Obituaries

’50

George Johanson
November 1, 1928–October 14, 2022

George Johanson was born in Seattle in 1928 and came to Portland at age 17 to attend the Portland Art Museum School (now PNCA). George returned to the Portland Art Museum School serving as faculty in Painting and Printmaking from 1955–1980. He remained a strong community supporter of PNCA, including support for student scholarships for painting and drawing.

'53

Katherine Cameron
November 15, 1929–September 26, 2024

Kathie (as her grandparents first called her), was born in Portland, Ore., on November 15, 1929, to Rose Marie Bradley and David M. Cameron.

Throughout her life, Kathie's family took annual summer vacations to Victoria, BC, where her grandparents lived. Her paternal grandfather was an accomplished painter. He inspired her love of art, and she began painting there.

After graduating from Grant High School in Portland in 1948 she enrolled in a joint BA/BFA program with Reed College and the Museum Art School. The latter became the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She studied under William H. Givler, Rachael Griffin, Jack McLarty and Louis Bunce. Her thesis was in lithography. She earned her degree in painting in 1953. In January 2019, the PNCA hosted a retrospective exhibition of her works. It was the first time they had been shown together in an academic gallery.

Kathie taught art for a year at Shriners Hospital in Portland before moving to Grant High School. She taught there for the next thirty years. Her classes included drawing, painting, art history, calligraphy, silk screening, weaving, frame making, fashion design, glass mosaics, and more. She was devoted to her Grant students, including Sherrie Wolf, a now well-known artist, and the actress Sally Struthers.

Each year Kathie would screen print an original Christmas card, usually featuring her cat's adventures. She was a lifelong and devoted student of Christian Science. She was a member of 8th Church of Christ, Scientist, and 1st Church of Christ, Scientist, in Portland, Ore. She loved traveling and gardening.

Kathie passed away peacefully at home on September 26, 2024. She was 94 years young. Surviving her is Ricardo Rodriquez, her handyman and caregiver for over 20 years. He cared for her as devotedly and tenderly as any son. At her request, no services were held. She was buried beside her parents at Skyline Memorial Gardens. She will be missed.

’82

Mark Gustafson
September 19, 1959–February 1, 2024

Guillermo del Toro Honors Oscar Winner Mark Gustafson, Who Co-Directed Pinocchio, After His Death at 64 Mark Gustafson won an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy, among other accolades, over his four decades in the animation industry Mark Gustafson, a longtime Hollywood director who won an Academy Award in March 2023 for co-directing Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, has died. He was 64.

Del Toro, 59, announced Gustafson's death in a post he shared on X Friday, stating that Gustafson died Thursday.

In del Toro's post, the filmmaker shared a photo of himself and Gustafson taken on the set of the stop-motion animated Pinocchio film.

"I admired Mark Gustafson, even before I met him. A pillar of stop motion animation- a true artist," he wrote in the post. "A compassionate, sensitive and mordantly witty man. A Legend- and a friend that inspired and gave hope to all around him. He passed away yesterday. Today we honor and miss him."

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won Best Animated Film at last year's 95th Oscars ceremony. It also won best animated film at the 2023 Golden Globe Awards, among other accolades. In del Toro's social media post announcing Gustafson's death, the filmmaker wrote that Gustafson "leaves behind a Titanic legacy of animation that goes back to the very origins of Claymation and that shaped the career and craft of countless animators."

"They say- 'Never meet your heroes...' I disagree. You cannot be disappointed by someone being human... We all are," del Toro wrote. "Burning the midnight oil during postproduction, or doing daily animation turnovers via Zoom during COVID or being trapped in an elevator in a Cinema in London..."

"I am as glad to have met Mark, the human as I was honored to have met the artist. As I said, I admired him before I met him," del Toro added. "I loved having had the chance to share time and space with him during the highs and the lows. Always and forever."

Gustafson was a native of Portland, Ore., as The Oregonian noted in an obituary published Friday. He started his career in animation working in claymation for Will Vinton Studios in Portland for the California Raisins brand, as multiple outlets reported. His first film credits came as part of the claymation teams for 1985's The Adventures of Mark Twain and Return to Oz, kicking off a career that lasted more than 30 years.

Prior to Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, Gustafson worked as the animation director on Wes Anderson's 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox. He received four Emmy Award nominations over the course of his career and won at that awards ceremony in 1992 for the television special Claymation Easter, in the outstanding animated program (for programming one hour or less) category.

"It's so good to know that this art form we love so much, stop-motion, is very much alive and well," Gustafson said at the Oscars last year ceremony following Pinocchio's win. He also took a moment to thank his wife, Jennifer, during his short speech.

’96

Mark Deleon Keene
February 23, 1970–August 22, 2022

Mark was born in Seward, Alaska and moved to Portland to pursue an art degree at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He had a gift for leadership, teaching, languages, writing, art, and humor. He taught in Portland, then spent 10 years teaching English in Japan where he also began perfecting the art of brewing. Mark is survived by the two loves of his life: wife, Atsuko Keene and daughter, Denise Keene. He is also survived by his parents: father, Gerald Keene, mother and step-father, Marlene Thiel Pearson and Roger Pearson; brothers: Nathan Keene (Astrid Persans), John Monsen-Keene (Berit); sisters: Erin Micciche (Peter), Kathryn Pearson (James Ogden); extended family members, family in Japan, and many friends.

’24

Trevor Mejia
March 5, 1998–September 2, 2022

Trevor was born March 5, 1998 in Thousand Oaks, California. He graduated with his Associates Degree from Lane Community College in Eugene in 2021 and was in his last year of college at Willamette University Pacific Northwest College of the Arts in Portland when he received his cancer diagnosis. A gifted artist, he aspired to become an animator; his backup plan was teaching. Trevor leaves behind his bereaved parents, Sugar and George and grandparents Kit Schneider, Steve Kane and Rachel Aldrich; his sister, Amelia, and love-brothers Ilanga and Luke, and girlfriend Tassjia Steeves. He also leaves his loving Aunt Candace, Uncle DavidPaul, cousin Hannah, Uncle Johnny and Aunt Lynn, as well as adopted-at-birth aunts, uncles and cousins, the Hall's, Klone's and Downing's and many dear friends that he considered family.

Faculty & Staff

Eunice Parsons
August 4, 1916–November 16, 2024

(The following is an excerpt of a piece from Oregon ArtsWatch)

Eunice Lulu Parsons, a prominent collagist, painter, printmaker, and teacher who moved from Chicago to Portland in about 1940 and stayed here for the rest of her life, died in Portland on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. She was 108 years old.

Parsons, who was born in 1916 in Loma, Colorado, and moved with her family to Chicago as a child, gravitated to the art world early, taking children’s art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and then, as a young woman, studying art at the University of Chicago.

She was a rare link to an earlier generation of Oregon artists that helped form the region’s aesthetic personality. Married in 1936 to Allen Herbert Jensen, a Merchant Marine, she raised her three children mostly by herself during the later years of the Depression and World War II.

Parsons, sometimes known as Eunice Jensen Parsons (she and Jensen divorced in 1960), eventually took up her art studies again, beginning classes at the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art).

Her Museum Art School teachers proved to be significant influences on her career, too: In her time at the school she took classes from a Northwest who’s-who of mid-20th century artist/teachers, among them Charles Voorheis, William Givler, Louis Bunce, and Jack McLarty.

For many years Parsons balanced her own artwork with a teaching career: She was on the faculty of the Museum Art School — teaching, as Laing-Malcomson noted, from 1957 until she retired in 1979, with a year’s break to teach art at Portland State University. And she was a founding member in 2005 of the Portland artist-run 12×16 Gallery, which continued until 2017.

Along the way she developed a distinct style of her own.

“(C)ollage is an art of destroying one thing to create another, splicing excerpts from many discourses, and jumbling the formerly ordered into a new, often chaotic unity,” the late Roger Hull, curator, art professor, and chronicler of the artists and artworks of the Pacific Northwest, wrote for an exhibition of Parsons’ work at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. “In these ways, collage does seem to reflect the splintery static of contemporary life. For the Portland artist Eunice Parsons, collage involves a particularly vital interplay of words, images, textures, shapes, and colors that mingle the new and the nostalgic, the present experience and the remembered time or place."

During her long and extraordinary life Parsons spent more than eight decades in Portland, but her eyes always took in what was happening in the larger world, too. She traveled by bus to New York and Washington, D.C., to take in the new art of abstract expressionism and other forms. She led Portland State University students on trips to Europe.

Then, too, there was her lifelong passion for Scrabble — a game of letters, broken down and reassembled into new patterns. Much, as it turns out, like collage, that other, larger, passion of her long and well-lived life.

Melissa Ann McClure
November 29, 1953–May 14, 2023

Melissa Ann McClure, 69, Emeritus Dean of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, following a courageous struggle with cancer, died May 14, 2023, at her home in Davidson, N.C., in the loving care of her husband and daughter.

Melissa was born Nov. 29, 1953, in Birmingham, Ala., the second daughter of Walter F. McClure Jr. and Billie Ruth (Fikes) McClure. She grew up in Huntsville and Atlanta, Ga.

In 1974, Melissa married David Griffiths in Atlanta, and together they had a daughter, Naomi McClure-Griffiths (now of Canberra, Australia). After Melissa graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1980, the young family moved to Portland, Ore., where Melissa established herself in the arts community and taught at Bassist College. In 1988, Melissa obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree from Portland State University. Melissa exhibited her art at venues in Atlanta, Portland, and San Francisco while continuing her teaching career at the Art Institute of Portland and the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), becoming Academic Dean at PNCA in 2000. Much loved and admired as an artist, teacher and extraordinarily capable administrator, she retired due to her illness in 2011.

Melissa and Dave Griffiths divorced in 1989, remaining life-long friends. In 2005 Melissa and Christopher Ley were married in Portland where they lived before moving to North Carolina in 2012. Despite increasing health challenges, Melissa applied her art and style to the house and property they loved – her "paradise" on Sugar Hill; gardening, decorating with the changing seasons, immersing herself in country life, and volunteering her graphic design talents for local non-profits. Melissa became an active member of the St. Alban's Episcopal Church, especially its Flower Guild, and was on the Board of the Davidson Music@StAlban's concert program.

Throughout her life, Melissa was a rescuer of animals and people alike. She brought people under her wing and built communities around her. She had a love of design and beauty in the natural world and a passion for music.

Melissa is survived by her husband, Christopher Ley; former husband, David Griffiths; daughter, Naomi McClure-Griffiths (David McConnell); stepdaughter, Amelia Ley; and granddaughter, Madeleine McConnell-Griffiths. She was preceded in death by her parents; and sister, Melanie McClure.

A Celebration of Life will be held at 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023, at PNCA, 511 N.W. Broadway, Portland, OR. Donations in her memory may be made to the PNCA Scholarship Fund, Music at St. Alban's Davidson, or the North Shore Animal League America.