A living at art.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

When she was a young artist in Eugene, Norma Driscoll used to hawk her paintings door to door.

Freshly graduated from the University of Oregon, where she got her master's of fine arts degree in 1954, Driscoll would take a stack of paintings under her arm and drop by offices at City Hall and the county courthouse, or wander through downtown restaurants and stores, or just accost people on the street.

She would sell the paintings - of covered bridges and pleasant landscapes and colorful bouquets - for $5 or $15 or $20. She called them her ``dinner paintings,'' because she sold them each day to buy dinner. They were different from her more serious work, and easier to sell.

``I think some painters would say we were prostituting our art. Well,'' she sniffs. ``I could have taken a job as a teacher ...''

Driscoll is 79 years old and still lives in the downtown house she and her husband - painter Robert Gilmore - bought in 1959. Walk inside and you're in a different decade, perhaps a different century. Built in the 1850s, the house has seldom if ever been remodeled. Worn, dark wood floors and rough plaster and wood walls surround what looks like a small gallery of paintings.

In the front room, there's a log table built by Gilmore, who at 83 is in declining health and in the hospital. An outdoor thermometer hangs on the wall near a big, black school-style clock that's stuck at 5:30. Catholic devotional pictures and statues rub shoulders with African folk art carvings.

On every wall and stacked on the floor are Driscoll and Gilmore's oil paintings, which range from studies of Paul Cezanne landscapes and still lifes to re-creations of Nicolas Poussin history paintings.

The room smells of turpentine and oil. A messy palette sits next to an easel. A stack of small cardboard boxes, each painted with a Picassoesque design, threatens to tumble to the floor. This is where she and Gilmore have painted for half a century, right in the living room, where their six children played and grew up.

A small, tidy woman, Driscoll wears giant sunglasses even inside on a winter day. Sitting in a comfortable chair next to a heating stove, she's gray-haired and urbane, a '50s sophisticate transported to the 21st century. She peppers her conversation with references to Thomas Merton and Thomas Aquinas, Igor Stravinsky and Flannery O'Connor.

Born in Montana, Driscoll came to Eugene to attend the University of Oregon. She landed here at a golden moment, she says, when the art department was run by teachers such as David McCosh, Andy Vincent and - especially, for her - Jack Wilkinson.

Wilkinson was an analytical painter whose work was shown from Portland to Paris. He was a charismatic and challenging teacher, whose lectures on art and philosophy could go on from 9 in the morning until 8 at night. It was an intoxicating time. Driscoll's student friends included painters Vernon Witham and Paul Georges and future filmmaker James Ivory.

``We'd all go to a restaurant on the way to class, and there would be Jack Wilkinson, standing on the sidewalk, talking. We'd talk art and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. When I got into that art school, I knew it was the right place for me.''

Driscoll married Gilmore, a fellow art student, in 1950. They made forays out of Eugene, once to San Francisco and once to New York City to seek their fortune, but always came back.

Faced with supporting a family, she and her husband settled in to what would be a career of painting and, for the most part, selling the paintings themselves. "We were painting every day," she says, "until the house was gunked up with turpentine, and the kids were wondering whether they would ever get dinner."

Driscoll and Gilmore never owned a car and never had a driver's license between them. Everybody walked, took the bus or hitched a ride with neighbors. On hot days, the family sometimes set up a wading pool for the children on the living room floor. They didn't buy a television until 1969, when Gilmore wanted to watch the moon landing. There was never enough money, and it didn't matter. The Christmas tree still always scraped the ceiling.

One grown son, Pat Gilmore, lives upstairs now in his parents' house in a small apartment full of their paintings, which are hung on the walls and stored under his bed. He remembers childhood with a mixture of fondness and humor.

"It was bustling and silly and fun," he says. "You know, your own life: You don't think it's strange until you make comparisons later on."

Driscoll and her husband have sold work steadily, but never for dramatic prices. For a while in the 1980s and '90s, Pat Gilmore ran a small gallery on 11th Avenue, selling his parents' work. At one point he packed a van full of their paintings and drove across country trying to place their work in galleries. One in Chicago took some paintings but sold few.

Now the couple's paintings are sold at the Oregon Antiques Mall on Willamette Street.

At its best, Driscoll and Gilmore's work - at a casual glance it can sometimes be difficult to tell their paintings apart - is well crafted, honest, sliding from representational to abstract, evoking Cezanne and Pablo Picasso and the period from post-impressionism through early modernism.

It can also be imitative. Though she's done Eugene cityscapes, including a number of paintings of the WOW Hall, Driscoll mostly paints what looks, at least superficially, like perfectly respectable Cezanne still lifes and Picasso abstracts. Her husband does Cezanne-inspired landscapes.

She doesn't see this as a shortcoming. ``They knew the principles of painting,'' she says of Cezanne and Picasso. ``They knew the method. You don't want to attach yourself to anything third or fourth rate.''

About seven years ago, a man approached an art dealer in Eugene with a painting he said was by Picasso. The painting was of a harlequin, one of Picasso's favorite subjects, and had an illegible signature that looked like it might be the Spanish master's. The painting had been found in New York, the man said. Its canvas was stretched on what appeared to be old French stretcher bars.

The dealer, who asked that his name not be used because of later legal threats, says the man's story about the painting was compelling, and it appeared possibly to be genuine. He took it to a Portland appraiser, who couldn't make up his mind about its authenticity, so the dealer stored it while he did more research. Ultimately, two things happened: The dealer traveled to the Norton Simon Museum in Southern California, where he found that real Picassos looked quite different.

And, for the first time, he heard about Norma Driscoll.

``I found out the painting was Driscoll's, and it had never left Eugene,'' the dealer says. ``I wasn't at all familiar with her work. I had no idea.''

For her part, Driscoll thinks the ``Picasso'' makes a great story. She doesn't at all mind having been confused with one of her artistic idols.

``You have to have a real passion for painting,'' she says. ``You don't get that much recognition. You just go on plodding every day, and painting becomes so much a part of your life that it's your life blood.''

NORMA DRISCOLL

Eugene painter

Age: 79

Style: Cubist, abstract and modernist

View work: At the Copper Penny's Antiques and Collectibles Show and Sale

Where: Lane Events Center, 796 W. 13th Ave.

When: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday

Admission: $3