Assignment #1

When Doug Jeck got his tenure at the University of Washington a friend of his jokingly gave him the book Modeling for Amateurs. In it was the question “Don’t you wish you could just start over again and again?” The starting point for Jeck is a house, tree, yard, and sun—a simple scene that is, for most of us, the first art assignment we received in school. For the current show at CoCA in Ballard, called house, tree, yard, sun, etc., Jeck curated a select group of friends, colleagues, students, and former students, giving them the “most fundamental and thus most difficult assignment ever,” he said, depicting in any medium a house, tree, yard, and sun on standard 8 ½-by-11-inch paper.

Each piece, pinned to the wall, is hung as though it is part of an elementary school’s open house. There is no real hierarchy among the pieces and you almost take on the role of an unbiased teacher, admiring each one for its unique approach to the assignment. But there are some worth mentioning.

Elizabeth Copland made a stunning three-dimensional cityscape out of masking tape, Jamie Walker took a direct approach but showered his house with a green only-in-Seattle rain. Sean Howe photographed his elementary school art students holding their rendition of the assignment. Adrian Van Dooren repeatedly wrote the words “house, tree, sun, yard” on lined paper (as if he had to rewrite them as penance for a spelling mistake), until they formed the shape of a house, tree, etc.

Then there is Claire Cowie’s watercolor on paper. Cowie’s piece makes you forget the assignment and abandon the hunting game for each of the required elements. It gets an A+ because it reminds me of a turning point in art school when the student realizes that an assignment is meant as a guiding tool, not a restriction, and that the successful completion of an assignment is creating a piece that can stand on its own out of the context of the classroom.

At the end of the hallway there are three group murals by students in pre-school, high school, and Jeck’s UW graduate program. As with some group projects the murals do not do justice to the strengths of the individuals involved, but there is something intriguing that happens between the three pieces. All were made with white fingerpaint on black paper and the uniformity of the medium renders them all very similar—it is not instantly apparent which age group created which mural. The similarities are based in the nature of fingerpainting; it’s not that the pre-schooler’s chiaroscuro fooled me into thinking they were MFA candidates. But the fact that they are so similar suggests that our childhood creativity isn’t as far away as we make it out to be.

—Lauren Klenow

Claire Cowie

Elizabeth Copland

Mural