Charles Heaney (1897-1981) was a printmaker and painter in Oregon for nearly sixty years. He lived most of his life in Portland, where he settled with his mother and sister in 1913 when he was fifteen years old, but he based his art on his perceptions of nearly every region in Oregon. He is known for his prints and paintings of the Oregon interior and Nevada as well as the neighborhoods near his home in Northeast Portland and the demolitions of downtown Portland buildings in the 1940s.

Heaney was the youngest of eight children of John Toner Heaney, and Elizabeth Ehricke Heaney, immigrants from Ireland and Germany respectively. They settled in an Irish community near Oconto Falls, Wisconsin, where Charles Heaney was born. Family snapshots taken in the early twentieth century record vernacular architecture of Oconto County that anticipates the picturesque houses, sheds, and storefronts that became iconic in Heaney's art.

Traveling to Oregon by train in 1913 introduced him to the other subjects that would interest him for a lifetime: the mountains, endless highways, abandoned mines, and isolated trees of the inner American West. While Heaney was not primarily a figure painter, he frequently depicted a lone woman as a contemplative presence in his urban and rural scenes. Heaney never married but was close to his widowed mother and his sister and presents women as meditative observers.

Heaney did not complete high school but immediately went to work in Portland. His first job was for F.C. Stettler Company, where he operated box-making machines beginning in 1913. He later apprenticed at the Brandenburg Engraving Company, learning to engrave flatware and trophies, a skill that supported him for much of his life and provided the basis for his work as a printmaking artist.

George Brandenburg recommended that Heaney enroll in classes at the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art), and beginning in 1917 he did this on an intermittent basis well into the 1920s. One of his primary instructors was the legendary painter Harry Wentz (1875-1965), who befriended and inspired Heaney. A fellow student was Kyuzo Furuya (1888-1929), who, Heaney recalled, goaded him into taking himself seriously as an artist. Heaney's deepest friendship was with Clayton Sumner Price (1874-1950), an artist twenty-three years Heaney's senior who settled in Portland in 1929. Price became a pioneering figure in Oregon modern painting. Heaney admired and emulated Price's absolute dedication to artmaking and found in the older man an important philosophic companion.

For three years beginning in 1929 Heaney was employed by the Oregon State Motor Association, where his former employer Brandenburg was the manager. Heaney worked in the sign department, traveling throughout the state to identify locations for directional highway signs and to install the signs. Sketches made on these forays and on later summer trips became the basis of Heaney's statewide imagery in his artwork.

During the Depression, Heaney was employed as an easel painter for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. In the course of two years with the Art Project (1937-1939), he completed sixty-four paintings and nine woodcut editions. The most famous of these works is The Mountain (1937; oil on canvas) painted for Timberline Lodge and on view there to this day. Inspired by Cezanne, Furuya, and Price, it is a monumental work. The opportunity to paint fulltime for the WPA was of crucial importance to Heaney, who developed as a painter during these years.

Heaney's prints of the 1920s and 1930s were mostly woodcuts. He learned the technique from Catherine DeWitt MacKenzie (1896-1960), a fellow student the Museum School. In the 1930s, he experimented with etchings with his friend William McIlwraith (1867-1940) and studied intaglio processes with William Givler (1908-2000) at the Museum School. Heaney's later prints are increasingly abstract, experimental works in etching and aquatint. Some are images of fossils, a subject Heaney also explored in painting. In the 1940s, he created mixed media "fossils"--combining plaster relief, painting, carving, and imprints of actual fossils. These irregularly shaped wall pieces he considered to be his most original work.

Drawing on Romanticism (including the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder that he saw at the Portland Art Museum), American Regionalism, European and American Modernism, and the art of his friends in the Pacific Northwest (especially Price), Heaney created a body of work that appeals to many audiences. His poetic temperament, combination of depiction and abstraction, tonal richness in prints and color subtlety in painting, and sense for light and atmospheric effect all contribute to a body of work that is notable for its expressive mood, which tends to be meditative, recollective, and at times melancholic.

Heaney exhibited widely and is represented in many public collections, among them the Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (University of Oregon), Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Willamette University), Oregon Historical Society, and Reed College.

Roger Hull
Roger Hull, professor of Art History at Willamette University, has lived in Oregon since 1970. He envisioned and helped establish the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. As a faculty curator at the Museum, Hull has written monographs and curated retrospective exhibitions on the Salem painter Carl Hall (2001), the Eugene sculptor Jan Zach (2003), and the Portland painters and printmakers Charles E. Heaney (2005) and George Johanson (2007). He was the recipient of an Oregon Governor's Arts Award in 1999.

Sources

Wallace S. Baldinger, “Charles E. Heaney,�? Art in America (Jan. 1948): 37-47. Roger Hull, Charles E. Heaney: Memory, Imagination, and Place (Salem, Oregon: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, distributed by University of Washington Press, 2005). Jack McLarty, Rachael Griffin, and others, Charles Heaney: Master of the Oregon Scene (Portland, Oregon: Image Gallery, 1980).

Roger Hull, Charles E. Heaney: Memory, Imagination, and Place (Salem, Oregon: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, distributed by University of Washington Press, 2005).

Jack McLarty, Rachael Griffin, and others, Charles Heaney: Master of the Oregon Scene (Portland, Oregon: Image Gallery, 1980).