A local myth finds life through art in Portland's Old Town
As fall fell on Portland last year, the city’s Green Line—the subway running through the Old Town District—received a whimsical makeover. Sponsored by TriMet, the area’s public transit system, local artist Daniel Duford installed eight “story” panels and two bronze and cement sculptures collectively titled, The Green Man of Portland.
Inspired by a fictional fusion of fact and fancy—and threaded through with references to local culture and landmarks—Duford’s work is based on the legend of a green archer flying through the city’s tree-lined streets. In a coincidence befitting the fanciful spirit of his project, Duford didn’t realize that the site designated for his work was called the Green Line until the process was nearly completed.
One of the larger TriMet-sponsored public works, Duford’s project spans 10 leafy blocks of Old Town, also known as Chinatown, an area that has undergone a number of transformations over the years. Today, visitors will find Duford’s pictures—influenced by ’70s horror comics and WPA-era drawings— protected under Plexiglas on table-like structures alongside two larger-thanlife sculptures inspired by characters from the story.
This is not the first time Duford, also an instructor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, has explored narrative. From his 2006 exhibition of drawings and sculptures, The Sleeping Giant, to the more recent 280-page comic book, The Naked Boy, storytelling is woven throughout Duford’s multimedia practice. By invoking allegory, history, folklore and comics, his work questions how the stories we tell examine who we are and how we define ourselves. While he has engaged weighty issues in the past, including the relationship between power and vulnerability, The Green Man of Portland is more playful.
The sensibility and storyline of this piece are in keeping with the current times, when recession anxiety seems to have raised our collective appetite for bedtime stories and spiritual wisdom. Duford’s poetic text is generous, if open-ended, in its embrace of both daydreams and passersby; the green archer calls the local library, “that Flying Dutchman of buildings,” home. His arrow turns the “secret world visible,” and the final panel reveals that, “The Green Man is not a man at all / But everyone and all at once.”
Acknowledging that most viewers will likely only encounter a portion of the work, Duford hopes the legend and its message will “slowly seep into the subconscious of the city, and start to frame how people think about downtown and the history of Portland.”
