Where We Belong: Selected works by Margaret Coe, Mark Clarke, George Johanson, David McCosh, and Erik Sandgren
March 18 - May 16, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, March 21st., 2:00 - 4:00 pm
Margaret Coe and Erik Sandgren in attendance
First Friday ArtWalk, April 3rd, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Remarks by Aaron Johanson at 6 pm
A special lecture on David McCosh's early lithographs, which are highlighted in our show, will be presented on May 16th at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art by Rachel Allen, Modern & Contemporary Art Curator at Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.
Karin Clarke Gallery is pleased to present Where We Belong: Selected Works by Margaret Coe, Mark Clarke, George Johanson, David McCosh, and Erik Sandgren. This five-person exhibition explores the connections and sense of belonging individuals find in particular places, with works depicting people in landscapes, urban settings, and interiors. The show includes oil, acrylic, and egg tempera paintings as well as lithographs, ranging in scale from small to large and spanning decades from the 1930s to the present. Unframed prints by McCosh and Johanson are also available, along with prints and watercolors by Sandgren.
Together, these works highlight how five significant Oregon artists engage with the places they live in and how the act of painting connects them to their surroundings. Attention and observation foster creative understanding, while imagination, interpretation, and even humor shape each artist’s response. Through varied approaches to the figure-ground relationship and scenes that suggest narrative, the works offer multiple perspectives on the relationship between individuals and their environment, inviting reflection on how we inhabit places and experience belonging.
If intimate knowledge of a place fosters belonging, Mark Clarke certainly belonged in the Willamette Valley, where he lived his entire life and which he frequently depicted. In this series of reimagined landscapes and rural scenes, nature, manmade objects and the human figure are treated as if ontologically inseparable. People and trees, hills and cliffs, boats and barns emerge as dreamy silhouettes: edges and forms are softened, details absent, and a shared palette of earth tones reinforces the contemplative mood. Yet the solitary figure remains the focal point, quietly drawing the viewer’s gaze.
Erik Sandgren’s familiarity with the Northwest landscape also runs deep. In this group of acrylic and egg tempera paintings, some works were created in situ, while others were recreated from memory, including the scenes evoking the Oregon beaches where he roamed as a child. Figures are treated like other elements in the landscape, built from layers and overlapping marks. Appearing in pairs or small groups, they remain tiny within their vast surroundings. Despite the absence of details, individuality emerges: we sense movement, attitude, intent. Sandgren’s people are actively engaged – walking, fishing, observing, interacting. What is suggested here is a sense of harmonious coexistence and being at home in the landscape.
Although Margaret Coe’s love of place has long extended beyond Oregon to parts of Europe, in recent years, she has found both subject and spiritual connection in the woods near her home. My Walden, her most recent painting, is emblematic in this regard, reflecting her experience of painting a form of communion with the natural world. The work depicts the artist seated in a clearing before tall trees, with tangled vegetation and fallen branches looming in the foreground. The figure is small within the expansive setting yet centrally placed. Figure and ground are united by the radiance that suffuses the scene, yet they do not fully merge – an essential condition for dialogue. When painting nature, Coe says she sees compositions everywhere, but she also strives to remain in conversation with a place where she feels deeply cared for, seeking to “manifest the sense of the sacredness of the place.”
The city of Portland, George Johanson’s longtime home, occupies a central place in his work: “Practically everything I’ve done with landscape has been the city of Portland. […] I feel like I’m doing a portrait over and over again of the city,” he once said. But these are not literal portraits. In this series of urban night scenes, imagination and fantasy play a key role, often through surrealist or expressionistic elements and touches of absurdism. Both formally and thematically, these compositions thrive on tension and contrast. In Nocturnal Mirrors, figures peer into multiple reflections of themselves, absorbed in a solipsistic world and oblivious to the surrounding cityscape. In his bus stop scenes, Johanson uses the shelter structure and patterns of light and darkness to partition space, heightening the sense of isolation among people waiting together yet lost in private thought. In Bus Stop #1, he overturns expectations by giving the figures a still-life quality while placing them within an environment alive with bright, clashing colors. The more minimalist Untitled composition evokes Eward Hopper in its quiet sense of separation within a shared space. Meanwhile, in Game Night, the explosion of artificial lights and swirling forms against the night sky give the place a mood of excitement that contrasts with the barely lit, inscrutable crowd.
David McCosh created the lithographs presented here in the early 1930s, before moving to Oregon. At the time, his figurative style reflected American social regionalism and the influence of Matisse. In these works, the artist’s gaze is that of a keen observer, at once sympathetic and wry, but external to what he is depicting. Viewers likewise become spectators as he captures moments of contemporary life: crowded street scenes, people lounging on the beach or under a tree, a woman in a park, a rider galloping through the countryside. In many of these works, the figures and landscape elements are somewhat stylized, often with touches of humor, in contrast to the realism of his sensitive portrait of fellow painter Francis Chapin. In his compositions, McCosh seamlessly integrates figure and environment through texture, vigorous line, and dramatic tonal contrast.
Sylvie Pederson
About the artists:
Mark Clarke (1935–2016), a fifth-generation Oregonian, earned a B.S. in 1959 and an MFA in 1965 from the University of Oregon, where he studied with David McCosh and met his lifelong partner, painter Margaret Coe. Clarke worked at the University of Oregon Museum of Art as curator and chief preparator before becoming a museum technician, while continuing to paint throughout his life. Working both outdoors and in the studio, he developed a complex layering technique that gave his acrylic paintings the depth and texture of oil. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections. In 2017–2018, he and Coe were honored with a retrospective at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Margaret Coe, an Oregonian since adolescence, studied with David McCosh and Jack Wilkinson at the University of Oregon, where she met her future husband, Mark Clarke. She earned an MFA in painting in 1978 and later taught at the University of Oregon and Lane Community College until her retirement. Throughout her career she exhibited widely across Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Her work has continually evolved, and in later paintings her subjects and formal elements often take on symbolic or spiritual dimensions. She has received numerous awards and Oregon Percent for Art commissions, and her work is held in museums and public collections in the United States and abroad. In 2017–2018 she and Clarke were honored with a retrospective at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
Born in Seattle, painter and printmaker George Johanson (1928–2022) moved to Portland in 1946 to study at the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art), where he later taught for twenty-five years before retiring in 1980. Known for his kindness and generosity toward students and fellow artists, Johanson remained active in Portland’s art community throughout a career spanning more than seven decades. He exhibited widely, and his work is held in major collections including the Smithsonian National Collection, the Portland Art Museum, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. He received the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award in 1992. The Karin Clarke Gallery has previously presented large exhibitions of his prints; this is the gallery’s first exhibition since his passing.
Painter and printmaker David McCosh (1903–1981) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began his teaching career before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon in 1934. He taught there until 1970, influencing several generations of artists—including Margaret Coe and Mark Clarke—and helping shape the direction of painting in the Pacific Northwest. Over time his work became increasingly abstract while remaining rooted in close observation of the natural world. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, which cares for the David John McCosh Memorial Collection and Archive, holds the largest body of works by and related to McCosh.
Born in Corvallis, painter and printmaker Erik Sandgren earned a BA from Yale in 1975 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Cornell in 1977. After returning to the Pacific Northwest, he taught for several decades at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington, retiring to Portland in 2017. Landscape has been a lifelong focus of his work, particularly in the Pacific Northwest as well as in England and continental Europe. Since 1978 he has led the annual Sandgren Workshop and PaintOut on the Oregon Coast, bringing together plein-air painters from across the region. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. He was recently invited to exhibit in the Oregon Governor’s Office in Salem, a rare honor previously bestowed on his father, artist Nelson Sandgren.
S.P.
