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It’s the show that wasn’t.
Lucinda Parker’s suite of personal paintings inspired by her late husband—cheekily titled Good Grief, with a nod to Charlie Brown—was supposed to be the featured exhibition at Russo Lee Gallery in Nob Hill for the month of September. But an Aug. 5 fire at the neighboring Caffe Mingo dashed those plans. The smoke damage to Russo Lee was so severe the gallery has been closed while the owner works on restoring the space and cleaning the art on the premises.
The Good Grief paintings were all unscathed since the show hadn’t been hung yet. (The paintings that were up—large-scale oils of Jet magazine covers by Julian V.L. Gaines—were unharmed but needed to be professionally cleaned.) While the show’s postponement is disappointing, Russo Lee employees have been bringing patrons who are interested in Good Grief to see it in person in Parker’s studio.
“Listen, it bothers me, but it would bother me an awful lot more if the whole damn gallery had burned down,” Parker says on a studio visit one crisp and sunny October morning.
Parker created all 14 paintings in tribute to Stephen McCarthy, who died in 2023 from Parkinson’s disease. The vibrant acrylics flow from representative to abstract and back again, sometimes on the same canvas. Many of them feature Mount Hood rendered in Cubist style—McCarthy summited the mountain 25 times in his life, and Parker has twice. Kingdom of Love shows one of the couple’s favorite hobbies: hiking on Hood and then cuddling up in the shadows of a well-placed boulder. The emotional My Rock is a self-portrait of Parker clutching a Cubist boulder with her eyes closed.
The warmth and joy of their 53-year marriage radiates through the exhibition, but Parker is happy to fill in the details.
“It was never a dull moment,” Parker says. “We were very well matched, in some kind of opposite fashion.” Parker was always an artist, and McCarthy worked as a lawyer and then ran Clear Creek Distillery for 30 years.
She began her art career in the 1960s at Reed College, which McCarthy also attended. Quick with a laugh and a pithy quote, Parker, now 82, has a good sense of humor about her eighth decade: “I’ve got three rules every day: Don’t get in a car crash, don’t fall down and put at least 10 strokes on my painting.”
Painting the series helped Parker move through her grief, she says. Almost two years in, sometimes she feels as if she’s got a handle on it, but then she gets hit with another wave.
“How do you deal with the fact that you are all of a sudden alone after 53 years of marriage?” she says. “And you know other people go through it and you’ve seen it, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as it does when it happens to you. I kick myself and say why wasn’t I more sympathetic to other people?”
Gallery owner Martha Lee has been so busy coordinating with contractors and insurance companies to get Russo Lee back in business that she hasn’t made it out to Parker’s studio yet to see the show. The gallery needs a pretty major renovation.
“It’s amazing to me that smoke and soot is so damaging to a space,” she says. “It gets into every porous surface.”
A restoration company had to catalog, photograph and transport a staggering 1,500 artworks that were in the inventory of Russo Lee at the time of the fire (this includes unframed work in the flat files). The company will then clean and deodorize all the art.
“It’s been pretty devastating for the artists, the staff, the whole gallery—it’s hard to take,” says Lee, whose gallery has operated at its current location since its founding in 1986. “We were doing as well as any gallery could be coming out of COVID, and to have everything come to a screeching halt is really difficult. We’re just trying to keep things moving forward to get us back up and running.”
SEE IT: Good Grief by Lucinda Parker through Russo Lee Gallery, 805 NW 21st Ave., 503-226-2754, russoleegallery.com.