Desolation, transformation: James Lavadour's landscapes of the mind

James Lavadour didn't choose to be an artist: Art chose him.

"It's been seamless," Lavadour told me on a recent visit to Seattle, sipping tea the morning after his show of new paintings opened at Grover/Thurston Gallery. "I developed my whole aesthetic very young, as a child actually. ... When I discovered paint — that was it."

Lavadour has vivid memories of his grandmother's house on the Umatilla reservation in Eastern Oregon, with its old wallpaper and leaking roof. As a kid in the 1950s, he would lie in bed and look at the ceiling, all peeling and stained.

"It was like the Sistine Chapel," he said. "I could see spaces and other worlds, vistas and other places that were incredible. That stayed with me all my life."

Lavadour, 54, still lives on the Umatilla reservation and has become one of the Northwest's most admired midcareer painters. He has been exhibiting his work in Seattle since the 1970s, when he joined other emerging Native American artists at the Sacred Circle gallery, then located downtown. His unique, landscape-based abstractions have long been distinguished by fluid, transparent oil paint and flamelike color, a sense of desolation and transformation.

For Lavadour, there has always been an instinctive association between stains on the ceiling, paint flowing on canvas, and the natural world outside, or "the mountains" as his family called the surrounding landscape. "We always called it the mountains; we never called it nature," he said. "What was happening on paper and out there was the same thing. It lit my imagination."

On the reservation, many people made art, even though it wasn't categorized as such. "They didn't call it art, but it was very specific stuff — cornhusk bags, beadwork, traditional art that was handed down for generations," Lavadour said. "There was a sort of reverence about things people made. There was a very strong aesthetic sense."

But Lavadour, of mixed heritage, didn't grow up in a traditional family. His parents both worked at the state penitentiary across the border in Walla Walla. Lavadour, a poor student and troubled teen, worked any kind of manual labor: cannery worker, delivery boy, carpenter, janitor, firefighter. Without formal training, he turned to books to discover the world of art and ideas. He became a nimble thinker who's exceptionally articulate about his creative processes.

"I was voracious in the library. I looked up every art book I could find," he said. And he took something from the most diverse artists: Robert Rauschenberg and Charlie Russell; Pierre Bonnard and Richard Diebenkorn; Franz Kline and J.M.W. Turner. Through Turner he discovered Chinese and Asian art, which led to a revelation: "The kinetic experience is the essence of making art."

In the flow

"When I make paintings, sometimes I feel like I'm right at the edge of perception, of what can be seen," Lavadour said. "There are comets and neutrinos whizzing by. I feel like I'm in motion when I'm there."

Movement, to him, stems from the experience of walking the land. "I'm a tribal member and grew up on the Umatilla reservation, and I love it there. One of the aspects of tribal life is that the land and I are one."

That sense of unity with nature put him at odds with the European notion of meaning in art, with its codified iconography. He eventually rejected it.

"In some sense it was the antithesis of my own interior," he said. "My painting went from trying to mean something to being a process of revealing an aspect of reality that's not visible in the paradigm in which we exist." In other words, he says: "It doesn't mean anything. It is something."

In recent years, Lavadour's paintings have blossomed with newfound color that builds layer upon layer: A sign, he says, of finding greater happiness in his life. And he has added more structure, the suggestion of human architecture, to his compositions.

"They are places of rest in the landscape," he said. "Like you are on a journey. You are walking and this is a place where many, many, many other souls have rested. It's there to make it easier to inhabit. You inhabit the painting with your life."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com