Artist gets into the ‘Colorflo’ of things

All Jim Sypert ever wanted to do was play.

“I realized that life is basically meaningless and you have to inject your own meanings,” he said. “I decided to enjoy myself and have fun.”

It’s made for a fairly unconventional life. Sypert said he spent 30 years eking out a living as a professional gambler. He got a mind for details and systems, and he turned that talent to the study of greyhounds’ behaviors and personalities as he wagered at what used to be Multnomah Kennel Club; he took his winnings and headed south to have fun and chase girls, he said with a gleam in his eye.

Now 72, Sypert said his health is iffy and he’s hoping for a few more good years. In the time he has left, he’s thrown himself into painting. The Truman-area home he shares with his wife, Chantel, has grown crowded with big canvases that tend to top intricate western landscapes — amber mountains and tan buttes, flowering cacti and gray stumps — with swirling, multicolored, marbleized skies.

After showing off some of his works as part of the Vancouver Community Library’s First Friday art exhibit, which starts with tonight’s Art Walk and continues through Monday, Sypert means to start framing and selling more than he ever has before.

“I’ve never tried to sell much, other than portraits,” he said. “But I’m feeling like maybe it’s time.”

Competitive

Sypert grew up in Fruit Valley, where he loved school and his classmates. “No bullies, no problems, it was a great environment,” he said.

The only twist was Sypert himself, who got great grades without trying too hard, he said. “I was always bored,” he said. “I doodled. Instead of listening to the teacher, I was looking up at the ABCs” that ran around the top of the classroom, and trying to copy their fancy, calligraphic style.

Sypert said his mother was a talented artist but never had time for that because she was always working to support the family. Sypert gained renown among his peers for his artworks, illustrations and cartoons that appeared in the student newspapers at Shumway Middle and Fort Vancouver High schools, he said.

“But I never thought about it as a profession,” he said. What he did for a living, he said, was gamble.

“I should have been a teacher — that would have been fun,” Sypert added, and it’s easy to see why: “I’m very schoolteachery.” He likes to talk technicalities, but he’s got plenty of opinions about big pictures, too. He once requested a meeting with Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt where he spent a good amount of time doling out advice, he said. He used to give his son’s basketball coach so much advice, he said, he was finally challenged to take on the job himself. The team had a great season, he said.

“Basketball is the ultimate coach’s game,” he wrote to The Columbian in 1998 — in a letter criticizing the tied score of a local high school contest. That’s the sign of bad coaching, he still believes. In 2006, Sypert and friends took their seven-man basketball team to the Hunstman World Senior Games in St. George, Utah, and earned a gold medal there.

“I am terribly competitive,” he said.

Landscape love

After public school, Sypert didn’t do much art for decades. It was his son who sparked this recent resurgence, by buying a home and inviting Dad to generate some abstractions for its walls. That’s what started Sypert developing what he likes to call his “Colorflo” technique. He uses a slatted juice extractor to dribble colors all over his canvas in streams and swirls. Then he starts adding more details from his imagination, or from photographs taken during his travels.

He’s inspired by the landscapes of Eastern Washington and Oregon, he said. “I never get tired of driving through the Gorge. Turn right at Biggs Junction, down to John Day. I love it.” Desert cacti are frequent stars of his compositions, and Sypert makes those his own by hot-gluing needle-like paintbrush bristles to them.

Sypert has only been back at painting for the past four years, he said, but the results have grown both large and intensely detailed.

“It consumes me,” he said. “Every day.”