One of a Kind
Renee Manford’s monoprints
By Ariel Burkhart
You might think that waking up at 5 o’clock every morning would have something to do with a handful of kids and a high-stress job that demands endless hours spent in a cubicle. But Renee Manford, an ambitious student, mother, and wife, is up and ready each morning to paint.
Whether she’s heading to her garage or her rented space at Clay Space, Manford is living her passion for the arts. Eight years ago, Manford set her sights on a graphic design degree and went back to school, traversing a multitude of art classes to explore her creative side. She found her personal niche with monoprints, or monotypes, which are created by painting a portrait or design and pressing it onto a single piece of paper. “It’s a medium I could really explore,” Manford says. “I saw the potential in it.”
Born in Canada but inspired by her scenic hometown of Port Orford, Oregon, Manford and her husband, Randy, have journeyed to remote places throughout Oregon and all over the West Coast. Manford paints emotionally stirring scenes and takes in more than just the sights. She has a habit of taking water from the creek or river she is viewing and mixing it into her paints. She says that salt water from the sea mixed with her acrylics make for a bubbly looking texture on her canvas. “It’s a visceral way of working with paints, and it’s a part of yourself,” Manford says. “Every artist is a part of whatever they’re viewing; the mind takes over and lets you go in directions that are kind of surreal.”
Manford spends much of her summers on the road, going from hotel to hotel, working on location rather than in a studio. While she would love to travel year-round, in winter she returns to her studio. There she attempts to recreate the vivid images she holds in her mind of what she has seen, using her tools of the trade: pallet knives, Q-tips, mineral water, and an array of brushes and plastic rollers, along with the large and heavy roller that presses the paint and ink to the paper. “If only there was a travel-sized one!” says Manford.
Instead of canvas, she paints on Plexiglas, using inks and acrylics, and, “when no one is looking,” a thumb or fingernail to shape her portrait or landscape before the final print is pressed onto paper. The paper is soaked in water before the pressing and is lined up evenly with the painting, framing the work carefully. Manford protects the glass with paper and cloth before the heavy press is moved over the sandwiched layers. The end result is that there will be one good print from all the hours spent on the picture.
She never knows exactly how the picture will come out when she lifts the paper, and “it’s always exciting to see the final print,” she says. There cannot be a second pressing; another copy of the same work would come out like a pale shadow of the first print. But since there is only one print, the colors are bold and intense though the pictures look raw and fragile.
Some of Manford’s work hangs in the Emerald Art Gallery, and she is looking forward to an art show of her own; an exhibit is planned for the summer of 2010 in the Hult Center’s Jacobs Gallery.
“Art has become like food and air—it’s something I feel like I need to do to live, because it’s important to me,” says Manford. “It’s therapy. It brings me happiness to see something develop. It might not turn out like how I think, but the picture leads me along. If I’ve got a brush in my hand it seems like everything else around me goes away.”
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Center Stage
VLT, the West’s oldest theater
By Jeneca Jones
Step inside The Very Little Theatre’s costume room, filled with well-kept shelves storing boxes of dresses, shirts, hats, and gloves, and you will find Nancy Boyett at the center of it all.
Head down, Boyett sorts through a box of sewing materials recently donated to the theater. Her hair is pulled loosely back, and she works comfortably. Here, she feels very much at home.
“Let me show you around,” she says.
She moves from the costume room to the library, known as the “green room,” where a single wall is filled with hundreds of play scripts. Like a second-hand store, mismatched furniture is scattered about the room, as if all the years before have come together as one.
There’s a pulse to this building, and this is where it originates—backstage, beyond the lights and applause of the stage.
Listen closely. You can almost hear the faint murmur of cast members rehearsing their lines as they nervously await their cue. Listen, as a frantic actress curses under her breath while she searches for a lost shoe. Listen, as actors crack jokes to lighten the mood. Listen, to the clanking of glasses as they celebrate a successful opening night. This is the heart of the theater.
“You create a family, an ensemble,” Boyett says. With each new production “you’re creating art, you’re creating magic.”
Boyett has spent more than 25 years here. Her two children, now grown, used to plop down to their homework here, in the green room, while their mother volunteered.
In the lobby hangs the portraits of 60 volunteers, life members, who have given more than 20 years to the theater. This year, the theater celebrates its 80th season, as the oldest continuously operating community theater west of the Mississippi.
Born during the Great Depression, The Very Little Theatre began 79 years ago with only eight founding members, hence its name. Today, its annual season ticket renewal rate is about 90 percent, with more than half of its seats going to subscribers. How has it survived all these years, even after competing theater companies sprang up?
Some credit the theater’s patrons, who pledged their loyalty during its formative years. Others credit those who regularly give up evenings and weekends to produce the plays. Many never appear onstage, choosing supporting roles instead: set building, costume design, lighting, or sound. Others run committees or serve on the theater’s board.
Boyett has done a little of everything: box office attendant, actress, and stage manager, among other things. She was introduced to the VLT in 1983. “It was fun,” Boyett says. “It was totally crazy and unorganized, but fun.”
The theater’s first production, You and I by Philip Barry, opened March 16, 1929, at the Heilig Theatre, which was originally built for vaudeville and stage productions.
In 1931, economic conditions and restrictions at the Heilig location forced the group to move to a small, renovated drugstore near the University of Oregon, called the Pillbox, where seating capacity was 100.
Due to the VLT’s meager budget, most of the plays were either melodramas or classics: works by Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and Oscar Wilde.
The theater officially incorporated in 1934. A year later, the group moved to a larger space: an old 257-seat exhibition hall at the Lane County Fairgrounds. The Barn, as it was called, had a leaky roof and wood-stove heating. Getting the building in shape consumed everything the group made from its first show there.
After struggling through the World War II years, the theater gradually increased its membership, its audience, and its bank account, paying $3,000 to purchase city-owned property at the corner of 24th and Hilyard Street, its present location.
Designed by theater member and Eugene architect Claire Hamlin in 1950, the wooden barrel-roof auditorium seats 220, making it feel both intimate and spacious.
A workshop, dressing rooms, and the green room were eventually added. And by 1979, a state-of-the-art lighting control console replaced the mechanical monster that preceded it.
The theater completed its largest capital improvement in 1992—the construction of a full-size rehearsal and meeting room called Stage Left, where smaller, more avant-garde productions are held.
“There’s something about knowing that you’re part of a long line of people who have put so much heart and soul into this,” says Boyett, seated in the auditorium in front of the main stage. This is where the tour ends, and where the magic begins.
Glengarry Glen Ross
By David Mamet, a comic drama
Directed by Chris McVay
Performed at Stage Left
December 5-14
Present Laughter
By Noël Coward, a comedy
Director Fred Gorelick
January 16-February 31
A Little Night Music
By Stephen Sondheim, a Tony Award–winning musical
Directed by Michael P. Watkins
Opens March 13
Humble Boy
By Charlotte Jones, a poignant comedy
Directed by Leslie A. Murray
Opens May 29
Night of the Iguana
By Tennessee Williams, a classic drama
Directed by James Aday
Opens July 31
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