The Juice, the Jump and Curtis Otto

(Jan. 5, 2012) If you’ve ever cruised down E Street in Eureka, done a double-take at the house next to the Labor Temple at Ninth Street and wondered, “Are those really oil paintings crammed at the front door, leaning on the hedges and tumbling out onto the lawn?” … you would be correct. And if you took the time to stop, you might be lucky enough to meet the prolific artist who lives there, Curtis Otto.

A retrospective of Otto’s work is on display at the Morris Graves Museum through Feb. 12.

Six Nudes on a Gunny Sack PAINTING BY CURTIS OTTO; PHOTO BY BOB DORAN

GALLERY >

I caught up with Otto at his studio, a testament to his free spirit and more than six decades of passion for painting. Born in 1923 and raised in Eureka, he went to the University of New Mexico to study pharmacy, a family business. In college he took art electives, he said, “and that was the beginning of my lifelong interest in drawing from the live model, especially the female form. But it took me a while to find my medium. I didn’t get much oomph from drawing or water-based mediums. But oil paint was juicy and it gave me the verve, what I like to call ‘the juice’ to be expressive.”

Early on, Otto was inspired by the experiments of French post-impressionist artists Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, and later, during a short stint at the Art Students League in New York, by the work of abstract expressionist Clifford Still and neo-dadaist Jasper Johns. “The abstract expressionists excited me, but I didn’t want to go all the way into abstraction. I still wanted to solve the problem of painting the figure. You can’t paint just a figure or a face or any object; you have to make whatever you paint work as apainting!”

True to his premise, Otto’s paintings are a synthesis of expressive realism and strong, intentional elements of geometry, pure colors and forms that function as explicit, graphic designs.

The works in his retrospective are prime examples of each era of Otto’s career. They clearly show his development of this idea of fused styles and an insistence that “a painting must speak!” That happens, he said, “when there is a certain amount of turbulence in a painting. I call it adversity. You have to create harmony, but not by blending everything — better to make some parts realistic and others more abstract. Contrast is what gives a painting the jump!”

Otto has been a working artist in Eureka for more than 60 years, and has seen tastes evolve and galleries come and go. “The Hobart Gallery in Ferndale was the only gallery that would always show my work. I got into trouble showing nudes anywhere else, especially my paintings of derrieres in the 1980s. My Gunny Sack series of female body parts was completely ignored for 10 years.

“The same thing happened with my Government & Money series. I showed that series for five years with no sales and no reaction except by someone at an exhibit in Sacramento asking that they be removed!”

1 2 NEXT PAGE >SHARE