A Conversation with Nancy Pobanz
Artist
Eugene, Oregon
by
Ellen Waterston
Many dread driving across the high desert, mile after endless mile on long, desolate, two-lane highways. Go as fast as you can. Get it over with. There’s nothing of interest, nothing to see. It’s monotonous, boring, lackluster, monochromatic.
That would not be Eugene earth color artist Nancy Pobanz’s take on such a drive. When she fastens her seat belt for a trip through the desert she sees technicolor, she sees a well-stocked earth color paint supply store, she sees cattails and dogbane for cordage, sagebrush and bitterbrush for ink, she sees prehistory, mystery, and magic.
To be fair, she has something of a home court advantage. The subtle and often underappreciated wonders of Oregon’s high desert were something she acquired from her parents growing up in Ontario, Oregon. “At home we made art, we made everything.” She recalls her mother, a potter, taking her into the desert at a young age to collect clay, and her doctor father stopping to pick up rocks. He later gave them to the art department at Treasure Valley Community College to be used, as it turns out, to make paint pigment. The desert is not only Nancy’s native habitat but, thanks to her parents’ examples, a source of infinite possibility and creative inspiration.
As a freshman at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Pobanz found the campus environment too prescribed, too stifling for her freewheeling desert spirit. But on what was intended to be a short trip with her mother to a pottery workshop in Mexico, Nancy began to find her footing. When her mother headed home, Pobanz stayed in Cholula, Puela, learning Spanish and earning her first bachelor’s degree at the university there. Returning to the United States, she married and then studied at the University of Oregon, receiving her second bachelor’s in fiber art before the couple moved to Seattle. Though they have remained friends, when her husband came out as gay, Pobanz again felt without direction. But art once more came to the rescue. In 1985 she accepted an invitation to teach book arts and papermaking for the Duntog Foundation in the Philippines. Her six years in Baguio City “provided a great opportunity to participate with a dynamic group of national and local artists.” It also cemented her commitment to continue making art.
On her return, she rejoined her community of friends in Eugene, Oregon where she met her second husband (they recently celebrated their 27th anniversary) and earned her Master of Fine Arts in fibers. “It provided the springboard into my next phase of working with eastern Oregon mineral pigments.” Place, especially the high desert, became ever more central to her art.
Though she has been collecting pigments and making art from natural resources since 1996, with 300 colors collected and counting, art and science came together in 2016. Pobanz wanted “to capture the spirit of the desert through drawing the bones” of desert mammals and birds housed at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. She was directed to the lab of archaeologist Patrick O’Grady. Six months and many drawings later, O’Grady invited Pobanz to be the artist in residence on a prehistoric archeological dig at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter in southeastern Oregon.
It was her dream come true. Each summer through 2023 she attended the field school, camping on site, collecting pigments and perfecting one of her specialties—blind contour drawing, whereby she draws her subject matter, such as archaeologists at work, without looking at the paper. “The character emerges better this way than trying to make a realistic drawing,” she says. Off-season was spent in her Eugene studio creating and cataloging the colors, refining drawings and producing the larger mixed-media and three-dimensional wall pieces she is also known for.
Rock and color are synonymous to Pobanz. All the paints she uses are made from rocks. She grinds them with a mortar and pestle, then uses a glass muller to render them into powder. Looking at her work, the pastel-like colors seem to converse, know each other, understand their shared origins. “The energy is in the paint,” she says.
It was a perfect rotation, summers in the desert and the spring, fall and winter in her studio in Eugene. But all was thrown off course when Pobanz was confronted with yet another destabilizing event. She had gotten away with years of working long days in hot, dry desert heat, temperatures sometimes climbing into the 100s at the excavation site. But all of a sudden, her body had had enough. Headaches, light sensitivity, extreme fatigue set in. The diagnosis? Severe heat exhaustion. “I felt cross-eyed, couldn’t read, couldn’t tolerate any light.” She tried changing her sleep schedule, getting to the site in the cool of the early morning and leaving by 10 a.m. at the latest. But it didn’t work. “The last time I got heat exhaustion,” she recalls, “it was only 77 degrees.” In 2023, she had to make the decision to leave the desert behind. “It was so hard, so hard to give up the dig. I am not going at all anymore.”
It should come as no surprise, however, that the unsinkable Pobanz figured out a way to continue a long-distance relationship with the high desert. No longer actively on the site, she has turned her attention to the scientific cataloging of her colors, including precise information on where rocks were harvested to inform ongoing and future geological and archaeological explorations. The desert hues of powdered pigment notated and perfectly lined up in glass vials offer a symphony of color as nuanced, as subtle, as mysterious as the desert itself. This painstaking task is a far cry from her early days of collecting when the road and milepost number sufficed. She has come to appreciate the importance of pinning down specific locations of rock sources particularly when seeking to match them with colors appearing in Indigenous pictographs. “I love the idea of figuring out where the colors they used might have come from,” she states.
There’s no question Nancy Pobanz deeply misses working out in the high desert.“I don’t know what is ahead of me as an artist,” she says, briefly indulging her sadness. But in the next breath she enthusiastically describes the clay from the summit of Long Hollow in Catlow Valley that she is tempering with Mount Saint Helens volcanic ash. “I have made some ceramics and fired them. I hope to do more of that.” As far as Nancy Pobanz is concerned, as long as there is Earth, there is art to be made. “Passion for art is what pulls me. There is no other calculation.”
Feature photo of Nancy Pobanz at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter by Patrick O’Grady
Published September, 2024
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