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Cosmic questions: Clark County sculptor Hansen wins Lifetime Achievement AwardSubscriber Exclusive

Battle Ground artist's work featured at Portland Art Museum and Clark College’s Cannell Library

By Scott Hewitt, Columbian staff writer

Published: October 26, 2024, 6:13am

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Sculptor James Lee Hansen works on a sculpture called “The Sky Skipper” in 2017 at his home studio near Daybreak Park. (The Columbian files) Photo Gallery

BATTLE GROUND — Strange bronze creatures and shiny abstract shapes roost on James and Jane Hansen’s rolling acreage. Smaller beings from the same imaginary kingdom live alongside the Hansens inside their vibrantly artistic home.

The sculptures embody James Hansen’s fascination with mythology and psychology, his sense of the divine, his restless imagination and his curiosity. The spacious sculpture-garden arrangement of her husband’s artworks around the property and inside the workshop is Jane Hansen’s labor of love, she said.

After a seven-decade sculptural career that’s seen his artworks bring wonder to galleries, museums, houses of worship, and civic and commercial sites all over the nation, James Hansen recently gained a local honor too: the Clark County Arts Commission’s Lifetime Achievement Award. A ceremony celebrated the award on a recent Sunday in Hansen’s workshop, alongside the couple’s home north of Daybreak Regional Park.

“This is a magical place,” said Arts Commission Chairwoman Deborah Nagano during the event.

Some Hansen pieces are as modest as “The Eaglet,” a bronze figurine perched at the Portland Art Museum. Others are as abstractly in-your-face as the 7-foot “Glyph Singer No. 3” beside the Vancouver Community Library and the 8-foot “Guardian” at the entrance to Clark College’s Cannell Library. And some are as immense and imposing as the textured relief panels commissioned to embellish the Clark County Title Company Building in the early 1960s, then moved in 2022 to a prime spot near Vancouver’s new waterfront development with an interpretive panel about Hansen.

“My sculpture work is about the phenomena of cultures and the forces that impel them,” Hansen says in a 2014 book about his work by Stephen Grafe, curator of the Maryhill Museum of Art. “I am inclined to view humanity as an epoch in a cosmic petri dish.”

The Columbian visited with Hansen, who is 99, a few days before the county’s award ceremony. This story is drawn from that visit, from a previous one in 2017, and from Grafe’s 2014 book.

Bombshells

James Lee Hansen was born in Tacoma in 1925 and moved with his parents to Vancouver in the depths of the Great Depression. His father was the lead upholsterer for the Seattle, Portland & Spokane Railroad who passed down to his son an aptitude for working with his hands and working with machinery, Hansen said.

He was also a boxer and dyslexic, Hansen said, and there was rarely a book to be found at home. But Hansen grew up with a keen intellect, a fierce interest in reading and writing, and an irrepressible desire to draw, design and build.

As a Vancouver High School student, Hansen sketched for the current events page of his school newspaper. He also delivered The Columbian and saved enough money from his route to buy a horse. Aside from doing art, much of Hansen’s youth was spent outdoors in the countryside.

Upon graduation in 1943, he immediately enlisted in the Navy, where he sketched shapely movie stars (like Jean Harlow, the “blond bombshell”) and sold the sketches to his shipmates for $2 apiece.

“I always had money,” he laughed.

Hansen served on the USS Preston, a destroyer that saw much combat in the South Pacific, he said. Destruction and carnage were all around him, he said, and there were many days when he expected to die.

“It was noon, and the sea was just as calm as glass,” Hansen began one tale during our 2017 interview. “I noticed a little spot just west of the sun. Nobody saw it but me.”

He sounded the alarm, but it was too late: The spot grew into a Japanese dive bomber that destroyed a nearby aircraft carrier, the USS Princeton. That 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, Hansen said, he was one of the crew who picked up “twisted, mangled bodies and pieces,” wrapped them in canvas and buried them at sea.

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

Burnt Bridge to Daybreak

Hansen was eager to forget about all that when he returned from war. He married, got admitted to the Portland Art Museum School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art) and bought local real estate for his own studio and foundry near Leverich Park. That was Burnt Bridge Studio, and the Hansens lived, worked and raised a family there until 1977. That’s when they lost the land to the construction of state Highway 500 but emerged with sufficient compensatory cash to buy property near Daybreak Park, northwest of Battle Ground.

Hansen said he remembers Battle Ground Lake when it was a prime recreation destination with a dance floor and skating rink, as well as swimming and fishing in the lake. Back when he was an art student, Hansen was also such a strong swimmer — from going back and forth across Battle Ground Lake while wife Annie rowed a boat beside him — that he was hired on there as a summertime lifeguard.

Meanwhile, Hansen’s reputation as a singular talent grew quickly. According to Grafe’s book, 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.”

Spark of life

Hansen also knew where he wanted to be. Offered an assistantship with a famous sculptor in New York — a relocation that might have been a smart career move — he turned it down and refocused on his own artistic vision in the Pacific Northwest.

Hansen taught at Portland State University. He made wax molds of ancient Columbia River Gorge petroglyphs before the originals were submerged behind the rising waters of the new John Day and Dalles dams 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.

But the group didn’t last because Hansen yearned to work from his own spiritual and mythological inspirations, he told Grafe, and not just function as a big-project manager.

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

Across his long career, Hansen made nearly 800 pieces. A great sculpture, he said in 2017, 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.

Also a prolific poet, Hansen once wrote about sculpture: “Trust your dreams for why you’re born / And put them in immortal forms.”

More curious than ever

Hansen’s first wife, Annie, died in the early 1990s. So did Jane’s first husband, an art conservator and longtime friend of the Hansens. James and Jane married in 1994, and Jane has devoted herself to her husband’s life and legacy ever since.

“My biggest gratitude of all goes to my late wife, Annie, and my present wife, Jane, who have experienced my obsession regarding sculpture with patient understanding,” Hansen said during a 2022 ceremony honoring his work. “I wouldn’t be here if not for them.”

At age 99, Hansen may have grown a bit frail — he’s suffered a couple of falls in recent years and doesn’t leave the house much — but the always curious, slightly subversive gleam in his eye has not faded.

Although he’s not sculpting anymore, Hansen has no shortage of really big questions and whimsical opinions — about God, about science, about our incomplete understanding of reality.

“I suspect God is a cat lady,” he said. Then, with a nod toward the pet cat purring on Hansens’ couch, he added: “But we are like God to the cats.”

There’s a changed and changing world out there, he said, and he’s eager to absorb all that he can. The constant stream of information — via everything from the internet and smartphones to documentary films on TV — has him more curious than ever, he said.

“It’s such a miracle how much information there is and how fast it is recorded,” he said. “I’m very busy finding out what’s been going on all this time.”