By Stephen E. Adams
The first words she says are “Don’t call me a damned artist.”
Myrtle “Dovie” Ulmer’s second words are “If the music’s too loud for you, too bad.”
The album, with which the interviewer is familiar, seems incongruous in Ulmer’s work-place—she eschews using “studio” because of the pretentious trappings the word implies for her. It’s NWA’s “Straight Out of Compton” and it is rattling the numerous paintings and on the walls and small sculptures on the shelves.
“One reason I’ve never been on the Studio Tour is this isn’t a studio to me. It’s just my home, my workshop.”
Everything from the steaming kettle on the woodstove to the untidy stacks of poetry and art books on any flat surface not already covered with her work reinforces Ulmer’s words.
A long time “off and on” resident of Lopez, as Ulmer characterizes it, she admits that she doesn’t get out much, doesn’t like people, and avoids meeting anyone new if she can help it.
It is quite clear that this interview represents a barely tolerable intrusion for her. “I work at what I do. I don’t have time to talk about it.”
She refuses to divulge her birthplace or anything about her career as an artist except to say that she prefers showing her work in cafes and bars to galleries. “People look at things in bars,” she says. “They might stare at a painting for hours when they’re eating or getting drunk. In a gallery, they pay about as much attention as a chicken on roller skates would.”
Yet her work deserves the kind of scrutiny she claims is found among those dining or imbibing. It is richly complex and startlingly weird at the same time.
Ulmer, who obviously lived long enough in the southeastern United States at one time to be comfortable using the term “y’all,” has a strong theme of the Pacific Northwest running through her creations. Tall Douglas Firs morph into rich sword ferns and she can capture the omnipresent gray of a November sky in a swatch of color huddled in the corner of a canvas.
A jar filled with the carapaces of crustaceans gathered from Lopez beaches rests beneath a scarlet lid capped with a hideous plastic arachnid.
One perusing her work might also see Bigfoot or a chimpanzee, as well, so it is safe, with Ulmer’s art, to say that anything goes.
“I just try to capture what I see, whether I see it with my eyes or in my head. Doesn’t make any difference to me how I see it.”
She ignores most of the questions put to her, speaking more as a stream of consciousness monologist. “Whatever’s around me or inside me or on the other side of those trees there and the water on the other side, it’s mine to do with what I want so long as I’m here to do it.”
Speaking, she gestures toward a collage she recently created, one that depicts a beautiful child in a lamplit room pulling a simian-looking head out of a basket. “What do you think that is?” she asks.
Not waiting for a response, she continues. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s all the things we find when we look inside.”
(At some point the soundtrack has switched from late-eighties gangsta rap to Debussy being rendered on a flute.)
“This,” she says, tapping the interviewer in the middle of his forehead, “This is like the junk drawer in someone’s kitchen. It ought to be filled with things that have nothing more in common than the fact that they’ve ended up in the same place at the same time.”
“That’s why I create what I create. Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s all ended up in what I think of as my own private junk drawer.”
Myrtle “Dovie” Ulmer won’t say where those so inclined may view her works, beyond encouraging them to study the walls of “bars and diners from Anacortes to Twisp to Forks to Grass Pants” (which is what she call Grants Pass, Oregon).
Her work is well worth the search.
Writer’s Note: This is my final column for the “Islands’ Weekly.” I have been privileged to write the Artist Profile for almost 3 years, during which time I have interviewed at least 28 artists. Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and your many kindnesses.
