Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
Overview:
An Indigenous artist who lives on Umatilla Indian Reservation land in northeastern Oregon, Lavadour’s abstract landscapes have evolved through his many years of painting.
James Lavadour has spent decades looking at the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon: observing the sky and land, seeing direct evidence of the natural processes that have formed its geology over centuries.
The painter, a self-taught artist who was selected earlier this summer to create large-scale public artwork at Portland International Airport, works in landscapes that are not representational. He does not paint pictures — he paints what he calls “events,” layered figurative landscapes that evoke Oregonian geography without depicting it directly.
He treats the paint itself like it’s part of a geological process: letting it drip, wiping it away, layering it repeatedly. Those abstractions are displayed in architectural grids of different panels, making Lavadour’s work both organically free-flowing and within tight physical boundaries.
A retrospective of Lavadour’s decades of work, “Land of Origin,” is on display at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, on campus at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Lavadour and curator Danielle Knapp spoke about “Land of Origin” and how his work has changed with time.
1980s – Beginnings
Lavadour became a full-time working artist in the 1980s, but started painting as a teenager with what he called “a pretty literal idea of what I was looking at.”
His early works are in earthy tones, often with skeletons or other direct imagery as part of the compositions. But even this early, he’s working with the grid format to arrange the pieces in, which becomes a hallmark of his work.
1990s – Development
Lavadour was introduced to printmaking in the 1990s, and started the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in 1992. Working in layers helped Lavadour refine his approach in both prints and paintings. Placing an abstract layer atop other abstract layers built a dimensionality that gelled with Lavadour’s developing vision of space and time.
“I really didn’t need to decorate it with figures or other types of objects,” he said about what printmaking taught him. “It wasn’t a picture. It was a painting, and a painting was an event.”
2000s – Interiors
In the 2000s, Lavadour’s work expanded to include “interiors,” with stacked abstractions of forms even less suggestive of traditional landscapes than his prior work. Though “Ice” isn’t one of his “interiors,” it’s indicative of his approach in this time period.
“He’s playing with space and his own perception of layering,” Knapp said of Lavadour’s work in this period. “He used that as a way in his work for that next decade to further explore how he wanted to represent his experience of the land.”
2010s and 2020s – Recent work
Lavadour’s work in the last 10 years looks bolder than ever in color, shape and the dripping treatment of the paint itself. Now in his 70s, he said he has a more internalized knowledge of life and the world now that he didn’t have when he first started.
“I’ve deepened my understanding of why I make work,” Lavadour said. “I’ve come to think that painting and these events, and this insight and this reflection upon and search for beauty, it uplifts the spirit. It affects the human heart. It’s not the mind I’m interested in. It’s the heart.”
How to see “Land of Origin”
“James Lavadour: Land of Origin” is on display at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Gallery, on the University of Oregon campus, through January 11, 2026.
The museum is open to visitors from Wednesday to Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. all other days. Admission for adults is $5, admission for seniors 62 and older is $3. Admission for all other visitors, including UO college students, faculty and staff, is free.
