Culture Features

The vivid, Technicolor hands of Cara Thayer and Louie Van Patten's paintings pull you into the Ruud Gallery as soon as you step into the hushed, cool space. Not super realism, yet not afraid of fooling the eye from twenty paces, the couple's new works have an underlying tension to them, illustrated by wringing, skeletal hands, by grimacing flesh, or, in the case of one dramatic scene, “The Persistence of Repressed Thoughts III,” an ambiguous figure jails the other in a contorted headlock.
In this painting, the dominant figure is Thayer, the trapped figure Van Patten. But this is an arbitrary acknowledgement. Yes, they are a couple. Yes, they share canvases and brushes, working on large, luscious oil paintings together. No, they can't really point out who painted what. And yes, they get along just fine, if you were wondering.

It will still be Drake Park and Riverside Boulevard will still wrap around the edges, but with the Deschutes lazily snaking through Mirror Pond and the pines towering over the stage, things will feel very much like a fairyland William Shakespeare set out to create almost 500 years ago. OK, so that last sentence wasn't as magical as any of the lines found within A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the Bard's most popular plays, but this weekend Drake Park will definitely take on a different feeling with the first-ever outdoor Shakespeare in the Park event.
With two evening shows on Friday and Saturday night and another matinee performance on Saturday afternoon, Shakespeare in the Park also includes acting workshops and teasers from community theater groups, but the focus is on the creative interpretation of A Midsummer's Night Dream by the Northwest Classical Theatre Company. The acting troupe is based in Portland and includes a number of Shakespeare's plays in their repertoire, and when Tifany LeGuyonne, whose Cat Call Productions is working with Source sister company Lay It Out Events to put on this weekend festival, heard they could do Midsummer's, she knew she'd found the play for the first year of the event.

Standing on a grassy lawn at the Peterson Rock Garden on a sunny Saturday afternoon staring at vaulted canvas tents, arcane symbols emblazoned on banners flapping in the breeze and, most notably, a lot of oddly dressed individuals, I start trying to sort through all of the strangeness.
I am at the Corvaria Harvest Tournament and trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on.
Luckily, not two minutes after stepping foot on the tournament grounds, I'm intercepted by lady Oliva Magdalene DeHaro, the Chatelaine of Corvaria (a.k.a. the media relations person/tour guide/encourager of all new-comers). Vicomtesse Duana Treherne, who has served as princess of the Summits (our area’s principality) three times, also approached me and reiterated the importance of Lady Oliva’s company as I poked around.

As a transplant to Oregon, I'm embarrassed to admit that I remain largely unlearned of the rich history that is Bend's past.
I imagine I'm not alone in this ignorance, which is why the folks at Let it Ride may be onto something. For $45 you can get a two-hour guided tour of downtown Bend. But get this: the tour is on electric bicycles. You get to see plenty of historical Bend without getting tired!

Driving in circles could be maddening. It could be nauseating, actually. But on a recent Thursday afternoon, Jody Ward is instructing her friend and fellow Art in Public Places board member Cristy Lanfri to continue driving in circles. Just a couple more times, she says, pointing to the center of a roundabout on Newport Avenue, describing in great detail the background of a sculpture – titled “Bueno Homage to Buckaroo” – its artist, Danae Bennet-Miller, and how it's one of the newer pieces of public art in Bend.
Ward knows a thing or two about art in Bend. Back in the late 1960s, Ward and some other community members came together to bring some more culture to what was then a relatively barren creative landscape.
“There were no art galleries, no traveling art shows. I was a young mom and wanted to have these opportunities for our kids and the rest of the town,” says Ward after our tour of only a third or so of Bend's 40-plus public art installations that range from our iconic roundabout sculptures to paintings in public buildings.