REX AMOS
Rex Amos brings to the art of collage boldness of spirit combined with delicate intricacy. The process of Chine Collé is ideal for enhancing Amos's exquisite technique and stunning combinations of images.
These hand-rubbed, pastel collages are run through a press on a larger plate sprayed with a thin layer of ink. They develop unity and richness when fused to a backing sheet of etching paper embossed by the edges of the plate.
Like visual poems, their form, imagery, and symbolism contribute to their meaning. Using an intuitive sense of composition combined with an appreciation of paradox and irony, Amos selects images from the thousands he meticulously cuts out with scissors intended for eye surgery. The results are unexpected juxtapositions that excite and provoke the viewer. Frequently the unifying symbol is a literal ribbon tying the universe of ideas together.
The collages are the result of a complex psyche developed through years of wide reading, intense experience, and thoughtful living. They are beautiful for their delicate craftsmanship, satisfying composition, and startling images. They are successful for the strength and depth of their statements.
HISTORY
In The Dome, Peter Voulkos's spacious studio complex for many of the San Francisco Bay Area's most prestigious artists, Rex Amos was referred to as "The Cutter." Amos's association with these artists goes back to 1959 when he became friends with abstract expressionist painter Matt Glavin, who later had a studio in The Dome.
Amos has never been satisfied with pure aesthetics. He has always been driven to make statements through his art. Extremely verbal and articulate by nature, he includes words or symbols for words in all his work. The violence of the images he selected during the Vietnam conflict clearly proclaimed his objection to America's role in that war. Other works represented the agony of the fight for civil rights of minorities.
Amos cannot pass a scrap of paper on the sidewalk without stooping over to pick it up and examine it for collage possibilities. His friends have been embarrassed repeatedly by his stopping to rip years' worth of pasted posters from public walls, layers of glutted paper and glue so heavy they wrapped themselves around him as he fought them into submission. These were the accumulated leavings of Vietnam protests, gay rights demonstrations, rock concerts, circuses, and political and religious meetings. As he returned from one trip to Europe, customs officials opened his suitcase to find no clothes, no underwear, no toothbrush-just piles of old scrap paper topped by a cardboard cutout of Spencer Tracy's head. These are the raw materials for Amos's expressions.
As his ideas have been refined, so has the precision of his art. From large, paint-splashed canvases and assemblages, he has moved to the delicate and precise form of collage. Precisely snipping out images, he glues them down so smoothly that few can tell where the edges are. Matt Glavin's influence is the flow of patiently rubbed pastels allowing figures to float as though independent of the surface.
Glavin also introduced Amos to Chine Collé. This medium represents a unification of Amos's vision. The work of the mature artist is achieved through images selected by an intellect developed by years of reading and diverse experiences.
These experiences have been as varied as building a log cabin in Idaho, fly fishing, jazz drumming, making candles in Mendocino, being an extra in Paint Your Wagon, digging clams on the Pacific Coast, and traveling throughout Britain and Europe.
Amos was born August 13, 1935, in Wallace, Idaho, and raised in Burke, Idaho, a little mining town featured in Ripley's "Believe It or Not" because it was in a canyon so narrow that store awnings had to be pulled up to let the trains pass through. At the beginning of World War II, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Amos attended Buckman Grade School and later graduated from Washington High School. Following that, he was drafted into the army and did his tour of duty in Germany. This gave him his first opportunity to travel through Europe wandering through the great museums and developing his first taste for art.
On returning home, he enrolled at Portland State University majoring in philosophy and literature. Meanwhile he took up jazz drumming, modeling his style after the jazz greats-Shelley Manne, Joe Morello and Philly Joe Jones. This culminated in his breaking the world record for marathon jazz drumming, 82 hours, in 1960.
During this time he began to experiment seriously with painting, producing some primitive figures and exciting abstractions in the manner of Jackson Pollock. Living in Big Sur and finding himself with no materials with which to work, he began to use found objects. This resulted in some of the first junk sculptures on the West Coast. Inspired by this new medium, he obtained a dump license in Portland so that his resources were virtually unlimited.
A woodcut he did during this time inspired bookstore-owner Walter Powell to ask him to paint a series of icons for Saint John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The technique employed, building up the hard-edged figures from dark to light with small brushes, became an influence on Amos's later work.
In 1969 he accompanied Professor Graham P. Conroy to Ireland to help with research on Bishop Berkeley. This project allowed him to finish the philosophy degree on which he had been working for ten years at Portland State. Amos's contribution to philosophy is Preliminism, the theory and practice of practice. Rather than keeping it to himself, he gave it to Dr. Conroy, making it the first philosophy ever given away. A bibliophile and voracious reader, Amos has continued to expand his knowledge and ideas. This is evident in his art.
His works are composed of ironically juxtaposed images rich with literary, historical, religious, and philosophical allusions that provoke the viewer to participate in their interpretations.
After thirty-two years of filling a large Northwest Portland home with books, art, and the miscellany necessary for his artistic inspiration and expression, Amos now lives in Cannon Beach, Oregon, with his wife Diane, a retired secondary English teacher. In 2012 The Pacific Northwest Art and Artist Archive at Willamette University/ Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Oregon, accepted a donation of Amos's lifetime ephemera composed of over fifty years of journals, diaries, scrolls, notebooks, drawings, and articles.