EVERETT, Wash — For even longer than he's been playing the harmonica, Lee Oskar, co-founder of the seminal 70's funk band War ("Low Rider, "Why Can't We Be Friends"), has been a visual artist.
"Whatever comes through me, it comes from the same place," he said in the Everett home where his colorful paintings line the walls. There are landscapes inspired by living in the Northwest. There's an entire series that involves instruments. All painted just the way he plays - in the moment.
"And sometimes it takes me places I had no idea," Oskar said.
Years ago Oskar discovered a new technique, using pencil erasers to dot his canvasses with color.
"I found it had this really amazing effect," he said.
And that's when something almost supernatural began happening.
"All of a sudden I'm seeing these faces," Oskar said. "It felt like spirits coming through!"
The Danish artist had been dreaming up the music for his album "Never Forget," a musical memoir dedicated to those killed in the Holocaust.
"And I wanted to liberate myself from a lot of fears," Oskar said. "And I was feeling, like, the spirits. Maybe my grandmother who got murdered in the gas chamber. I was just feeling deeper than I allowed myself before."
Oskar's mother, a holocaust survivor, would write notes full of memories she couldn't say out loud. For most of his extraordinary life Oskar tried to ignore the trauma he now believes he inherited.
"So I've always had the fear of anti-Semetic and one day I realized enough is enough," he said.
As he started working on "Never Forget" Oskar says his purely abstract paintings began to reveal themselves as portraits. Faces would emerge. Can you see the woman wearing a hat?
"I hardly did anything to embellish it," Oskar said. "It just came out like that and it blew my mind."
The more Oskar painted, the more portraits emerged.
"Usually I would never paint faces but I got into it," he said.
One night he even woke up to a face.
"Like this person was just looking right at me," Oskar said. "And it scared the crap out of me!"
Oskar would get up in the middle of the night to paint. Dozens of portraits emerged, all included in the liner notes of the album.
But who are these people?
" I have no idea," Oskar said. "I don't know."
But Oskar says he does know it's important to make sure, through music and visual arts, that humanity never forgets.
"If I went to the grave and hadn't expressed everything that comes through me I would be ashamed to call myself an artist," Oskar said.
Everett's Zamarama Gallery will display Lee Oskar's paintings from June 1st through July.
Lee Oskar and Friends perform at North City Bistro in Shoreline on May 24 and the Juan De Fuca Festival in Port Angeles on May 26.
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