Paul Havas, Poet Laureate of Northwest Landscapes

Paul Havas, the landscape painter who died of pancreatic cancer last week at the age of 71, was a prolific, gifted, and enthusiastic ambassador for the serenity of his adopted Northwest, moving easily from the quiet, confident vibrancy of Seattle at night to the wistful, fog-shrouded expanses of Western Washington's valleys and waterways.

Havas was raised in New Jersey and graduated from Syracuse. He arrived in Seattle in 1963 and earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Washington.

His "Night City" paintings of the 1980s evoke a dormant, languid Seattle, with muted flashes of light that foreshadow its vitality. His mountain series was more abstract, with powerful shapes and jagged contrasts.

In his career, Havas returned again and again to the flatlands of the Skagit Valley, the Snohomish Valley, and the Long Beach peninsula, much as the plein-air painters of Paris moved from the city to the river estuaries of the coast of France. In cranberry bogs and tulip fields he found a vivid foreground; in the long, low oyster sheds of Willapa Bay a steady keel for what his fellow plein-air artist William Elston called his "wet, salty landscapes." It was Elston who anointed Havas the Poet Laureate of Northwest landscape painting.

Havas started showing at the Gordon Woodside Gallery in 1970. His most recent one-man show two years ago, at what is now the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, showed what Cornichon called "a calmer, more confident artist, no longer shrouding his scenery in mists and fog but giving them stronger light, cleaner lines and evanescent reflections of sheds and cabins on the ponds and backwaters of the valley floor." The review was titled "Under the Skagit's sheltering sky"

Glenda McPherson, a Madrona neighbor of Havas and the owner of one of his Skagit Valley canvases, said, "I delight every day in the product of his heart, mind and soul. I am truly sad, for me and for Seattle."

A memorial service is being organized by the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, 2101 9th Avenue, Seattle, 206-622-7243.

Johsel Namkung's Remarkable Nature Photographs

Josel Namkung with his 1981 photograph "Lake Juliuis, North Cascades"

The current exhibit at the Gordon Woodside / John Braseth Gallery in South Lake Union, titled "Masters Behind the Lens," features works by Ansel Adams and Johsel Namkung.

Adams is represented by a framed group of six familiar black and white prints, offered at $200,000. Far more interesting are the dozen or so vivid color prints by the 92-year-old photographer Johsel Namkung, selling for $5,500 apiece. It's as good a show as one can find outside a museum; in fact, the last time these photographs were exhibited was in 2006 at the Seattle Art Museum.

Namkung is a remarkable polymath. Born in Korea to a Chinese family that converted to Christianity, he studied music in Japan. In 1940, as an apiring opera singer, he took first prize in the All-Japan Music Contest. After the war, he and his wife, Mineko, moved to Seattle, where Johsel earned a master's degree in music at the University of Washington. Because he spoke several Asian languages fluently, he was then hired by Northwest Orient Airlines, but he soon discovered photography and embarked on a series of apprenticeships with the likes of George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, Mark Tobey and Ansel Adams himself. At one point in the 1950s, during the simmering conflict between North and South Korea, the Namkungs were declared enemy aliens and slated for deportation. Mineko, for a time, worked as a kimono-clad waitress at Canlis to help pay the family's legal bills.

To support his burgeoning career as an artist, Namkuing took a position as a scientific photographer with the UW School of Medicine. A friend gave him $500 to buy a Sinar 4 x 5-inch view camera and several lenses, which he used for his nature photography for the next three decades. In his book, "Ode to the Earth" (pbulished by Cosgrove Editions in 2006) Namkung describes "the loneliness and exultation" of reaching the top of the mountain, "standing all by yourself with your camera."

The actual printmaking is done by Namkung's longtime collaborator Dick Busher, who first scans the negative into a digital file. Namkung orchestrates the balance of colors (tone, hue and density), then Busher makes a proof using a highly calibrated Epson color printer fed by a 44-inch-wide roll of cotton-based, archival paper. The process uses eight inks and takes over two hours for each print.

The results are astonishingly textured, almost painterly images, from closeups of an icicle to a telephoto frame of heather on a mountainside. They make you gasp with wonder.

The exhibit runs through October 15th and is free. Woodside/Braseth, 2101 9th Ave., 206-622-7243, www.woodsidebrasethgallery.com. Open 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday.