Collector needed a few good walls

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from May 21, 2003. One of the projects Louise Ronald, Jack’s sister, has been handling recently is sorting through the art he had collected in the office. We have a bit more wall space at 309 W. Main St., Portland, than he had at home, but he still managed to fill a good amount of it.



Our house doesn’t really need more room, but it could use more walls.

Let me explain, or try to.

The family’s mysterious DNA not only includes a predilection for the newspaper business, which has caught up not only with me but at various times with my brother, my sisters, a couple of cousins, my parents, an aunt, and one of my daughters.

It also has some sort of chromosomal tie to art, specifically to things you frame and hang on the walls.

And we’re running out of walls.

Actually, we ran out of them long ago. Paintings, photographs, posters, prints, and various ephemera are leaning against walls and bookcases, waiting their turn to hang properly where they can be enjoyed.

The problem seems to be getting worse. We tell ourselves that when we re-do the twins’ bedroom as our own master suite, there will be plenty of room for things. But the fact is, much of that wall space is already spoken for.

The other myth is that I’ll find room for this piece or that on the walls of my office. Trouble is, they’re filling up fast.

By rough count, there are already 42 different things hanging in my office, with two more ready to go up.

At home, it’s rare to find a room with fewer than 10 paintings on the walls.

It started innocently enough. We’d pick up something on vacation as a memento. But it soon got out of hand.

There’s usually no intent involved. It just happens.

On this most recent training mission to Central Asia, for example, I stopped by to see my favorite antique dealer in the region. After I bought something for my wife (not a painting), he insisted on giving me a small oil-on-cardboard plein air work by a Soviet artist done in the 1980s.

Then, walking down the street about two weeks later, I found myself bargaining for a small watercolor as a gift for my brother, whose walls are in the same overloaded state as our own. The same day, I fell in love with an illuminated page from an old copy of the Koran which had been framed. I had to have it, even though I had no idea where to put it.

Enough, I told myself. No more paintings.

And I held to my resolve, but that didn’t stop me from picking up three beautiful pieces of embroidery, two Kyrgyz and one Kazakh. They were gifts for my wife and are supposed to be hung on the walls of a yurt, a traditional nomadic dwelling, as a decoration.

But I may have to erect a yurt in the backyard if they’re going to be displayed properly at our house.