Northwest Mystic

Put a painter on an isolated fire-lookout tower, keep him there alone for weeks at a time with nothing to look at but the rugged vastness of Washington State's Cascade Range, and something is bound to happen. For Seattle's Kenneth Callahan, 48, who stood three summer fire-watching stints during World War II, what happened was the crystallization of a lifetime's thinking and painting experience. "In the complex of crags, clouds, movements and mist I saw identity with life," he recalls. "I was struck by the awareness that rocks, man, animals, ideas all come from one source." The working out of this personal vision has, in the years since he has come down from his heights, established Callahan as one of the artists (along with Mark Tobey and Morris Graves) who make the school of Northwest Mysticism the most commanding regional art movement in the U.S. today.

Fossil Imprints. This week the Seattle Art Museum is showing 35 of Callahan's most recent oil and tempera paintings.

They prove that as an artist, Callahan can be as articulate in deed as word. At first glance the paintings appear to be sweeping prospects across the Northwest's mist-shrouded glaciers, mountain ranges and stormy coasts. Only slowly do the wraithlike figures of Callahan's inner vision--luminous white men, women and ghostly, plunging broncos--disentangle themselves from the black, grey, ocher-beige and violet whorls of rock and sky.

One of his most successful is The Crater (see cut), dominated by lava-black swirls in which prehistoric reptiles, ghostly riders and a whole flotsam of humanity are discovered like fossil imprints in a violently sheared rock.

Spokane-born Kenneth Callahan came to his peculiarly regional style the long way around. At 16 he was a good enough realist to have a watercolor of the Seattle waterfront hung in a major exhibition. In 1926 he gave up both local notoriety and his studies at the University of Washington to go to San Francisco, where, between part-time jobs as grease monkey, bank clerk and restaurant waiter, he worked on his style ("There was nobody there to tell me I was wonderful"). Back in Seattle he tried commercial art. (Says his wife: "Kenneth's heart just wasn't in it. He was always leaving the t out of

'Carnation' or the k out of 'Milk.' ") On the proceeds of the sale of five local-color paintings he went off to Mexico, fell in love with the work of Orozco, Rivera and Tamayo ("There was no talk of what could sell").

Peace of Mind. Finally heading home again, he got a job opening crates at the Seattle Art Museum, rose to become curator. As a museum man, Callahan had 20 years of free summers and the financial backing to pioneer his own painting. Contributing to Callahan's native bent for mysticism were long evenings of talk with Fellow Artists Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, artists "who shared the tremendous stimulation of days on the beaches, in the fogs, and high up in the mountains." Then Callahan's fire-tower experience set him "trying to express that bond which exists between forms of life and forces of nature, often in conflict, always in struggle, but with that basic order which means that understanding and peace of mind are, in fact, achievable."

Callahan's mountaineer's grip is not always sure. In his more ambitious themes, he slips from Blakean heights to the low level of overliterary metaphor. On occasions his luminous symbols drift aimlessly like mist from the top of a Douglas fir. What Callahan's symbolism does achieve, when it is successful, is an additional dimension that lifts his work out of the rut of provincial parochialism. His message can be read by a world far beyond the Northwest's lakes, mountains and forests.

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