The painter SANDY ROUMAGOUX and the poet JAMES FLEMING have come together to create a wicked alliance of paintings and verse meant to subvert the structures of some holy conventions... 21 color plates with 21 poems... handsomely reproduced on Kromkote paper. It is a signed and numbered limited edition of 2000.
Preface by Henry Sayre, art critic, and Professor of Art, Oregon State University
SANDY ROUMAGOUX is represented by the Quartersaw Gallery in Portland, Oregon which she came to by way of career jumps that have landed her in jobs from college administrator to motel maid. Through it all she has painted with a tenacious determination to express her daunting point of view.
She received her Bachelor and Master degrees in Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas where she stayed to teach courses in drawing, painting and design.
The hunting scenes that are part of many of her paintings come out of her growing up experience on a farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon where gun cabinets were as normal a piece of furniture as the dining table.
Roumagoux works in oil and encaustic at her studio in Newport,Oregon. A number of Newport prominent citizens have commissioned her to do portraits which have resulted in some mild scandal.
Roumagoux has always been an art teacher through her professional career. Besides at Arkansas and at Oregon Coast Community College, she has taught at Portland Community College and for the Creative Arts Community a Menucha (east of Portland on the Columbia).
Her long list of exhibits extends from the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas to the Oregon Biennial in Portland, to the Galerie brati Capku in Prague, the Czech Republic.
Roumagouxs strong background and skill have enabled her to be uncompromising with her bold and original style. In other words, she gets away with a heck of a lot. At one point in his life, JAMES FLEMING decided he needed an outlet for the more sensitive and intuitive side of his nature. Fortunately, the Portland Police Bureau was seeking recruits about this time, and so for the following years, protected by civil service and an entrenched bureaucracy, Fleming was able to nurture his poetic gifts. As a homicide detective, he found that long periods of quiet, meditative thought were considered a sign of professional dedication.
When he wasnt writing poetry on company time, Fleming was a union agitator, publishing an insurgent newspaper, The Rap Sheet, that went to criminal justice people, as well as the generally curious, throughout the state.
He has also been a merchant marine sailor, a combat infantry soldier, a high school teacher, a social worker, a college instructor and an encyclopedia salesman, among some less engaging occupations.
His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals (mostly small press publications which lost their funding as soon as they fell into the hands of local taxpayers). His latest appearance is in a poetry anthology, the Prescott Street Reader. He will read at mall openings, boat launchings, plaque dedications or any place that has food and reasonable access to the drink table.
Fleming is a native Oregonian. He was born on Williams Avenue in Portland and now resides in Newport, Oregon. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon and his M.Ed. from the University of Portland.
