Joni Kabana had never seen art like it. The paintings were primitive and intricate and colorful and filled with patterns and mazes.

Joni, a Portland commercial photographer, was looking at the Website of Art Enables, an organization based in Washington, D.C. (artenables.org). It sells what it calls ‘outsider art,’ created by people with disabilities.

Joni’s friend had given her the URL so Joni could look at paintings by her friend’s cousin, 22-year-old Margie Smeller. Margie is an artist and a Special Olympics athlete who was born with Down syndrome. She lives with her parents in the nation’s capital.

Perhaps because she sees the world a little differently, Margie’s paintings are unusual. And that made them fascinating to Joni.

Joni wanted to see what Margie would do with some of Joni’s photographic images. So Joni sent her some photos, including one of the Brooklyn Bridge, and commissioned three paintings.

“They took my breath away,” Joni says. “She had deconstructed many things within the images and put them into an amazing array.”

Joni showed them to Marilyn Murdoch at Katayama Framing in Northwest Portland. “I’m familiar with outsider art,” Marilyn says. “I’ve collected it for years.” Margie’s paintings are “so interesting. If there’s a splash in a pool, instead of doing the splash, she’ll do the negative space around the splash. So you get a whole different way of looking at the world. Shadows in her pictures are almost three-dimensional.”

Together Marilyn and Joni hatched a plan: They’d invite a group of professional Portland photographers to allow their photographs to be interpreted in paintings by Margie, and then they’d show the photos and paintings side by side in a show.

It opened Oct. 11 at the Katayama Gallery. No one expected what happened that night.

Margie and her parents had flown to Portland for the opening. Margie had spent six months creating 17 paintings from photographs she picked from 11 Portland photographers’ Web sites. (Some of the photographers, including Joni, occasionally do freelance work for the Oregonian.)

Margie has a few relatives in Portland; perhaps the only attendees would be people who knew her, Joni and Marilyn thought.

Would the public be interested in outsider art? Would people come to see work by a painter with a disability? Would any pieces be sold?

The last question was a serious concern. When the paintings were shipped to Portland before the show, Joni says, “I had mixed feelings, to be very honest. I knew some of them would be commercially desirable and some would be less so. So I had my first foray into the question, ‘What is art?’ Because I was concerned…how it would look on a wall, as opposed to the intention of the show, which was to show how you can perceive a realistic image in a photograph in a different way.”

Joni and Marilyn both admit they first thought they wouldn’t hang some of the paintings. But then they had a change of heart. This was Margie’s show, they decided. “She had selected the images, and we decided we would show every single one of the paintings,” Joni said.

Their hesitation was based, in part, on the photographs Margie had selected. In one, “Margie took a very flat, bland, stark image” of the Dammasch State Hospital and created an intricate painting “that looks like a city.”

In the notes she wrote about that painting, Margie explained, “I went crazy with the perspective, as befits the picture.”

Other paintings are “very colorful and very beautiful to look at,” Joni says.

Margie may have some limitations in life, but she always has loved art and can talk about technical things like texture and hue. Her program notes read like poetry. In one she wrote, “This is a painting looking out beyond a curtain into my imagination.”

And at the opening of her show Margie talked about her work with many, many people.

“We had a phenomenal turnout,” Marilyn says. “They were packed in like sardines.”

The majority of Margie’s paintings were sold that night. (The show will stay open until Nov. 1.) Proceeds will be divided between Art Enables, several local nonprofit groups and Margie herself.

The painting about which Joni and Marilyn had the most reservations, Joni says, “was the first to sell. And the ones I thought would sell right away didn’t. It just shows you don’t know; art will touch people in different ways.”

The photographers did not see Margie’s paintings of their work until the opening. Steve Bloch was surprised by the two photographs Margie had picked from his Web site. “They seemed very dissimilar,” he says. In one, a woman with red hair drives a convertible along a Portland freeway.

Margie created a downtown skyline of intricate patterns.

“The paintings had a naïve sensibility to them,” Steve says, “but there was some kind of other energy happening under the surface; some kind of voice underneath, trying to get out.

“I would like to go back and look at them again.”

Margie Smeller wants to be a full-time artist. From the time she was quite young she always had crayons or pencils in her hand; she carries a sketchbook with her wherever show goes.

Because of the success of this show, Margie may be able to make a life for herself in art.

Her paintings, displayed beside photographs of very successful commercial artists, more than held their own. “She is not someone you would expect to have this art within her, and her paintings made out work pale in comparison,” Joni says.

“Her art has defined her in a very different way than you might think when you first meet her,” Joni says. “It’s not, here’s a person with Down syndrome. It’s here’s an artist.”

 

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