Bonding with Blue, here and at the beach

There’s an odd little corner of Hazel Dell, tucked away behind busy muffler and neon-sign and Subway sandwich shops, where artworks get cranked out at a similarly industrial pace.

“I’m proud to say that 3,500 paintings have come out of this building,” said painter and teacher Blue Bond. “I don’t teach people how to be great artists. I teach them how to paint a picture.”

The Blue Bond Studio and Gallery hosts dozens of students every week, and Bond tries to send each student home with a finished painting each and every time. He calls his technique “Power Painting” and starts off by projecting and outlining photographs on canvas. Then he can counsel students about backgrounds and base layers, brush strokes and final details.

“Everything in steps,” he said one recent night while helping Olga Miller think about the texture she’d need to underlie a complicated outdoor scene busy with trees and leaves — plus a park bench and a leaning umbrella. “There’s nothing difficult or mysterious about it. It’s like learning to hit a golf ball. You hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. And then you’ve made it all the way to the green.

“I love the shine you put on her eyebrow,” Bond told student Lee Jenkins, who was working on a large, loving portrait of his wife. “That is an incredible artwork. I’m so proud it’s coming out of this studio.”

Colorful

Clif Stewart’s alter ego has been Blue Bond since he was a child — long before he ever picked up a paintbrush. He doesn’t know why or where the nickname came from, he said. He just knows that it stuck.

Bond inherited his father’s habit of drawing and doodling, he said. “I wasn’t worth a damn at reading, writing and arithmetic” in school, he said, but he earned easy A’s in art.

Eventually, Bond went to work as a journeyman sign painter. He loved working on big, bold projects, climbing ladders and perching on scaffolding. He was working in his native Los Angeles when he was offered a job in Vancouver, B.C., so one day in 1977, he drove north.

Serendipity stepped in. During what was going to be a 10-minute break for coffee in this Vancouver, Bond met Don Buss, then the owner of the Monterey Hotel, who was busy envisioning a vast series of mosaics, 80 feet long and 4 feet high and brimming with western nostalgia: cowboys gambling and drinking and having a grand ol’ cowboy time.

Bond unwittingly entered into negotiations for the job. Within half an hour, he said, there was $5,000 cash on the counter. Bond never made it to that other Vancouver. Instead, he rented space in Hazel Dell to do the work. The Columbian did a story. Curious neighbors started visiting. More jobs started materializing.

Bond wound up buying property that’s both convenient and hidden away — on dead-end Northeast 10th Avenue, just off Northeast Highway 99 and 68th Street, near the foot of Hazel Dell — for a home and workshop for his own company, Markon Signs and Decals. He led Markon for 38 years, he said. Then he sold the business and transformed his workshop into an art gallery and studio — an anchor for an eccentric little neighborhood all its own.

There’s an old church here, repurposed as Clark County’s only mosque; a handful of modest older homes perched on a couple of steep, dead-end lanes; and the colorful, eye-catching little empire that Blue Bond shares with his wife, Karen — the art studio and their petite home.

Signs for the times

When Mt. St. Helens blew its top in May 1980, Bond smelled more than hot ash — he smelled opportunity. Within a day, Bond said, Markon Signs was busy cranking out commemorative posters, T-shirts, bumper stickers and plenty more. (Bond had also started a gallery and gift shop that turned out to be a little too near the action; when roads to the mountain were closed, and stayed closed, for years, Bond’s business wound up about 150 feet inside that zone, he said.)

For decades, his immediate neighbor in Hazel Dell was a friendly rival, the Vancouver Sign Company, owned by then-Mayor Bruce Hagensen. The firms referred customers to one another while making different kinds of signs, Bond said: Hagensen did powered, lighted, neon signs while Bond handled the hand-painted and silk-screened. He lettered and logoed the sides of service vehicles like C-Tran buses and police cars, he said.

Another difference: Bond ran a union shop and made signs for Democrats during political seasons; Hagensen did Republicans. In 2008, Bond said, he was delighted — and harried — to do 500 large signs for the local Obama campaign.

But by then, he said, computers were taking over the art world along with the rest of the world. Bond, who said he’s just about managed to figure out his cellphone, never had any interest in working on computer screens instead of real signs. “That’s just not for me,” he said. “It was fun, but it was time to stop.”

Power painting

That’s not surprising when you see Bond’s big, bold, earthy and occasionally racy paintings. There’s a fair bit of flesh on display on his studio walls — and it runs the gamut from cool, restrained and refined to sensual, curvaceous and even leered at.

But there are also horses and wildlife, motorcycles and boats, sea captains and cowboys, fishing poles and family portraits. One big joke of a painting shows Bond himself as a tiny figure perched in the palm of his gigantic and tolerant wife, Karen. “She has the real control,” Bond chuckled.

Bond teaches painting at various levels. The first time The Columbian visited, he was preparing for a beginning class by distributing outlined Seahawks logos that would get colored in by about a dozen students (“for Father’s Day,” he said); the following night was a more advanced class with fewer students and much more individualized attention.

“Painting is something I always wanted to do,” said beginning student Olga Miller. “But life got busy, and I forgot this world existed. Now I am hooked.”

Blue at the beach

Bond loves his little corner of Hazel Dell, he said; he also loves the town of Cannon Beach, which is so packed with artists and galleries, he considers it the “Carmel of Oregon” — referring to the historic California coastal art colony. Bond was strolling the town and fantasizing about opening his own gallery there when his eye landed on a “For Lease” sign in a window, he said.

Now, Cannon Beach is the site of the second Blue Bond Studio and Gallery. The only drawback, Bond said, is spending hours driving back and forth every week.

If you go to Cannon Beach this summer, watch out for one particular Bond work plastered all over town — on posters, signs, even T-shirts — since he won the design competition for last month’s 52nd annual sandcastle festival.