91-year-old Battle Ground artist revisits his unfinished sculptures

DAYBREAK — James Lee Hansen is finishing things up. He’s not starting any new sculptures these days, he said, but he is striving to complete decades-old pieces that were left undone.

Fortunately, the renowned sculptor keeps liking most everything he started, once upon a time. Only rarely, he said, does he find leftovers that he just wants to destroy.

Hansen has no taste for waste. His character was forged during a time of extreme scarcity and worldwide destruction, his wife, Jane, pointed out, and his generation became a cohort of “great scroungers, greatly creative and inventive minds. In this time of devastation, they were about making something real. If you did that, people really noticed.”

Jane sure noticed; she married two such men. First was Harvey Jack Lucas, a painting conservator and longtime friend of sculptor James Hansen and his first wife, Annie. After Harvey and Annie both died, in the early 1990s, James and Jane paired up. That was in 1994; since then, Jane has devoted herself to her second husband’s life and legacy.

“He is a deep guy,” she said. “I didn’t realize just how deep until after I married him.”

Sculpture heaven

Jane has worked to transform the couple’s 10-acre campus, northwest of Battle Ground, into a version of sculpture heaven: a border of tall firs embracing an emerald lawn where bronze abstractions and mythological creatures seem to mill about, gleaming in the sunshine. When the sun isn’t out, there are a couple of museum-style indoor galleries where more Hansen creations can be admired in comfort.

James Lee Hansen, who will be 92 years old on Tuesday, is one of the Pacific Northwest’s best-known artists. Across a seven-decade career (so far), he’s created nearly 800 abstract expressionist sculptures that explore the connections between mysticism, mythology and human psychology.

“‘Abstract’ is music without the lyrics,” Hansen said.

Some Hansen pieces are as modest as “The Eaglet,” a small bronze figurine perched inside the Portland Art Museum; others are as substantial (and familiar to locals) as the eight-foot-tall “Guardian” at the entrance to Clark College’s Cannell Library, and “Glyph Singer No. 3,” part of downtown Vancouver’s Sculpture Garden on Broadway; and some are as monumental as the 15-foot-tall panels that form the facade of what’s now iQ Credit Union.

Hansen creations are also on display at major art museums in Seattle and San Francisco. Large-scale, outdoor architectural pieces mark government buildings in both Olympia and Salem.

“We have about 200 of his sculptures here” at Daybreak, Jane said. “The rest are out in the world.”

Copying, creating

Hansen was born in Tacoma in 1925, and moved with his parents to Vancouver in 1936 during the depths of the Great Depression. His parents were not even slightly artistic or intellectual, he said. His father was an upholsterer and prize fighter, he said, and there was rarely a book to be found in the house.

But Hansen’s mother praised to the skies everything her son did, he said, including the childhood sketches that were mostly copies of newspaper cartoons and advertisements. Later sketches were for the current events page of his school newspaper; and, he also remembers devoting special attention to copying figures of certain shapely icons, like 1930s “blonde bombshell” Jean Harlow.

“Copying the masters” is how all artists begin, he said. “I really think, before you create, you have to learn to replicate.” Just the same, he said, he hated school art classes because you had to “stay inside the lines.”

A little spot

Hansen is convinced that he would have died in World War II if he’d been able to join the Marines. But the Marine recruiting office in downtown Portland happened to be closed for lunch when he showed up immediately after his high school graduation in 1943; undeterred, Hansen went next door and joined the Navy instead.

He wound up on the USS Preston, a destroyer that was “in combat all the time” in the South Pacific, he said. Death and destruction were all around him, he said, and he was frequently amazed to discover he’d survived again.

Sorrow in his eyes, Hansen began a tale: “It was noon and the seas was just as calm as glass.” The gun captain on his ship took a food break and Hansen took over for a moment.

“I noticed a little spot just west of the sun,” he said. “Nobody saw it but me.” He sounded the alarm but it was too late — the spot grew into a Japanese dive bomber that managed to destroy a nearby aircraft carrier, the USS Princeton. It was the beginning of a sequence of horrors that ended near Okinawa, where Hansen’s ship was supposed to go on what would have been an advance “suicide mission,” he said — but didn’t because of a minor equipment problem. Another ship went instead.

The next day, he said, he was one of the crew that picked up “twisted, mangled bodies and pieces,” wrapped them in canvas and buried them at sea.

“They all got killed,” Hansen said with fresh tears in his eyes, 75 years later.

Life and work

After the war, Hansen came home, married Annie, got admitted to the Portland Art Museum School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art) and bought real estate for a studio and foundry. That was Burnt Bridge Studio, and it sat near the current borders of Leverich Park and what used to be Arnold Park. The Hansens lived and worked there until 1977, when they lost the land thanks to the construction of state Highway 500, but emerged with enough cash to buy acreage near Battle Ground and start his 4,000-square-foot Daybreak Studio there.

Hansen’s reputation as a great talent grew quickly. According to a booklet about Hansen by Maryhill Museum of Art curator Stephen Graff, cubist painter Max Weber caught Hansen’s work at the Portland Art Museum as early as 1951, and remarked, “Now there is a young man who knows what sculpture is all about.”

Hansen was offered an assistantship with a more-renowned sculptor in New York, but turned it down. He made wax molds of ancient Columbia River Gorge petroglyphs before waters rising behind the new John Day and Dalles dams submerged them, and gave away copies to regional museums. He launched a “Builders Arts” group — nicknamed “Hansen’s Art Gang” by local media — to collaborate on large-scale art projects for spots such as churches, malls, hotels and convention centers, but eventually dropped that and went back to pursuing his own artistic vision.

Hansen has never been concerned about commissions, sales or reviews, he said. (Maybe that’s easy for him to say, since all have always been good.)

“I make it because I want to make it,” he said. “I make it for my own satisfaction.”

Makes you think

A great sculpture, Hansen said, contains “the spark of life.”

“The most beautiful sculpture in the world is a seashell,” he said. “There isn’t one person in this world who walks along the beach and isn’t impressed by a seashell.

“It’s made by a snail. But it lasts much longer than the snail does. It’s most important and impressive when the snail is gone. I’m not as important as my work,” he concluded.

Earlier this month, Hansen was working on a huge metal abstraction called “Sky Skipper,” part of a long-running “Sky Series.” Drawings and miniatures go all the way back to the 1950s, he said, but this jumbo version was something he never finished. Meanwhile, he also mentioned recently stumbling across little unfinished nude figure “that’s been flopping around since the 1950s or maybe the 1940s. I thought, ‘This needs attention and a base.’”

Surrounded in his studio by tools, equipment, towering figures and shining shapes, Hansen demanded of himself: “How much isn’t up to snuff? How much time do I have to bring it to fruition?”

That’s not a new dilemma for him. Hansen has always had too many ideas, no shortage of invaluable assistants to help with welding, pouring and production — and never enough time. He’s also grown increasingly wary of industrial accidents as he’s grown older; he described mishaps like “bullets of liquid aluminum” randomly firing through notches in a mold at a Portland foundry where he used to work.

“When you’ve got 400 pounds of molten metal hanging in the air, it makes you think,” he laughed.

But Hansen can’t stop thinking even harder about life and art. Making sculpture is just like making a life, he mused: “Disassembling. Reassembling. And discovering. You begin to see the various algorithms, or recipes, or equations, that everything is made of.”