23 / Fish Story

Darrell Austin, a native-Northwest painter and WPA artist, created figurative paintings to highlight the hope of a human during an era of loss and despair. His collection of five oil paintings is an intended focal point of Timberline Lodge’s hexagonal Mezzanine, a place where viewers can get an up-close exposure to the Depression-era fine art owned by the US Government Services and provided to public spaces by the WPA. His depictions of the human experience enliven viewers to proceed to each of his paintings along the Mezzanine, as if the viewer is anticipating the next page of a book about this extraordinary period of US history.