Doris Totten Chase - Northwest Art

Northwest Art

Chase's early paintings were Northwest landscapes and figures, often musicians, in blocks of color. She favored heavy oil surfaces, sometimes building them up with sand to achieve coarse texture. She credits inspiration for her style to the structured designs of Northwest Coast Native American basketry and carving.

Northwest painter Kenneth Callahan, in an article for The Seattle Times, reviewed Chase's first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Otto Seligman Gallery, and called Chase "a serious and talented young painter."

In 1961, Chase was invited to show at Galleria Numero in Florence, Italy. Subsequent shows were in New York and in Japan, where a writer for Tokyo Shimbun compared her work to Japanese sumi painting.

Chase was accepted into the Huntington Hartford Foundation's artists' colony in Pacific Palisades, California, in 1965, 1966, and 1969, each time for a month.

From early wash drawings, her work evolved into a series of cement paintings meant for outdoor use, inscribed with faces, and words like "joy" and "love." Chase experimented with painting on shaped canvases when one of her students gave her some pieces of laminated oak. Her first solo New York exhibition, in 1965, at the Smolin Gallery, contained paintings on wood. She exhibited a series of small painted sculptures inset with hinged sections which opened to reveal additional painted section.

Soon the painted pieces and laminated wood shapes became large. She sculpted pieces that weren't fixed in a position, but rather invited viewers to participate in rearranging modules. Many of the forms, such as a black-stained fir piece titled Haida, resembled the look of Northwest Coast Native American art. Chase felt the inspiration came from pieces she'd seen at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (of 1909) that were on the University of Washington campus when she attended classes there.

Meanwhile, some of the hoops and circles, arches and ellipses Chase created had grown large enough to be walked through, allowing people to interact with them. While sculpture was still considered a man's work in the 1960s, Chase showed that women could create in this medium as well. An early steel sculpture, the 4.6 m (15 ft) tall Changing Form, was commissioned for Kerry Park on Queen Anne Hill, at the waterfront, becoming one of Seattle's most highly regarded public sculptures.

In 1968, dancer Mary Staton used a set of Chase's giant wooden circles for her choreography. The dancers rocked upside down in enormous wooden arcs, and spread-eagled like spokes inside wooden hoops, wheeled across the stage of the Seattle Opera House. In collaboration with Boeing, Chase produced Circles, a computer film based on the spinning hoops.

King Screen made a film of the dance and sculpture collaboration. Chase requested and received footage edited out of the King Screen film, and from the cut footage, made her own film, Circles II, with the help of film professionals Bob Brown and Frank Olvey. Using color separations that showed the dancers and sculpture as color forms, Chase used time lapse so that trails of light followed the wake of dancers' arms and legs. The film was acclaimed at the 1973 American Film Festival in New York with critic Roger Greenspun comparing it to Matisse's Dance painting.

At about the same time Circles II was in production, Chase created prototypes of kinetic sculptures for children, made of shaped urethane foam encased in tough, bright-colored fiberglass cloth. The shapes were designed for kids to help them with equilibrium and body awareness.