Deep Cuts

With his ubiquitous murals, art cars, totems and obsessively intricate paintings, Tom Cramer has been a Portland institution since the 1980s. But his latest show, New Wood Reliefs, almost didn't happen. One reason was a broken shoulder; the other, a broken heart. Each of Cramer's wood-relief paintings begins with a bone-punishing process of heavy carving as the artist cuts into solid pine and mahogany panels with a chisel and mallet. After three decades of working with this arduous technique, the artist awoke on Jan. 2, 2013 and found he couldn't move his right shoulder without excruciating pain. As the month went on, the problem worsened, making carving—the cornerstone of his artistic process—impossible. He worried his career might be over.

Four surgeries followed. Doctors put a steel plate in his collarbone, then had to remove it. They replaced the plate, but that one had to come out too. After one of these operations, Cramer developed life-threatening blood and bone infections. Finally, after a year and a half of not being able to carve, Cramer started healing with the aid of physical therapy.

In a cruel twist of fate, just as the artist recovered, his longtime partner and artistic muse—photographer Shannon Kraft—died after a 14-year battle with cancer. The physical and emotional traumas left Cramer devastated. First gingerly, then with more gusto, he began to make paintings again.

Those pieces are on view at Augen Gallery in an exhibition he has dedicated to Kraft's memory. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the artwork is that there's no trace of melancholy or loss in them. His carved pine blocks, painted in bright sheens, seem to radiate pure exultation with their chromatic bravado and gleaming metallic leaf. Elite Light is a phantasmagoria of undulating forms that intersperses 24-karat gold with flecks of purple, periwinkle and brick red. In the circular composition Subconscious Machine, curlicues punctuate a field of striated lines, looking like chloroplasts on steroids. That interplay between botanical and psychedelic imagery intensifies in Pine Cone, Moonlight and Quasar, in which a flower-power daisy floats in the center of concentric colors and silver gilding.

If there is one iota of tragedy in this luxuriance and visual panache, I'll be damned if I can find it. The show's lighting scheme, masterminded by Augen director Bob Kochs, maximizes the works' effulgence. Hitting the artworks at varied and unusual angles, the gallery halogens make the colors pop and emphasize the wood panels' sensual, deeply etched contours. In these unapologetically hedonistic paintings, Cramer has returned to form, parlaying his hard-earned resilience into a defiant ode to joy.

SEE IT: Augen Gallery, 716 NW Davis St., 546-5056, augengallery.com. Through Nov. 28.

Willamette Week