothing felt real because Terry wasn’t there.”

Jim gives his wife and painting partner, Terry Oats, credit for the inspiration behind the show, a retrospective “studio sale” featuring work he created from 1980 through 1999. “We were cleaning out our basement and I started pulling out painting after painting,” said Jim. “I came up with the idea of having a studio sale, but when we saw how much good work was in storage, we knew it would be impossible to have it at our house. It was Terry who suggested the Cody-Pettit.”

‘Korbel Bridge’ by Jim McVicker

GALLERY >

Realizing the exhibit could be a major event, both Terry and Jim planned to help hang the paintings and remain in the gallery throughout the four-day event, but on the Monday before the show disaster struck: Terry fell off their roof while trimming a rhododendron. “It was horrifying,” Jim recalled. “I heard her scream and my heart just stopped.”

The day after the accident, I visited Terry in the hospital and found her in high spirits, looking as radiant as ever. She apologized for not being able to help hang Jim’s paintings, and said that although the X-rays had revealed a broken pelvis, she was convinced she would make it to Arts Alive! Saturday night. “Forget about the show,” I instructed. “Just concentrate on healing.”

On Wednesday morning, Jim delivered his paintings — 89 of them — to the gallery, where there was already a crowd of potential collectors awaiting his arrival. I helped Jim and my husband Bill Cody (who co-owns the gallery with Bruce Pettit) unload the van, while Jim updated us on Terry’s condition. Her caregivers were coping with “pain issues,” he explained. They suspected her injuries might be more extensive than the X-rays had initially revealed. A CAT Scan was being scheduled, as well as an MRI. The two sleepless nights Jim had spent since the accident were etched in his face. I suggested he return to the hospital, but he said Terry had insisted he remain at the gallery.

It would turn out to be a very long day, and the beginning of an even longer week. An immensely popular painter who hasn’t had a public studio sale since 1983, Jim brought people to the gallery in droves. Four paintings sold before we had finished unloading the van. More people arrived and more paintings sold.

In between conversations and sales, we hung the paintings, putting images of Yosemite from the ‘80s and ‘90s together, then grouping the artist portraits that Jim had created for a 1992 show at the Humboldt Cultural Center. We hung street scenes from the early ‘80s on one wall and ones Jim did when he was painting with George Van Hook back when they were sharing that “very funky” studio in Arcata on another. “There was no hot water, no shower, just a toilet. Rats running around, the whole thing,” Jim recalled. He remembers being happy, though. “We were outside all the time anyway, painting on the streets.”

Jim’s paintings revealed a variety of changes in the region since he began painting here, 35 years ago. The steps around the statue of McKinley, featured in “Arcata Plaza,” have given way to flowerbeds, and an apartment building now blocks the view of Curtis Otto’s house in “Eureka Street.” Vegetation currently obscures the view of “Korbel Bridge,” and “The Red Pepper,” the Arcata restaurant Jim captured so luminously in 1980, disappeared decades ago. Two of the artists featured in Jim’s portrait series have since died.

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