John Dempcy
Northwest artist John Dempcy utilizes the intrinsic qualities of paint to create abstract paintings that explore forms and processes underlying biological life. Form follows process as drops of paint burst with color on the wet painting surface to produce an interplay of pattern, rhythm, and structure. Within a limited framework, Dempcy endeavors to convey a sense of the mystery and beauty inherent in the unfolding process of life.
Veronica Mortellaro
Working with the medium of ink creates many wonderful imperfections and happy accidents and I find that working with it forces me to let go. The figures that emerge are my expression of the human experience- the body in both its strength and frailty. As a young person dealing with chronic pain for many years, these figures represent not only the sorrow and fear I have experienced, but also the sensuality, power, and human connection. The figures that I paint are not portraits of specific people, rather they are universal representations of us all.
Jane McGehee
Beauty, energy, renewal, fresh and refreshing, stimulating, calming, rhythmic
This body of work invites the viewer to encompass these feelings as a suggestion and is certainly not limited to those alone. These paintings came about from observing the waves along the coast of Australia. Again, the meditative response to the uninterrupted landscape not made of concrete is at the forefront of my work.
Leslie Stoner
It has been said, “We often need the darkness to feel the release to the light.” This statement encapsulates my work and my life. Painting with Encaustic allows me to slow down my thoughts and reflect inward. As I work, the image evolves in layers according to the chances of the materials and the seasons of my emotions. Because my medium is organic, layered, and hard to predict, when I paint I play at the intersection of risk and promise. The result is a deception of surfaces, where control slips into accident and back again. My materials come from nature—beeswax, pigment, oil, and tree resin. My tools are purposeful: the razor blade, the spatula, and the Hogs hair bristle brush. Fire is the element that blends and merges them. My paintings are about human emotions, fears, anxieties and self-doubt. The imagery is rooted in abstract nature, about what lies beneath and what floats above, with an emphasis on where the two meet. I believe that everything beautiful has some darkness. What I paint is a reflection of my struggle to find inner peace with the dark and the light.
Don Wesley
My work borders the mystical, comical, and at times human-feeling side of birds. Many of my paintings have birds serving as surrogates for human emotions and situations. My goal is to always make the work approachable and beautiful on its own merit, despite the story beneath the surface.
Katrina Beach
There is beauty in grain silos, old fences, rusted metal, sea grass, waves on the sound, an old canoe on the beach, friends, a weathered dock, beach sand and a retreating wave. Being by the salt water has a certain feeling to it. Landscapes and structures by the water have a certain draw. There is a tension between the natural coast and the human invented coast, and I find both what nature creates and what humans create beautiful. This collection of photos highlights images at the coast, which struck me as beautiful and remind me of the wonderful feeling of being by the water.
Charles McGehee
With the advent of digital technology, photography has taken on new meaning and possibilities for me. Less constrained by the limitations of lenses and light, color, chemistry and convention, digital photography has freed me to express a scene as I experience it. Influenced by such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and my early teacher, Martha Abbott, as well as Renaissance and 19th Century European art, I have come to regard a photograph not as a representation of objective reality but more a frozen moment in visual time reflecting the photographer’s mood and impressions of the moment. Now, with total control over all aspects of the photographic process, I travel widely ”painting with pixels” the fleeting shapes and shadows of disappearing scenes.
Christina Hale
Jackson Joldersma
A closer look at the glamour in death, portrayed in black and white.
Melissa Messer
Melissa Messer relies on her multi-disciplinary background in classical art, graphic design, and literature as she experiences and records the natural world. Melissa views her work as way to create space around still moments stolen from the frenetic rhythm of the everyday. To this end, she is dedicated to working directly from observation of people and environments, cultivating present and meaningful relationships to the subjects of her work. Melissa’s process is a traditional one stemming back to the Old Master artists who created studies, drawings, and under-paintings as preparation for final paintings. The slowness of these methods give her work a warm solitude and her subjects a careful expression of life.
James Olson
I create art from salvaged material. Weathered wood and hammered metal provide the rough, heavily textured style that is the signature feature of my work. With my Wife's recent involvement, I believe it has only improved.
Ben Darby
Ben Darby is a Southern California native who left the sunshine to study art in Seattle, Washington. He earned his B.F.A. in art at Cornish Colleges of the arts. Ben is a prolific painter, producing satirical works that are whimsical with intricately detailed and textured surfaces. He has lived in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. He currently lives in San Diego, California.
In Ben's work, we see the weirdly beautiful way phages are structured and exist in their environments. His detailed hand has brought to life the symmetry and form of these viruses.
Anne Siems
Anne Siems has been showing her work in galleries nationwide since 1992. She is represented in Seattle by Woodside Braseth Gallery.
This body of work entails prints from images that have been individually overworked by hand.
Sandra Mander
I have primarily worked in thrown, stretched and carved porcelain, attempting to capture the feeling of movement of soft clay on the wheel through form, images and patterns. The vessels are high fired in a dry soda atmosphere.
Lazo Fulgencio
I have been a full-time, professional artist for more than 25 years, working predominantly in acrylic on canvas in my studios in Seattle and Oaxaca, Mexico. I am represented by galleries in Oaxaca, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Valle de Bravo. I also enjoy creating Day of the Dead installations at area community centers, schools and other venues, including at the Seattle Art Museum, where we just celebrated our 21st anniversary. To be a painter is to have a responsibility to others. Our work must have a purpose. It has to give life and hope. And we can’t stop there. It is not enough to simply make art that lifts people up, but as painters our actions in the world should do the same. Every day we have many opportunities to practice this--some tiny, seemingly unimportant encounters, like greeting our neighbors with a genuine smile, and some larger, life-long projects, like struggling with local arts institutions to create programs that are inclusive and reflect diverse audiences and cultures. Whether large or small, these encounters define us much more than any canvas or line possibly could. In fact, in many ways it seems to me that it is because of these very efforts that lines and colors can grace our canvasses with a purpose, bringing joy to the viewer.
Ponciano Vargas
I am from Tlahuitoltepec, a Mixe community in the northern mountains of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Within our community, there is a long-established tradition of “tequios”, or organized, collective community service to meet all the necessities of our town. I have fulfilled these obligations while contributing to the artistic development of our community through the realization of murals, art classes, workshops and general art stewardship. Kum-baash, my artistic name, reflects the fact that migration has been a part of my entire life, from my earliest years when I witnessed the mass emigration of youth from my community up through my young adult life, when this same path led me to emigrate, living in several cities within the United States. It was then that I learned firsthand about cultural differences as well as the value of my own indigenous roots, projecting my vision of nature and the world through my art.
La Concepcion de la Vida
31" x 53" acrylic on canvas $500
Linda Ozakazi
On both sides of my family, parents, grandparents and great grandparents continually made lovely things with their skilled hands. Painted porcelain, handmade musical instruments, sign painting, quilts in the old-time tradition of women sitting around the quilting frames while reciting poetry, and fine hand work with knitting, crochet and dressmaking I witnessed first hand. I was encouraged to do the same as a youngster and had talents that demonstrated an early understanding of painting, drawing and inventing things for play.
These formative experiences contributed to my earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree at Washington State University, which launched my professional career as a painter and as an educator. I continue to explore contemporary ideas, exhibit new work, maintain a strong studio practice, and enthusiastically share my understanding of art with both beginning and advanced students at Port Townsend School of the Arts.
Teresa Stern
Teresa Stern is a visual artist who often pulls inspiration from nature. This collection of floral works explores the colors, textures and interplay of space and shadow found in simple, seaonsal floral arrangements. Using a variety of mixed media, including acrylic, pastels, markers and casein, these works express the joy to be found in observing nature’s infinite variety.
Emilie Sandoz-Voyer
In these pieces, I have worked exclusively with pen and ink, relying on a dense interweaving of lines to create creatures that might leap, fly, or scurry from the page at any moment. In creating each piece, I love watching the animal emerge gradually, the tiny, etching-like lines of the pen filling in the textures of fur and feathers and contributing to a feeling of temporarily arrested movement. I imagine these creatures paused for a moment, tensely aware of the human gaze, before beginning to move again. That is the energy I try to capture in every drawing.
Shinzaburo Takeda
Takeda’s fascination with the landscape, people, and cultural traditions of Oaxaca is clearly revealed in the themes and motifs embodied in all his work, as seen in the piece selected for this show. As much as the Oaxacan environment and its people have inspired Takeda’s work, he too has inspired many local artists since the beginning of his teaching career at the Fine Arts School of the University of Oaxaca. Interestingly, and here we return to the connection between art and migration, several of the artists whom professor Takeda has trained have left Oaxaca to practice their trade in other places. This is the case of Fulgencio Lazo. It wasTakeda’s agency and direct support, that enabled Lazo to embark on his journey to the United States in 1990 and ever since he has divided his time between Seattle, Washington and Oaxaca.--excerpt from an essay by Dr. Lauro Flores, University of Washington
Raquel Stokes
My collages and paintings are colorful, detailed, and surreal. My primary source of inspiration comes from nature and life's absurdities. My artwork is a direct reflection of how I see the world- vibrant, dizzying, and full of diversity. I am driven by a primordial curiosity and restlessness resulting in an artistic portfolio stuffed with varying subject matter and changing mediums.
Robert Williamson
Robert Williamson grew up on both coasts and forged an eclectic education that included studying with various Japanese calligraphy masters, assisting renowned environmental sculptors, and mounting shows while living in Italy. He has used Seattle as a base for 25+ years working with interior designers and architects on project specific artwork for various types of projects, first as a painting partnership with Irene Ingalls, Eclectic Surfaces, and for the past 15 years has worked as Williamson Studio. As Williamson Studio, he does large scale paintings and digital design for reproduction in connection with projects such as restaurants and other hospitality venues, lobbies and public spaces in multi-family residences, and private homes. These could be paintings and graphics that tell a story, create a signature image for a brand, or evoke a time, place or atmosphere, and always contribute to a unique sense of place. Best known for contemporary murals, with an extensive client list that includes Starbucks Coffee, Google, Microsoft, Westin Hotels, Lunchbox Lab, and Cactus. He also does some graphics, and illustration for both books and the web, plus story boarding for independent film and museum programing. As time permits he does his own smaller, more personal artwork, mounting small shows around town. More of his work can be found at ‘williamson.ws’
Yarra McClure
Painting has always been a vital part of my life. My work is driven by a need to create art that is emotional, beautiful, and expressive.
Abstract painting has been something that I continue to return to in my artwork. I typically layer my work to create a history of under paintings. This layered effect is the process I use to tell a story within a painting.
Abstract expressionism, color, and landscape are my main influences. I aim to create paintings that are imbued with feeling. When someone looks at my work I want them to feel the aliveness of the image through my use of color, and the way that the paint dances on the canvas. Painting, for me, is a way to seek a deeper understanding and connection to the world and myself. My art is where I find my home.
My most recent paintings are influenced by the light and landscape of the Bay Area. The beauty of the reflective light found here is a constant inspiration to me. I seek to create an atmosphere of emotion with paint.
Binky Bergsman
Encaustic is an immediate and physical medium that requires me to work quickly as I paint, layer, and scrape. Previously, I have worked with charcoal, pastel, and print, but when I found encaustic, I surrendered myself to the smells, the colors, the depth, texture, and luminosity of the medium.
I am a scavenger, a collector of other people’s trash and of nature’s treasures. I embed these bits of detritus—clock gears, feathers, bird eggs, beach sand, and computer circuitry—into my paintings, using beeswax as an adhesive. After co-owning a sign shop for over 25 years, I have re-discovered these castoff materials as ingredients and tools for my paintings.
Ana Karina Luna
While I am indirectly influenced by the outside world, my inspiration comes most strongly from within. My work is autobiographical for the most part. I’m deeply interested in the individual and the unconscious worlds within. My process aims at making room for serendipity – such as cutting directly onto the clean un-sketched linoleum block – and welcomes “accidents”. Improvisation and chance are a fascination.
I’m interested in lines as abstract elements. I pursue limitation of materials, process, elements, and subject. When I search for the essential, the result is not exactly minimalism – rather, complexity, contradiction, and inconsistency are often surfaced. Negotiating and reestablishing independence from everything, including technique and even my own process, is rejuvenating and seems necessary.
Other sources of inspiration and goals: to compare real perceptions with what the mind thinks it sees — to “frame” the mind and expose its iniquities and mistakes; the line as a shape: how the precariousness of life shows in the flaws of the hand; limitations in color and material as a way to understand the human condition (frugality to transcend, to clarify).
My core mediums are printmaking, painting, wire sculpture, and mixed-media drawings/prints.
Shelly Corbett
As a long time Seattle art photographer, my work has primarily focused on the human figure. A few years ago I was introduced to the photo social media site Instagram, and through some quirk of fate, I was drawn into the world of toy photography. I quickly became inspired by the clever, imaginative ways my fellow toy photographers were able to bring their toys to life. My husband and children are huge Lego fans and our collection of bricks is vast and growing, so integrating my love of photography with my family’s favorite hobby seemed a natural fit.
Even though my current models are mostly yellow and 1 1/2" tall, I can't escape my photographic past or who has influenced my previous work. Voyeurism has always been a consistent theme, and this photo series is no different, as I aim to show the hidden, secret life of these popular toys. I may not be obviously emulating my long-time influences such as Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, but the idea of revealing an intimate moment or a glimpse into a private world is something I'm always thinking of. I feel that my best photos encourage my viewers to make up their own stories about the mini figure(s) in each photo.
As I continue to interact in the worldwide to photography community, I realize that even as we grow older, we never fully leave our childhood behind. My friends in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, Sweden and Finland (to name a few) have taught me that our toys, be they big or small, help us all to rediscover our inner child and the joy of play
Thomas Jeys
Thomas Jeys
These photos capture the essence of incoherent photon scattering from both natural and human-made objects as applied to select locations east of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate during a period 65 million years after the age of dinosaurs.
These photos capture the essence of incoherent photon scattering from both natural and human-made objects as applied to select locations east of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate during a period 65 million years after the age of dinosaurs.
Grace Flott
I seek to convey the emotional significance of my subject. Be it a person, an arrangement of objects, or a slice of landscape, I use drawing and painting to capture an essential humanness while maintaining an authentic likeness. As a student of classical realism, I believe that representing a subject in its truest form affords the viewer a chance to recognize themselves and our world as worthy of being seen. In seeing ourselves reflected on the canvas, we are affirmed in the universality of our human condition.
Right now I am working in traditional media like charcoal, graphite, and oil paint. These allow me to concentrate on my end goal of accuracy in representation with varying degrees of control. I work from direct observation, a process which means I am sitting in stillness with the subject over many hours. I embrace the natural shifts in the model’s position or changing light of day because I am seeking to describe what is real, not what is imagined. This grounds me in the present and reconnects me to the life in front of me.
Theodore Kralicek
…Because layers.
My goal is to create interesting things with interlocking layers. Oftentimes a layer can be as simple as a coat of paint, but more abstractly, a layer can also represent a specific field of science. When disparate colors, materials, tools, and disciplines join forces in a common cause, the kaleidoscope of distinct attributes usually add up to make something that is unique and compelling.
Betsy Best
Relief printmaking has been my primary medium for the past two decades. In that time I have traveled from Seattle to Italy and Japan learning both western and eastern printmaking techniques and traditions. For me, printmaking is a captivating process. The tactility of using tools to carve a piece of wood and then, the immediacy with which I can see the printed result, offers me a gratifying combination of anticipation and satisfaction; I liken the process to magic. I try to incorporate aspects of both the western and eastern approaches into my printmaking practice. As I work, I reflect upon my personal experiences and use the human form to explore gesture, pattern and color.
Courtney Gallagher
I'm inspired to create art by the magic and beauty of nature and powerful archetype figures both wild animal and domesticated. My whimsical style reflects freedom, energy, and playfulness. I'm interested in the stories of people, places and things.
May the lights and colors that capture your fancy keep you grounded and grateful to the gift of every day!
Dreama Blankenbeckler
My passion for eco printing is based in the magical, chemical experience between myself and the plant life around me. Eco printing is about gathering found objects and plant material, composing and binding it creatively, and then simmering it on the stove. Each print is unique and depends upon the chemical processes used--the content of the water, the mordant, rusty iron oxide, the pan's metal used and natural dyeing materials for color. I love that it makes me see the world differently. Now I find myself studying every type of tree, flower or plant to consider the potential for artistic expression.
Alan Corkery Hahn
The seed stitch is one of the simplest gestures you can make with needle and thread—a single tiny straight stitch. The works contained in this catalogue, made from time-worn and discarded pieces of paper and a few careful stitches with (usually) black thread, disarm with their simple grace and their naive pleasures. Yet these gestures sewn into found pages communicate much more than we’re used to experiencing from such a simple action. Never dogmatic, their messages consistently refuse to participate in what Edgar Allan Poe called “the heresy of the didactic.” Even those pieces that include words do so only in decidedly ambiguous ways. These works convey the true significance of their deeper meanings at a much more superficial level.
That is to say, to understand these images you have only to look at them. But you must truly look, seeing them not with the jaded eye of an adult but with the native imagination inherent in all of us. To appreciate these pieces at their fullest potential, you must see them with the eye of a child for every child is naturally an artist. At least they remain so until they learn to mistrust and abandon their own artistic impulses.
A note on the works here presented: With one or two exceptions, each piece is approximately five by seven inches and consists of cotton wrapped synthetic thread embroidery on repurposed book pages and covers. The work is a subset of the hundreds of similarly produced works created by Alan Corkery Hahn between 1998 and 2012.
Charlie Duncan
I enjoy sharing how I see the beauty of nature through my work. I share things that others might pass by everyday never slowing down to enjoy what we have right in front of our eyes. I practice my photography every single day since 2011, forever evolving my skills and finding new places and things to photograph.
Ernest Hilsenberg
Was involved with clay and ceramic work since high school (graduated in 1967). I did what one might call pottery into the 80's. Now I prefer the term ceramics. I work in various temperature ranges low fire (raku) to high hire 2360 degrees. My work is greatly influenced by the Japanese ceramic tradition. I like for people to think my work looks at first unskilled but under more acute observation can recognize its skill. I like nuance in a glaze asymmetry in a form.
Michelle Kelly
With my photography, I aim to capture the places in between. Those moments that are overlooked - expressions, details, embodied energy and the small details of everyday life as well as extraordinary moments.
Megan Prince
My work is about time, relationship and detail. Process oriented and intuitively driven it ranges between sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and performance.
My work is best described as an attempt to represent everyday relationships between people and the spiritual realm by utilizing abstract forms. I am ultimately interested in bringing form and visual language to the perceived but unseen (invisible) aspects of relationships. My main focus is capturing the variety of intercourse used in successful communication. In addition to relationships between people, I am exploring the individual’s spiritual relationship with unseen beings such as God, angels or demons. A couple ways I represent this unseen dialogue in relationships within my work is by marking movements through space and showing spatial depth between images.
AJ Power
Though I don’t feel bound to it, I largely work with animal imagery. I worked for many years in positions that allowed me to interact with the natural world, and I continue to draw upon this fodder. The study of animals is a way of studying our own behavior. Males go through elaborate courtships to win a female. Some build massive structures (Hammerkop), some create artworks (Bowerbird), some deceive & some cooperate, and some invade (European Starling). Some go to extraordinary lengths to provide for their young (Albatross). We see ourselves in them through such adaptations. My paintings remind me of our own patterns of behavior, and not just the cultural stereotypes that we apply.