By Bryce Dole
East Oregonian

PENDLETON — Brain Purnell is a firm believer that art at its best is a revolutionary activity.

“When you make a statement that no one else makes, you’ve found yourself,” he said. “It’s something that comes from your core.”

Such was the message he wanted to instill in his students during his 30 years as an art teacher.

“Whether it’s pottery or painting or drawing, however you express yourself, make it honest and from the core of your being,” he said. “If you do that, it doesn’t make a difference what people think. They may love it or they may hate it. But if it represents who you are, that’s a brave act.”

Growing up in Arlington, Virginia, Purnell found an interest in art in the late 1960s amid the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. He recalls when Virginia integrated schools when he was an eighth grader. Later, he was involved in anti-war protests in Washington, D.C.

Purnell, who found inspiration through the beat poets and writers like Allen Ginsburg and Ken Kesey, appreciated the way that artists could challenge perspectives, including his own. So he took up teaching “as a form of activism to promote social change,” he said.

“Society was changing,” Purnell said. “And I was young and in the forefront of that. And I felt that the art room was a good place to encourage people to think their own thoughts and express themselves in a way they found enjoyable.”

Purnell later moved to Oregon, where he went to school at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon in Eugene, eventually getting a master’s degree in art education. In 1978, he got a job as an art teacher for the Pendleton School District and moved out to Eastern Oregon.

Over his years as a teacher, Purnell said he wanted to connect with students that are at first hesitant to create art because they’re hypercritical of themselves and others. He wanted to provide students with an opportunity to take simple materials and explore the creative process free of critique.

“Everybody in our society is so pigeonholed into what we expect and what we expect from others,” he said. “Through my entire career as an art teacher, I have encouraged students to find their own voice.”

Purnell said that he especially enjoyed working students with more difficult “thorny” personalities — those that required greater patience and encouragement.

“Teaching is just not like moving rocks from point A to point B,” he said.

Today, he will often run into these former students around town, sometimes at his art classes at the Pendleton Center for the Arts, where he’s taught since retirement.

When the pandemic began, Purnell found himself sculpting mugs and bowls two or three times a week. More recently, he has found an interest in sculpting with natural clay, travelling to areas along the hillsides leading into the Blue Mountains to find materials for his work.

Meanwhile, he has followed his other passion — photography. He often makes composite images of people, birds and landscapes with gloomy and surrealist overtones.

It’s a landscape he’s come to enjoy more and more with time.

“I love Eastern Oregon,” he said. “It took me a long time to adjust, because I thought everything should be green. But there’s a certain austerity and beauty and skeletal aspect to the mountains. This is just a gorgeous area.”

Purnell said that, when the pandemic ends and the art center reopens, he can’t wait to get back to teaching classes again. For him, the center embodies the tight-knit nature of the rural community that he’s grown to love.

“The art center is hugely important to the health and vitality of culture in Pendleton,” he said. “It’s a cultural hub.”