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[ ♪♪♪ ] ALLISON: I want dolls to have a little bit of character, I guess.

They don't have to be all beautiful and...

I love beautiful dolls, and I have some beautiful dolls, and then I also have ones that have kind of buck teeth.

WOMAN: A lot of people will see their mother or a long-lost aunt or uncle.

MAN: It just was beckoning you to fill in the blanks.

It just had so many stories it was telling.

This chair all alone in a spotlight, kind of sitting there by itself, and that was the "aha" moment.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The thing that I like most about dolls is that I can do pretty much anything I want, it's just in miniature.

I like building things, and the sets and the furniture.

So I get to do all of those things and I don't have to answer to anybody.

My name is Allison Wonder, and I work with dolls.

I want dolls to have a little bit of character, I guess.

I don't-- You know, they don't have to be all beautiful and-- I mean, I love beautiful dolls and I have some beautiful dolls, and then I also have ones that have kind of buck teeth and they also have a little bit of a sadness to them, so they're like, "Rescue me!"

It's like, "Okay, I'll bring you all home."

I have definitely met people who are disturbed by my dolls.

I have gotten to the point where it's like if they've never been here, I do make sure that they're not scared of dolls.

Because this is not the place for them.

Lots of eyes... [ chuckles ] looking and watching everything.

Right now I'm working on an outer-space kind of theme.

I had started building this kind of rocket ship several years ago, and I can make this spaceman outfit and helmet and all these things.

Took me a couple days just for the outfit, and took like a week for me to figure out how to make this helmet work.

This little guy, his name is Vlad, as all good vampires are Vlads, aren't they?

I'd always wanted to do fangs, and so I finally just got brave enough to try it.

And I'm glad I really did.

I've just always wanted a cute vampire.

They don't all have to look mean.

[ people chattering indistinctly ] [ ♪♪♪ ] There is a whole doll community.

There's all sorts of different people who are making wigs and clothes.

-And you make them?

-I do not.

-Your other friend does.

-My friend does.

-I just help her.

-ALLISON: Amazing.

Just anything you might want, there's a little bit of everything for everybody.

And it's really nice to be in a room full of people who don't really even look at you twice.

Like, we're all a little bit weird.

It's comfortable, it's fun, and it's really great to meet all the artists and see all the new stuff.

Oh, my God.

Do you need a flying squirrel?

Boot-making was probably my biggest self-challenge.

And it took me a while, but I feel like I actually met the challenge.

Allison makes the most amazing shoes and boots.

[ ♪♪♪ ] They are made like human shoes.

Real leather, real stacked heels, many, many grommets.

They're little works of art, you know, and you can always feel the love in Allison's creations.

Allison has a totally unique look.

It's whimsical, it's sometimes a little sad.

Or maybe soulful is a better word.

I think soulful is a really good word.

And it's imaginative, totally his own thing.

ALLISON: I think the biggest gift I gave myself with being creative was to make mistakes.

It's like, "You know, we're just going to try it.

If it's a mistake, you can start over.

Or we'll find something new that we didn't know we liked."

And sometimes they work and it's great.

[ radio beeping, then indistinct chatter over radio ] [ ♪♪♪ ] The ideas for my tableaus, really anything will inspire me.

They can just start off as just a small, little piece, and all of a sudden I've got this whole story or tableau that I want to make.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The '70s tableau, you know, you've got bell bottoms, you've got bare feet, just these different ideas of looking back from my own childhood, whether I got to experience those things or not.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My childhood was messy.

Just a lot of bouncing around.

I was in kind of the foster-care system for three, four years and like 12 different placements before I finally got adopted at 9.

A lot of unknowns, I think, can really alter someone's life at that age.

And that was, you know, just enough to make a nice, fat mess.

[ laughs ] And I think that that's one of the reasons why I fill my apartments up to the brim.

Like it's kind of like a grounding thing: "This is where I live, I'm not moving."

I like nesting and I like nesting for my dolls.

Building their little houses and rooms and things, everybody gets their place and their nice-- Safe and sound, with a permanent home, well loved.

Sometimes I like to take my dolls out to different spots and areas and just take photos with them.

Depending on where you go, there will be a whole bunch of different props that I drag with me, whether I use them or not.

All right, guys.

[ humming ] Oh, let's do this.

Look at that!

That's perfect balance.

I think the dolls have a good time when we're out.

Except for an occasional, you know, face plant here and there.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Some of my favorite scenes that I've made are the kids in the winter...

I've got some great beach photos.

I like to imagine that they're always happy to leave the house and go out on adventures.

And sometimes that can get a little difficult, because I can't take them all.

Good, good.

Sometimes there's some sad faces, like, "Oh, they didn't get to go."

But, yeah, I try to get everybody out as often as I can.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I would've never thought that this would be my life.

It just kind of happened, and it happened because I allowed it to happen.

I don't even know if my younger self would've been able to comprehend this.

You know, it's just like, "Oh, yeah, you have a whole apartment full of dolls."

You know, it's like, "What?!

That's crazy!"

I'm like, "Eh, here we are."

[ chuckles ] [ sewing machine rattling softly ] [ ♪♪♪ ] What I'm known for mostly in my paintings is probably the chair compositions.

My name's Gabe Fernandez, and I'm a painter.

I show at Russo Lee Gallery in Portland.

Do representational/photorealist painting.

I'm always painting spaces that I just want to meditate on.

They always start with a familiar object, and an empty table is something that I've seen a million times and have a million different perceptions of.

So what I really like to do is I put these objects in spaces, whether it's an empty chair and an empty table, and then just have real subtle things like shadows casted on it.

Almost like purely abstracts of space.

And it's relatable on a representational level.

I like to create spaces that you can also get lost in the shapes and the colors and the lines and all the formal elements that make great abstract painting.

They also make great realist painting, too, for the same exact effect.

I was born in Caldwell, Idaho, and we moved very shortly after my birth to Sweet Home, Oregon.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Sweet Home growing up was about the timber industry, first and foremost.

I mean, that's what really ran the town.

So my dad worked at a plywood mill.

When the timber industry bottomed out a little bit, he lost his job and was out of work for a little while.

I think that's where a lot of love for the art came from, because it was just a lot of downtime.

And my dad was kind of creative and was into calligraphy and those kind of things.

When I graduated high school, I had a few birds whisper in my ear that if you wanted to make it in the creative industry, you may want to leave town.

And, plus, it was a lot of speculation about what the future of small towns in Oregon were going to be like with the timber industry kind of being up in the air.

I got married in '95 in Eugene, and we quit our jobs, moved to Portland and went to PNCA, and that was a blast.

There was a group of us that would follow teachers around and just hound them for wisdom and information, anything we could glean because we realized when you're in art school, like, this isn't going to last forever.

Right after we graduated art school, everybody's doing a couple different things.

They're either going into teaching, they're either going to go get their master's and then go to teaching again, or whatever's going to happen.

I sort of ended up falling into a completely different category and trying something new, and that's where I ended up in social work.

[ ♪♪♪ ] There was a homeless center for youth in downtown Portland, and it was a pretty straightforward regiment: Kids that were going to stay there would come in at 8:00 sharp, and I think we would open the doors up and they'd have a half-hour to get in there, and they close the doors and lock them at 8:30.

So if you weren't in by 8:30, you're done.

[ people chattering indistinctly ] It would just be this mad rush of just energy, chaos.

Every night, it'd be the same routine, and at 10:00, we would just close the lights.

And so it would go from this super chaotic, loud, crazy energy to all of a sudden silence.

[ clock ticking ] There's something about that shift, that very quick shift, that makes it a very eerie, kind of pensive moment where you're just all of a sudden alone with your thoughts.

So I was sort of always searching for some subject matter, and one night, totally quiet, about 10:05, I kind of look over, and there's a chair sitting in a spotlight, just all by itself.

And it's just there.

And it's an old '60s chair, and it's kind of rough around the edges, probably donated from some office space down the street, who knows.

It just was beckoning you to fill in the blanks.

It just had so many different stories it was telling.

I happened to have my sketch book, I happened to have my paints, and I just kind of did a little sketch of this chair all alone in the spotlight, kind of sitting there by itself, and that was the "aha" moment.

And that was the day that I realized, "This is a subject matter, in some form or the other, that I could easily pursue the rest of my life."

That was well over 20 years ago.

Since then, it's branched off into all these other things.

But in the end, I still come back to the chair, because it's such a representation of the human form in some ways, an imprint of a human figure.

And it almost tells more about itself than a human can, in some ways.

My latest show was titled "First Person."

This body of work was probably one of the most challenging undertakings I've had to do, and I think a lot of that had to do with the events that's gone on in the last couple years, between COVID, the wildfires, some of the unrest we've had in society.

I was really starting to second-guess my whole vision of the celebration of solitude and the quiet stillness of things.

When COVID hit, it kind of put all of that into question.

[ ♪♪♪ ] It suddenly, like, made my work in some ways, when I was looking back at it, kind of sad.

I never visualized it so much like that before.

All the rules that I'd been playing by for the last 20 years were suddenly, like, out the window.

"What am I going to do with this?"

[ music playing ] What I ended up doing is, like, not putting so much pressure on myself.

And kind of going back to my roots of when I was first out of school and I didn't have, like, a real strict agenda about anything.

And I decided, "I'm just going to paint whatever I want.

I'm not going to second-guess it.

And if it's going to bounce all over the place subject-matter-wise, that's totally fine, too."

I think one of the most interesting pieces that came out of that show was a wind-up duck toy.

This one kept coming up in my head, and I was-- I got such a nice, happy feeling from it, and the person who purchased the painting, I happened to run into them at the gallery, and she just gave me this huge spiel about how this kind of painting is-- This piece was so needed in this time that we're dealing with, and we need positivity, and that's what's so needed right now.

And I never really thought about it until she presented it verbally to me, and it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks, like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I was subconsciously thinking."

[ ♪♪♪ ] After this show opened, it was very heavily on my mind, all these feelings that the duck invoked, and then walking by this store, there's all these lunchboxes in this store that I walk by called Billy Galaxy.

And it's this vintage toy store.

-Hey, guys.

-Hey, how's it going?

I probably go in there about three times a week, just kind of looking for different compositions that will invoke some sort of possibilities of a great painting.

The way that particular store is curated is quite brilliant.

They really have the same, almost the same mindset I do about what these objects mean.

And so I can really relate to that.

MICHAEL: They're super evocative.

You've got your classic hero look, your Flash Gordon, your Buck Rogers... GABE: I was sort of eyeballing these two figures for the last few weeks every time I visited, knowing there was just something about the way they were posed.

They're just these little 2-inch little figures that, I don't know, there was something about them that had this super nostalgic feeling.

-See you later, Michael.

-Take care.

It looked so much like these figurines that used to be in the toy box at my grandma's, and she'd keep a basket full of little toys for any visiting kids to play with.

They were usually worn down, but there was something comforting about these little guys that were in the toy box and I would still play with them, and you would just bide your time while you were spending time at Grandma's.

It was a fleeting moment that I never really thought of consciously until I was in the store, and didn't even hit me the first few times I saw the figures, "Oh, this is about Grandma's house."

It's like comfort food.

There's something, once again, familiar about those sort of environments from our past.

Since visiting this store, I'm starting to gather kind of a treasure chest of objects that I think might have possibilities into making a body of work that invokes the same concept that the duck paintings started.

But I want to see how far we can push it and see what other directions it can go.

I'm really, once again, sticking with that same theme of, "Okay, that makes me feel a certain way."

In order to grow as an artist, you have to keep acting like you're just brand-new at this.

It's how you avoid getting into ruts or getting a creative block.

I think the security I have is I trust that feeling I have in my gut: "There's something special here."

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: I like to put big heads into my painting.

I like to put a man's head on a woman's body, and vice versa.

A lot of people will see their mother or a long-lost aunt or uncle.

Others'll say, "What's that guy doing?

It looks like he's doing this."

And it's like, okay, if that's what you see, I'm fine with it.

"Modern Man" was probably the third collage painting that I did.

I found this guy who looked like, "Oh, gosh, now I've got to do all the housework because I'm a modern man."

This painting is called "Roller Baby."

It's a man's head on a baby girl's body, roller skating through New York.

I was kind of messing with an Escher thing where you can see the arms going through the building.

I've only been painting for a few years, like maybe two and a half years.

My style has evolved very quickly because I've spent the last 39 years as a graphic designer wanting to be an artist.

Things just took off.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Four months ago, I decided to start working in collage.

And it was like I could combine my graphic design with my painting.

This is a giant man sitting on Tillamook Head.

And this line of people waiting to view the giant man sitting on the rock.

And he's going to be headless right now, because I put the head in later.

This is my bag of heads.

A lot of mugshots or old war pictures from the First World War or the Civil War.

And so when I'm painting, I go through my bag of heads and I look till the head speaks to me.

I rarely use a smiling face, because that just looks like a selfie.

I don't want my people smiling.

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] My good friend, Tom Vandel, who's a copywriter, started driving for Uber.

Yeah, I just like driving.

I like driving and talking to people.

And he was emailing me these little stories that he had written about the people that were riding in his car.

I always eavesdrop on what people are talking about.

And I just fell in love with them and thought, "Wow, these kind of go with some of my paintings."

And she said, "Well, I need a way to show my images, my paintings, and I was going to do a little book."

So I asked him if he wanted to make a book together.

It has his writing and my art.

This is my favorite story.

The lady got in the car and she was wearing too much perfume, and it says, "Too much perfume, too much perfume... losing consciousness."

I could hardly breathe.

This painting is called "Sad Day."

This is about a woman and boyfriend fighting.

Who would do that?

I mean, couldn't you wait?

I just thought, "Man, this is like being a voyeur or something."

It was really interesting.

[ ♪♪♪ ] This is probably an old mugshot, and the guy looks serious.

That's probably what drew me to this one.

I think my most favorite part is putting the face on.

I usually wait till the very end to do that just because I feel like that's the payoff.

And then I also really like to draw in the paint.

I love to paint.

I paint every day, at least six hours a day.

It was always in there.

So I feel like I stored up 39 years of this desire to paint, and so now I have like a million ideas in there and just wanting to come out.

I don't know what I did with your horn.

I'm sorry, sir.

[ ♪♪♪ ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at the stories we're working on right now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

ALLISON: Do you need a flying squirrel?

Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.