Retrospective of late artist Dick Elliott's work begins Sunday

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Dick Elliott didn't want to do pencil drawings anymore.

It was the early 1980s, and he was a brilliant draftsman in Ellensburg, creating detailed 4-by-8-foot Kittitas Valley landscapes in graphite. They were, as Washington State University Museum of Art director Chris Bruce said, "as good as any I've ever seen."

But, despite his skill, the medium didn't satisfy Elliott. Then came the epiphany -- everyone who tells Elliott's story uses the word.

Reflectors!

"He talked about this epiphany as feeling the breath and pulse of the earth as he was drawing and realizing he couldn't match that in graphite," Elliott's widow, Jane Orleman said. "He was looking for another way to catch this energy, the fundamental patterns of energy."

Elliott would use bicycle-style reflectors to create large-scale patterns that would simultaneously evoke the ancient and the futuristic. The art would be grounded in what he called "fundamental expressions of energy" even as it moved and changed based on light and perspective.

Reflector art consumed the last 25 years of his life and, by the time he died last November at age 63, it had become his trademark. You can see Elliott's reflectors atop the Yakima Valley SunDome, wrapping water towers outside of Pateros, Wash., and greeting visitors at Sea-Tac Airport.

You can see them adorning the St. Louis light rail system, or at a train station in Charlotte, N.C., even in Times Square.

And you can see them at the Yakima Valley Museum, which will host "Into the Infinite: The Art of Richard C. Elliott," starting Sunday. The show will be notable for including art work from those pre-epiphany years.

Andy Granitto, the museum's curator, began planning the show before Elliott died as just a display of the artist's colorful Pendleton vest collection. But when he saw all the art Orleman had stored in Ellensburg, he kept asking for more and the exhibit grew.

"Every time Andy would come up here, I'd pull something out and say, 'I know you don't want this, but isn't it cool?'" Orleman said this week, standing in an Ellensburg storage building stacked with Elliott's work. "And he'd say, 'I want it.'"

It's the first posthumous retrospective exhibit of Elliott's work and will run through Dec. 23; another is being planned for next year in Seattle.

Orleman met Elliott in spring 1970 when they were students at Central Washington University. She was unimpressed at first -- "he was a dud" -- but shortly after they met he asked her to go out and draw.

"I said, 'Why would I want to go out and draw. I draw here in my kitchen,'" she recalled. "So we stayed there and drew together in my kitchen."

Elliott was there two weeks before deciding he ought to head home, to a house he shared with other students. Orleman convinced him to stay with her. They were married the next year.

Shortly thereafter, they formed Spot Janitorial, which allowed both of them to work part time while devoting the rest of their hours to art. Orleman still owns and operates the business.

Over the next 38 years they created prodigious amounts of art, the most visible piece of which is their own home, "Dick and Jane's Spot." A whimsical collection of reflectors, glass pieces and characters hewn from wood, metal and all sorts of other materials cover the house, putting the home and its occupants at the vanguard of local art.

The house, with its unabashed eccentricity, is a sign to Ellensburg's creative set that there is room for expression in the small, rural community.

"It's like a landmark," said Ellensburg artist Joanna Thomas. "Like we (artists) look at that and go, 'This is the place. If this can be here, so can I.'"

That's the sort of thing Elliott loved, the idea that something he created could reach people, could give them a glimpse of beauty or community. That's one reason -- the need to pay bills was another -- that he did so many commissioned public art pieces.

The two water towers in Pateros in Okanogan County, for instance, give the sagebrush hills outside that town a flash of color they wouldn't otherwise have. Commissioned in 1992 by the Pateros Chamber of Commerce, the tower artwork has become part of the town's character.

"The town absolutely loves them," Pateros Mayor Gail Howe said. "You see barren hills in both directions on Highway 97, and having those colors is great."

When Elliott was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2007, the urge to create only intensified. In the last year of his life, he completed dozens of works. When the physical demands of building work with reflectors became too much, he moved to the computer and created graphic prints.

"When he knew he was dying, he threw himself even more intensely into his work," Thomas said.

That work notwithstanding, Elliott is not as well-known in serious art circles as he should be based on the quality of his work, said Bruce, WSU's Museum of Art director.

"He's just one of the most innovative and interesting artists in the region," he said.

But, as Yakima's museum curator points out, Elliott was never concerned with the big gallery shows or the commercial aspects of art. He never moved to New York or even Seattle, where his work could have been embraced by the culturati. Doing so wouldn't have worked with Elliott's driving ethos to create and to get those creations out into the world, not on some collector's wall.

"A lot of his work that are probably the best expression of his talent were installations or public art pieces," Granitto said. "They're not commodities. They can't be sold in a gallery."

Still, to Granitto's mind, when Elliott was alive, he was the "most significant living artist in Central Washington, because what he was doing was so unique."

History will tell whether Elliott's art has lasting significance from a critical perspective, he said. But that wasn't that important to the artist, whose main goal according to an essay he wrote in 1999 was to give people something "visually sensuous and emotionally joyous."

That message comes through in the Yakima Valley Museum show, Granitto said.

"The most powerful art that communicates the most effectively does so because it's coming out of the heart and soul of the artist," he said. "Their nature comes out in the art."

That was true of Elliott, Thomas said.

"On the day he died, he was talking to me and he turned to Jane and he said, 'Jane, sometimes I don't know if I make the art or I am the art.'"

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

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