The Artist And The Art Collector
I went to an estate sale and I brought home more than belongings
On a drizzly Friday morning in January, I waited in line to enter the estate of prominent Portland artist Doug Lynch (not to be confused with filmmaker David Lynch). About 40 other people stood in front of me. Men with gray hair and round wire frames, a trio of women about my age wearing dad hats and tote bags, someone in an oversized yellow raincoat with a child-sized backpack. Each person came prepared with IKEA bags or bins or baskets in hopes of filling them with precious finds from the three-story home. Probably like everyone else, I learned about the sale on estatesalefinder.com, where I often look for secondhand furniture and home goods. Following my curiosity that morning to Northwest Portland, I couldn’t predict I’d end up waiting in the rain for three hours.
I spent some of my time in line learning about Doug and his wife, Alix, from news stories, gallery blurbs, and obituaries. Doug was a graphic artist whose most iconic piece is still in the Timberline Lodge. In the 1930s, at age 24, he was commissioned to design, carve, and paint nine large linoleum murals for the resort’s cafeteria on Mount Hood. He spent most of his career freelancing and teaching at the Portland Museum School, and he even owned a studio in the Galleria. One of his other significant projects was designing Portland’s city flag, with its blocks of green and intersecting blue, yellow, and white lines.
His wife was equally interesting. Alix was also an owner of The Design Source in the Galleria, where she occupied the studio’s front space with an import boutique. She curated work from artisans around the world, including delicate Mexican straw Christmas ornaments and intricate colorful tapestries from Ethiopia, Peru, and India. Alix died in 2022, outliving her husband by 18 more years.
In a 2004 interview with the Oregonian only a few months before his death at age 96, Doug said:
"I didn't become an artist. I always was, from the time I was a child — everybody put pencils in my hand, colored chalk and all that stuff — and so there was no transition from the point when I was whatever I was as a child to becoming an artist. It was just a continuous process.”