Brave heart

Hessel closes shop, opens artistic adventure

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Jul 24, 2010

Contributed art / The Gresham Outlook

“The Girls” by Mary Jo Hessel.

Mary Jo Hessel’s pacemaker did as much for her art as it did for her heart.

Recovering from a pacemaker installation about six years ago, she elected to spend the down time sitting in an art class at Mt. Hood Community College.

“Six hours of drawing and I was in heaven,” she remembers.

In early July, vowing to celebrate her 65th birthday with an “act of bravery,” she opened her own one-woman show at the Art Reach Gallery in First Congregational Church, 1126 S.W. Park Ave., Portland.

The show continues through July. The gallery, across from the Portland Art Museum, is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Hessel, who owned and operated the popular Cloudtree & Sun store in downtown Gresham for 29 years, is a docent at the Portland Art Museum. Her seven years volunteering at the art museum gives her the “people fix” she needs after so many years as a Gresham retailer.

Though Cloudtree customers still mourn the loss of Gresham’s premier cooking and gift store, Hessel says she has moved from the art of the table to fine art. Her favorite and newest piece, a sprawling cross-shaped work, a tree in four parts is “the Cloudtree in my heart.”

Hessel paints her passions. One is a portrait of a friend, normally a quiet dresser, who dolled up in flamboyant prints and ate a berry parfait for lunch. “She has cancer,” Hessel says. “It was such a moment.”

Hessel likes goats. A painting of a pair of whimsical goats is called The Girls, and an angel goat of indeterminate sex is named St. Frances. Hessel claims not to be funny, but her titles put a whimsical finish on her works.

Her portraits of older women all show them with pacemakers. There is an element of mourning in some, they are women worn with illness, but still vibrant.

While it is sad, she says of those portraits, it is also healing.

“The process that goes on when you are making the art is quite extraordinary,” she marvels.

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