Darlene Schaper-Art and Curiosity Shop: About/Contact

email: darleneschaper@yahoo.com

Darlene Schaper is a Native Oregonian living in Portland and has been an artist and explorer since she was a child. She has always had a great love of nature and its creatures. Everything is wondrous and precious to her and she has spent years collecting obscure antiques & oddities. Darlene discovered antiques as a child walking her neighborhood and going to any local garage sales. Learning about the objects from the seller fascinated her and she was hooked from then on. She has collected all sorts of neat (and odd) things, including items related to circuses, sideshows, taxidermy and natural history. Many things she incorporates into her art. Before long, Darlene found herself with so much stuff, she was going to have to either seek help for her hoarding addiction or open a shop. "Open a shop" won, her art and curiosities can be found at Stars and Splendid, The Dusty Tiger, and Cannibals Gallery. If you don't live in Portland shop her Etsy site.

Art Bio: Darlene Schaper is a graduate of the Pacific NW College of Art. Living in rainy Portland gives her plenty of time to make art being stuck indoors for most of the year. The lack of sunshine has had its effect as Darlene inserts a darker side that is juxtaposed into her sugar sweet paintings and sculptures. She has had her work published and written about in Ceramics Monthly, Art Doll Quarterly, Somerset Studio, The Oregonian Newspaper, and Venus magazines. Darlene is the creator of the first Women’s History Card Deck that has been published and is now available in stores and on her Etsy site. She has appeared on the DIY Network’s Craft Lab with a show focusing on some of her favorite techniques and a showing of her artwork.

Cascade Aids Project Auction, Artists raise money for a cause

Every year since 1990 CAP has hosted an art auction and party to raise money to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and provide services to those infected and affected by HIV in our community. Portland's art community first organized the event, and they remain the backbone of the Art Evening and Auction today. The event has grown over the past two decades from a small affair to a cornerstone event on Portlanders' social calendar. The Annual Art Evening and Auction now encompasses over 225 works of art and well over a thousand guests.

Greco-Roman myth

The hare represented romantic love, lust, abundance, and fercundity. Hares were associated with the Artemis, goddess of wild places and the hunt, and newborn hares were not to be killed but left to her protection. Rabbits were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and marriage—for rabbits had “the gift of Aphrodite” (fertility) in great abundance. In Greece, the gift of a rabbit was a common love token from a man to his male or female lover. In Rome, the gift of a rabbit was intended to help a barren wife conceive. Carvings of rabbits eating grapes and figs appear on both Greek and Roman tombs, where they symbolize the transformative cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Christian Interpretation

As Christianity took hold in western Europe, hares and rabbits, so firmly associated with the Goddess, came to be seen in a less favorable light — viewed suspiciously as the familiars of witches, or as witches themselves in animal form. Numerous folk tales tell of men led astray by hares who are really witches in disguise, or of old women revealed as witches when they are wounded in their animal shape. Hares were also associated with madness due to the wild abandon of their mating rituals. The expression "Mad as a March hare" comes from the leaping and boxing of hares during their mating season.