Art From The Heart

DAYTON - When Yance Yost asked his friend and gallery owner Claire Johnston if she might be interested in placing one of his pieces in the jimgermanbar, which she runs with her husband, the answer was "no."

Yost dropped his head in disappointment. He didn't think that his piece, a wired collage of empty picture frames accompanied by a poem about the images that "used to lie inside," "sucked that bad."

Then he realized Johnson hadn't finished answering his question.

"But you can have two months at the gallery," she told him to his surprise and elation.

After all, this would be the first-ever show for the homegrown working-class artist, whose composites of found, sculpted and painted elements run the gamut from the melodramatic to the deeply touching.

For Johnston, who owns and runs AMO Art Gallery next to the jimgermanbar, it's not the first time she has featured a "beginning" artist who didn't find his or her way into the field through a fine arts degree.

Previously, AMO showed abstract and still life paintings by Eric Dunham of Walla Walla, and winter wildlife photographs by Todd Tucker, a farmer in the Dayton area. Neither one had any formal art training.

"I encourage the work of local artists as long as it moves me," Johnston said. "I like to mix it up."

So does Yost.

A welder and roofer by day, Yost puts the pieces of a thus-far tumultuous life back together through raw expressions in the various mediums of found objects or on canvas.

"His pieces are very personal," Johnston said. "It's pretty sensitive work even if it's quite intense."

If adversity is the mother of creation, Yost has plenty of material to draw from. Now 31, he lost his mother to cancer at age 22 and went into a dark hole of substance abuse, troublemaking and imprisonment.

"I just didn't care anymore," he said.

He found his way back through a relationship and the birth of his son Owen some six years ago, only to have his heart broken when his girlfriend broke up with him. Except this time, he had a sober constructive outlet for his emotions: his art.

"He cleaned up his act," Johnston said, explaining that she's happy the gallery is on the receiving end of Yost's "therapy." "A lot of people don't have an outlet for their feelings, their pain. It's helped him through these moments. He's got a lot of energy and I like to see him use it in a positive way."

Scattered though his energy might be at times, Yost has been on a trajectory of waxing self expression, ranging from sketching portraits for money behind bars to a working man's contribution to the million-dollar portfolios of well-established fine artists.

"I can't sit still," he admits.

It seems everything in his vicinity, whether searched out of stumbled upon, can find its way into his creative hands. His modest home in Dayton is full of hanging, sitting and lying finished and unfinished art projects.

Born at Dayton General Hospital, Yost developed an interest in drawing, clay and wood shop in high school but argued endlessly with his art teacher and struggled with the structure and the discipline of production. Other times, he would go well beyond the requirements of an assignment, like the time he turned a simple towel rack into a sculpture showing a house with a picket fence and a tire swing.

During several years at the Walla Walla Foundry, Yost worked on the sweat crew for high-end sculptors such as Deborah Butterfield and Tom Otterness.

Butterfield collects "driftwood" from rivers and streams in the mountains. These sinewy sticks are cast in bronze and end up forming the skeletal anatomy of horses. At the foundry, it was Yost's job to transfer the texture and profile of the wood to bronze.

That exposure to the vision of fine artists, and the drive to express heartbreak over his mother and girlfriend resulted in many of the pieces that will be on display at AMO.

There's the startling pig's heart (the closest resemblance to the organ of the human variety) on vinegar that has his name carved in the tissue, representing "my heart in a jar on a shelf so it can't be broken again."

There's the stand with the two bottles of Jack Daniels, bottoms removed to represent the "bottomless" pit he was throwing his money and his life into with the only way a coffin.

There's the colorful but darkly painting of gear "stamps" embellished with minuscule renderings of the skulls, eye lashes and other objects he reads into the chaos of their overlapping layers.

And there's his own body, a smorgasbord of tattoos ranging from a lantern (a man with his own lantern need not fear darkness) on his biceps to his own drawing of a thistle needled into the skin above his temple. Johnston used a photograph of that part of Yost's head on the card to promote his show.

"That in itself encompasses his art," she said. "It was tattooed right over a scar from a bad (truck) accident."

Johnston predicts Yost's art will provoke emotions and debate among its viewers, something she says her gallery "is all about."

Yost himself doesn't shy away from the chance of being accepted or rejected, vilified or revered, cheered or jeered. As one of his favorite tattoos explains: "It's better to be hated for whom you are than to be loved for whom you're not."

"For Judy" By Yance Yost

AMO ART

117 Main Waitsburg Opening Reception 4-7 p.m. Thursday July 7