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Weston Lambert, Yooperlite Moonrise, 2026, Yooperlite and laminated glass mounted on granite, 7.5 x 5.5 x 3 in
Tacoma-based sculptor Weston Lambert is redefining the possibilities of mixed-media art. Originally from Bellingham, Washington, Lambert began sculpting as a teenager and has since developed a distinctive practice that merges glass, stone, and metal into works of striking precision and balance. A graduate of the University of Hawaii Manoa (B.F.A.) and Tulane University (M.F.A.), Lambert's career has taken him across the country and around the world. His work has been featured in international exhibitions including the International Biennale of Glass, the Seattle Art Fair, and numerous venues across Europe, Asia, and North America.
From intimate, hand-held forms to monumental public installations, Lambert continues to push the boundaries of material and form-inviting viewers to experience the interplay between transparency, weight, and light in unexpected ways.
Guy Anderson, Untitled, unknown date, Oil paint on brown paper, 11.75 x 21.75"
With a talent that has spanned a lifetime, Guy Anderson (1906-1998), investigated life in the broadest sense, absorbing Indian, Asian, and ancient cultures. His paintings, shrouded in spirituality, convey the tension between the overwhelming forces of nature and the human condition.
In 1953, Guy Anderson received national attention from an intensive article about the Northwest art scene in "Life Magazine". Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey were viewed as 'mystics'. Over the years, Guy Anderson had developed a close relationship with Morris Graves and later Mark Tobey, sharing ideas on religion and aesthetic.
This Northwest Master has received many awards and commissions, such as, the Governor's Art Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Seattle Opera House Commission, etc. He has been included in exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the Bellevue Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the National Museum of Art in Osaka Japan, and at the Northwest Museum of Art in La Conner.
Rebecca Fletcher, Overturned, 2022, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 x 1 in
After graduating with an Illustration Major from the Art Institute of Boston in 1974, Becky Fletcher moved to the Northern California coast where she briefly free-lanced for greeting card companies and did local graphic design. In Eureka she soon found Savoy Studios and was engaged to design stained glass windows, painting inset figures and details with fired enamels. She continued this work as she moved on to Portland and then to the Skagit Valley in 1986. Taking up oils in 2005 she continues to marvel at the feast of form and color wherever she casts her eye.
This painting strikingly captures overturned tree roots above Ann Lake. Flecher's vision is all about the light and the shapes and wanting to share what she sees through her paitings.
Dinner with Weston Lambert, A Trailblazing Sculptor
Enjoy an unforgettable evening of art, cuisine, and conversation in an intimate private setting on Seattle's Phinney Ridge. Hosted in the beautifully designed residence of retired architect Robert Edson Swain-featured in The Seattle Times' NW Magazine-this exclusive dinner brings together exceptional food and world-class contemporary art in a truly personal setting.
Guests will be treated to a three-course culinary experience prepared by MoNA's Executive Director, Stefano Catalani, guiding you through a thoughtful journey of flavor, color, and seasonality. The evening is elevated by a rare opportunity to spend time with trailblazing sculptor Weston Lambert, whose innovative "vitroliths" fuse glass, stone, and metal into luminous, gem-like works. His work has been featured in major exhibitions including the International Biennale of Glass, the Seattle Art Fair, and Through the Light: The Sublime in Contemporary Northwest Art at MoNA.
Your Package Includes
Donated By: Weston Lambert, Robert Edson Swain, Stefano Catalani
Benjamin Moore, The Palla Bowl, Blown Glass, 4 x 19 x 19 Dia
Benjamin Moore (1952-2021) was a master of traditional glassblowing, renowned for his clean, elegant forms and luminous use of pure color, hallmarks of the enduring influence of Venetian glassmaking. Early in his career, Moore sought out the expertise of Italian artisans by writing to sixteen glass factories on the Venetian island of Murano. Only one company, Venini, responded. From 1978-79, he apprenticed under Checco Ongaro, an experience that defined his work. In 1979, he brought Lino Tagliapietra to the Pilchuck Glass School, fostering a lasting Italian-American exchange.
His Palla bowls exemplify his style-simple spherical forms, often featuring a sphere as a "foot," prized for balance, clarity, and refined craftsmanship.
Patty Haller, Transparent Understory, 2023, Oil on panel, 41 x 31 x 2 in
WINNER OF 2026 CURATOR'S CHOICE AWARD
Patty Haller uses forests to explore how complex natural systems create life. Her oil paintings celebrate visual space, color interactions and healthy growth of organic forms. Although the forest is observable and measurable, being in a forest is a spiritual experience. Haller is fascinated by both conceptions: the science and the mystery. Her work honors reality but creates ambiguity, as an authentic reflection of her personal experience in nature.
Haller's art life nourishes her, and she want to document a nourished world. Despite our modern abundance we know we are missing something elemental and essential to thrive. She feels whole in our forests. While painting, she thinks about growth. She visualizes shapes upon shapes, armatures stretching into the distance, all bathed in atmosphere. She weaves the shapes around each other, obscuring and framing views into the sky. Considering how the enormous microbiomes of forest floors determine the character of the ecosystem, she envisions life from tiny forms to epic old growth and try to approximate that world in paint.
Max Benjamin, XXII, 1977, oil on canvas in original framing, 49.5 x 61.5 x 2 in
Max Benjamin was a prominent Northwest artist based on Guemes Island, celebrated for his expressive abstract paintings and vivid landscapes. Working from a log cabin studio for more than six decades, he developed a distinctive visual language marked by bold color, dynamic brushwork, and emotional intensity, displaying a pronounced kinship to European Modernist innovations. Benjamin was honored with a Washington State Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in 1998.
Benjamin's work is held in major regional collections, including the Museum of Northwest Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others. He remains an influential figure in the Pacific Northwest art scene.
Cruise, Cuisine & Creativity: Circumnavigate Fidalgo Island
Step aboard a stunning 60-foot Fleming yacht for an unforgettable private cruise around Fidalgo Island. This exclusive experience for up to six guests combines breathtaking Pacific Northwest scenery, exceptional hospitality, delicious cuisine, and artistic inspiration into a one-of-a-kind day on the water.
Over the course of approximately six hours and 35 miles, you'll cruise the shoreline of Fidalgo Island while enjoying sweeping views of the Salish Sea and passing historic landmarks along the way. A local artist will join the voyage, sharing creative insights inspired by the surrounding landscapes and seascapes. Throughout the journey, guests will relax aboard the elegant yacht while enjoying delicious refreshments served throughout the day.
Donated By: Rod Proctor
Lisa McShane, Winding Gorge, 2026, Oil on Wood, 40 x 30 x 1.5 in
Lisa McShane's paintings explore beauty through water, reflections, skies, clouds, and shifting light. Her atmospheric landscapes balance natural beauty with subtle signs of human presence, including wildfire smoke, roads, and reflected artificial light. Inspired by memories of specific encounters with light-rivers, beaches, low tide, and distant mountains-McShane begins with photographs and sketches before building layered skies and luminous surfaces. Recent work has moved beyond specific locations toward a broader exploration of light across water and land. She views painting as both a contemporary dialogue and a conversation with artists such as Jacob Lawrence, George Inness, Sanford Gifford, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Juliet Shen, Ten Thousand Leaves Fell About My Head, 2024, pigment-based inks, watercolor, archival varnish, on canvas, 48 x 60 x 2 in
Juliet Shen's work explores the life-affirming transformations she observes in trees and forest ecosystems: regeneration emerging from decay, resilience after injury, mutual dependence, and the absence of waste in natural systems. She understands the cycles of life and death in nature as fundamentally benevolent, and suggests that estrangement from these cycles carries moral consequence. Influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painting, which views nature as a reflection of the human heart, Shen aligns her practice with this philosophy of interconnectedness.
She works with Chinese brushes and ink on paper made from plant fibers. The paper is both strong and highly absorbent, so each mark is permanent, emphasizing the irreversibility of gesture. This material condition echoes her belief that human actions, like brushstrokes, leave lasting effects on the environment. Through this practice, Shen links material process, ecological awareness, and a contemplative observation of nature's cycles.
9th century Chinese poem
Pruning Trees
by Po Chu - I translated by Arthur Waley
Trees growing-right in front of my window;
The trees are high and the leaves grow thick.
Sad alas! the distant mountain view,
Obscured by this, dimly shows between.
One morning I took knife and axe;
With my own hands I lopped the branches off.
Ten thousand leaves fell about my head;
A thousand hills came before my eyes.
Suddenly, as when clouds or mists break
And straight through, the blue sky appears.
Again, like the face of a friend one has loved
Seen at last after an age of parting.
First there came a gentle wind blowing;
One by one the birds flew back to the tree.
To ease my mind I gazed to the South-East;
As my eyes wandered, my thoughts went far away.
Of men there is none that has not some preference;
Of things there is none but mixes good with ill.
It was not that I did not love the tender branches;
But better still-to see the green hills!
Create Your Own Salmon with Artists Joseph Rossano & Ben Cobb
Step into the hot shop for an unforgettable hands-on glassblowing experience with acclaimed artists Joseph Rossano and Ben Cobb. Working side-by-side with two leaders in the Pacific Northwest glass community, the winning bidder will help create two handcrafted mirrored salmon sculptures while learning about the artistry, technique, and vision behind their celebrated Traveling Salmon School project.
The Salmon School installation features hundreds of suspended mirrored glass fish designed to raise awareness around salmon conservation and the interconnected ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. During this unique studio session, you'll collaborate directly with the artists to design and create your own fish. One completed salmon will become part of the Traveling Salmon School exhibit, while the second will be yours to take home as a one-of-a-kind work of art and lasting memory of the experience.
Donated by: Joseph Rossano & Benjamin Cobb
Etsuko Ichikawa, Trace 4812, 2012, (signed) Glass Pyrograph on paper, 30" x 22.5"
Etsuko Ichikawa's Deai: Glass Pyrograph Series centers on the transformation of fleeting gestures into lasting marks. "Deai," meaning "encounter" in Japanese, reflects her process of "Glass Pyrography," in which molten glass is drawn across heavy paper, scorching the surface with traces of heat and movement. The series began in 2004 at Pilchuck Glass School when Ichikawa noticed accidental burn marks left by molten glass and recognized its potential as a drawing medium.
Since then, the work has expanded from intimate works on paper to monumental installations, including a site-specific triptych for the Bellevue Arts Museum. Exhibited internationally, the series has appeared at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Toledo Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Ueno Royal Museum, and Eretz Israel Museum. For Ichikawa, the process serves as a metaphor for life itself: transient encounters that leave enduring impressions.
Alan Fulle, Vision Wind, 2026, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 x 2.5 in
Vision Wind represents a pivotal moment within my long running Dots series. It is a mature work, created after years of refining the geometry, surface, and philosophy behind these paintings. The piece balances discipline and intuition. The grid is carefully structured, yet the ground remains alive with gesture, transparency, and subtle turbulence. That contrast is essential to the work.
The painting is built with multiple layers of oil, allowing light to move through the surface rather than sit on top of it. The depth of the ground is not achieved in a single session. It evolves slowly, creating a richness that reveals itself over time and in changing light. The dots themselves are slightly raised, giving the surface a tactile presence. They are not printed or mechanically rendered. Each one is hand formed and individually painted, reinforcing the idea that every being within the pattern holds its own existence.
This work is also part of a broader philosophical inquiry that runs through my practice. The Dots series reflects my ongoing study of non Abrahamic traditions such as Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Shamanism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, the Bahai Faith, and Stoicism. Each of these traditions explores the relationship between the individual and the greater whole in different ways. Vision Wind translates that inquiry into visual form. The painting becomes a field where unity and individuality coexist without conflict.
Within the Seattle art community, my studio practice has been rooted in dialogue and long term commitment. I have remained dedicated to abstraction at a time when trends shift quickly. The consistency of the Dots series demonstrates both focus and evolution. Collectors often remark that living with one of these works changes their relationship to it over time. What first appears minimal becomes expansive. What seems repetitive becomes meditative.
As a donated artwork, Vision Wind carries that full history and intention. It is not simply an isolated painting but part of an ongoing continuum of work that continues to grow in depth and clarity. It has been professionally maintained and carefully stored. The surface is stable and archival.
Most importantly, the piece invites contemplation. It offers a quiet yet powerful presence in a space. Whether viewed as a cosmological map, a community of beings, or a meditation on breath and wind, it opens a conversation between viewer and field. I am honored to contribute this work, knowing it will continue its life in a new environment, extending the pattern outward.
Luxury Coastal Getaway for Two at Semiahmoo Resort with Dining & Golf
Escape to the tranquil beauty of the Pacific Northwest with an unforgettable overnight stay for two at the stunning Semiahmoo Resort. Nestled along the shores of Semiahmoo Bay, surrounded by the Salish Sea, this seaside retreat offers sweeping water views, peaceful surroundings, and exceptional hospitality.
Your getaway includes a spectacular two-night accommodation for two in a water view guestroom, along with a $150 dining credit to enjoy a delicious meal at one of the resort's inviting restaurants. Savor fresh, locally inspired cuisine while taking in the serene coastal ambiance.
Complete your experience with a round of golf for two at the nearby Semiahmoo Golf & Country Club, a premier course known for its lush fairways and scenic beauty.
Whether you're seeking relaxation, recreation, or a romantic escape, this package offers the perfect blend of luxury and leisure.
Your Package Includes:
Donated By: Semiahmoo Resort; Columbia Hospitality
A Gathering of 45
A bespoke sculptural installation by artist Rob Snyder, A Gathering of 45 is an extraordinary site-specific artwork composed of 45 individually hand-sculpted glass forms. Created as either swallows or leaves-based on the collector's preference-each element is uniquely crafted and then thoughtfully composed into a flowing arrangement that animates the wall with light, movement, and rhythm.
Rooted in Snyder's exploration of the natural world, the work reflects the quiet poetry of how living forms gather, shift, and disperse through space. The installation is designed in close collaboration with the collector through a comprehensive consultation process, ensuring the final composition responds beautifully to the architecture, scale, and atmosphere of the space. The result is a seamless integration of sculpture and environment, culminating in full professional installation by the artist.
Donated By: Rob Snyder
Donna Leavitt, Majesty, 2016, Graphite on paper, 60 x 45 in
Donna Leavitt's work reflects a lifelong passion for trees, which she regards as the heroes of the natural world. Decades of observation and drawing have led her from studying trees at a distance to examining their forms and textures in intimate detail. Her large-scale drawings emphasize both drama and contemplation, inviting viewers into a close encounter with the natural environment.
While serving in the Peace Corps in North Macedonia from 2006 to 2008, Leavitt developed a method of working on multiple sheets of tablet paper so her drawings could be transported home in a suitcase. That modular approach remains central to her practice, allowing her works to remain large in scale while flexible, portable, and easily stored.
For Leavitt, trees are healers and companions, offering comfort, shelter, and connection-qualities she seeks to honor and share through her art.
Steve Klein, Shelter 59 after Nicholson, kilnformed glass, 18 x 19 x 9 in
Steve Klein was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He currently lives in La Conner, WA where he maintains a studio and makes his distinctive kiln-formed glass work. "Through the complexity, versatility and beauty of glass I explore personal observations and experiences" Howard N. Fox, Curator Emeritus at LACMA stated, "Kleins work reveals sumptuousness and sensuality, the elegance and refined physicality of form, color, texture and scale are undeniably and assertively present in his sculptures. He manifests a perfect colloquy of the ideal and the real in his art." Klein's work has been influenced and inspired by the Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors as well as the Constructivist movement. His topics have varied from the landscape to personal experiences. Recently, Steve's work and attention focuses on our environment and global warming. Steve's work is in museum collections throughout the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Ultimate Los Cabos Escape: Presidential Suite Stay & Airfare for Two
Elevate your next escape with an extraordinary seven-night stay in Los Cabos, combining luxury oceanfront accommodations with seamless travel. This exclusive package includes roundtrip airfare for two, generously provided by Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, making your journey as effortless as the destination is unforgettable.
Overlooking the sparkling Sea of Cortez, Hacienda del Mar Los Cabos blends the charm of a traditional Mexican hacienda with the comfort and elegance of a world-class resort. Your seven-night stay in a spacious Presidential Suite offers sweeping ocean views, refined interiors, and a private retreat ideal for relaxation, romance, or adventure. Days can be spent enjoying the beach, lounging by multiple pools, or indulging in the resort's dining and spa experiences.
Donated By: Kathleen Wadland, Alaska Airlines & Hawaiian Airlines
Jared Rue, Sapphire Sea, 2025, Oil, aluminum leaf, spray paint on canvas, 48 x 36 x 2 in
Jared Rue explores contemporary perspectives within the landscape tradition, moving from distant vistas and underwater scenes toward immersive "in-the-forest," riverbank, and macro-scale environments. His paintings often blur the boundary between representation and abstraction, inviting viewers into spaces that feel both physical and psychological.
Balancing light and darkness, boldness and serenity, Rue's work combines traditional landscape influences with a modern sensibility. Layered surfaces, shifting perspectives, and atmospheric compositions create a sense of movement and presence, encouraging viewers to mentally and emotionally enter the paintings themselves.
Central to Rue's practice is the pursuit of honesty: an effort to maintain emotional authenticity while exploring contrast, abstraction, and the tension between observation and imagination.
Kenneth Callahan, Untitled, Oil on paper on board, 28" h x 34" w
Kenneth Callahan was a leading figure of the Northwest School and one of the region's influential "big four" artists. Born in Spokane and based in Seattle, he became known for paintings that combined modernist abstraction with a deep connection to nature.
Callahan gained national recognition in 1933 when his work appeared in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Influenced by artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, he developed a distinctly Northwest vision alongside fellow artists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves.
Though often associated with the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest," Callahan saw his work as rooted in art history and the rhythms of nature, which he viewed as a powerful, transformative life force.
Patti Warashina, Skybird '25-B, 2025, Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 11 x 13 x 4.5 HWD in.
Covered container in the shape of a bird, feathered in sky and clouds.
Patti Warashina (b. 1940, Spokane), graduated from the University of Washington, where she taught for 25 years. Her national awards include: 2022 ACC Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship; Smithsonian's 2020 Visionary Artist Award; 2018 United States Artists Fellowship; and three NEA awards. Warashina's work is included in many national and international collections. She was honored with two 50-year retrospective exhibitions at AMOCA (2012) and Bellevue Art Museum (2013).
Mark Tobey, Woven World, 1973, lithograph ed. 19/150, 21.75" x 28.75"
Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was an internationally acclaimed American painter and a founder of the Pacific Northwest School of artists. He is best known for his pioneering "white writing" style-a luminous, calligraphic network of strokes over ambiguous spaces-which anticipated the "all-over" abstraction later popularized by Jackson Pollock.
Mark Tobey's lithographs are celebrated extensions of his signature "white writing" style, blending Eastern calligraphy with Western abstraction. Produced primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, these prints translate his meditative, luminous networks of lines and metaphysical themes into accessible, editioned works of art
Much like his tempera and oil works, his lithographs feature interwoven webs of light, calligraphic marks overlaid on shifting abstract fields. Heavily influenced by the Baháʼà Faith and Zen Buddhism, Tobey's prints aim to convey harmony, meditation, and the unity of science and religion rather than physical action. Through lithography, Tobey manipulated fine, airy lines to create a delicate illusion of space and depth, challenging the Western focus on mass.
Dinner with Nancy Mee and Dennis Evans at Utopian Heights
You and five guests are invited to an unforgettable evening at Utopian Heights, the extraordinary home, studios, and gardens of celebrated Pacific Northwest artists Nancy Mee and Dennis Evans. For over fifty years, they have built this ever-evolving creative sanctuary-an immersive world where art, architecture, collections, and daily life are seamlessly intertwined.
Utopian Heights is a living work of art, filled with Northwest art, First Nations masks, Chinese scholar stones, and remarkable objects collected over a lifetime. Guests will be welcomed into the home and working studios for a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the artists' world, beginning with champagne and hors d'oeuvres and a guided tour led by the hosts.
Dinner is a multi-course experience prepared by Nancy Mee and served in one of the home's enchanting dining spaces, set with selections from her celebrated "Art of the Table" collection. Throughout the evening, Dennis Evans will share stories and conversation, accompanied by exceptional wines and the warmth of true Pacific Northwest hospitality.
Donated by Nancy Mee and Dennis Evans
Peter Millett, Hourglass, 2018, painted wood, 32 x 9 x 4 in
Peter Millett, a Seattle-based artist, has been exploring the mystery of common forms in his artwork since the late 1970s. Raised within the rich architectural history of Chicago, Millett's journey across the world brought inspiration from costume and ritual, vernacular architecture, and sacred monuments. His geometric intricacies, evident in both sculpture and drawings, echo the intense patterns found in ancient tile work of Iranian mosques, while the repeated but irregular lines carry the memory of textiles woven on simple looms by Andean weavers.
Millett's work, with its abstract quality, is a blend of personal and global influences. The construction-grade dimensional wood, painted in monochrome hues, hints at the timber of the Northwest, grounding the work in a regional context. His art embodies a unique blend of barn-door modernism, steering away from the slick minimalism of New York.
His work is in the collection of the Museum of Northwest Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seattle Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tacoma Art Museum; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; King County Public Art Collection; Microsoft Corporation; Boeing Corporation, Chicago, and other private and public collections. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Artist Trust Grant and the Betty Bowen Committee Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum.
Catherine Eaton Skinner & Suzanna Westhagen, Shingen XXVII, 2022, Beeswax, oil stick, microfiber paper, thread, bamboo, box, 47 x 13.5 x 2.5 in
Catherine Eaton Skinner is a multidisciplinary artist working in encaustic painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and book arts. Her practice is rooted in the natural world and the elemental forces of earth, water, fire, air, and ether, which she uses to explore balance, transformation, and continuity. Drawing from macro- and micro-scale observation, she works intuitively with materials such as beeswax, graphite, glass, textiles, metal, and found objects. Through processes of layering, erasure, fusion, stitching, and reassembly, she allows material history and physical behavior to shape each work.
Photography often serves as a starting point, with images of trees, water, sky, and landscape reworked through encaustic and printmaking techniques in which heat and fire play a central role. Her serial approach allows ideas to evolve over time, emphasizing process, memory, and material change.
Skinner's work reflects on decay, resilience, and the persistence of hope, framing her practice as an ongoing act of attention to nature, time, and transformation.
Ed Kamuda, In the Bog, oil on board, plein air, 23 x 20 in
Ed Kamuda became an important presence in the Northwest art scene beginning in the late 1970s. Originally from Queens, New York, he relocated to the Pacific Northwest in the early 1970s, first spending time in Seattle before making La Conner his long-term home. The surrounding Skagit Valley landscape would become a lasting source of inspiration.
In La Conner, Kamuda developed a close relationship with Guy Anderson, who encouraged his transition from writing poetry to painting. Without formal artistic training, he learned through observation, studio time with Anderson, and outdoor painting alongside Clayton James. Deeply engaged with art history, Kamuda devoted himself to painting forms that convey the essence of the natural world.
Whiting Tennis, Untitled (floral motif), 2025, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 x 2 in
Whiting Tennis is a celebrated painter whose work explores the intersection of form, color, and abstraction. Drawn to the power of mark-making, Tennis uses painting to explore the subconscious as a source of imagery. Through "automatic drawing"-a spontaneous, intuitive process-he creates sketches that evolve into paintings and sculptures. The resulting works feel like artifacts from an alternate reality where nature and technology have evolved together.
Tennis earned his BFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Washington in 1984 and has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Northwest Art (La Conner, WA), Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY). His work was included in the 2014 California-Pacific Triennial at Orange County Museum of Art, and he has received significant honors including the 2007 Neddy Artist Fellowship and the 2008 Arlene Schnitzer Prize. Tennis's major works are held in public and private collections such as the Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and Tang Teaching Museum, establishing him as a leading voice in contemporary Northwest painting.
Dinner with Skagit Symphony Concertmaster in the Heart of Skagit Valley
Enjoy an intimate and unforgettable evening of music, fine dining, and wine in the heart of Skagit Valley. Hosted by David Benson and Mandy Duperron in their beautifully restored turn-of-the-century farmhouse, this exclusive gathering combines exceptional hospitality with a private musical performance celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.
As Skagit Symphony concertmaster David Benson performs a curated selection of works for first violin, guests will enjoy an elegant three-course dinner prepared by Stefano Catalani, paired with wines selected from the private cellar of wine enthusiast and MoNA Board President Erik Benson. Designed for six guests total, this special evening brings together music, conversation, cuisine, and the warmth of Skagit Valley hospitality.
Donated by David Benson and Mandy Duperron, Erik Benson, and Stefano Catalani
Paul Havas, Grayland Fog, 2008, Oil, 24 x 18 x 2 in, A shed in blue and red shadows sits on a cranberry field as grey clouds float by.
Paul Havas (1940-2012) was an acclaimed American landscape painter best known for his deeply evocative, synthesized depictions of the Pacific Northwest environment. Born in Orange, New Jersey, he moved to the West Coast for his graduate studies and ultimately became a central figure in the Northwest art community. Over a career spanning more than four decades, his work captured everything from geometric farmlands to moody urban cityscapes. Havas was known for a modernist, abstract feel that reduced and synthesized natural views rather than strictly documenting them. Primarily focused on Skagit Valley farmlands, Havas also captured the Washington coast, and night cityscapes of Seattle. The Museum of Northwest Art honored his legacy with the exhibition Paul Havas: A Life of Painting.
Ross Palmer Beecher, Flashlight Study #2, 2019 Oil paint, wired tin, rocks, and found objects, 26 x 10.5 x 1.5 in
Ross Palmer Beecher is a Seattle-based mixed media artist whose practice spans quilts, flags, portraits of American folk heroes, and sculptural objects made from scavenged materials such as aluminum cans, found metal, wood, fabric, and porcelain She grew up in the Northeast U.S., studied painting, printmaking, and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, and moved to Seattle in 1978.
Beecher's work is deeply rooted in Americana folk art forms such as quilting, New England funerary art, offbeat flag-making, and visionary/outsider art. She also draws inspiration from the material transgressions of contemporary sculptors like Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Italian Arte Povera movement
Beecher's work is in the collection of the Museum of Northwest Art, Portland Art Museum, and Seattle Art Museum, among others.
The winner of this piece will have the opportunity to have a private tour of Beecher's upcoming solo exhibition, Ross Palmer Beecher: Speaking in the Vernacular, on view at MoNA from June 20 to September 20, 2026, plus a copy of the forthcoming catalogue signed by the artist.
Kimberly Trowbridge, Backyard Peony, 2021, Oil on Paper on Panel, 20 x 16 x 2 in
Kimberly Trowbridge is a painter, an installation artist, a performer, and a lecturer on color theory. She received her MFA from the University of Washington (2006). Her first solo museum show at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2021) was developed during her time as Creative Fellow at Bloedel Reserve (2018-2020), a 150-acre garden amid an old growth forest.
Trowbridge recently completed a Facebook Open Arts commission (2021), and was Artist in Residence at Jentel Artist Residency, in Wyoming. She is a two-time Neddy Award Finalist (2014, 2016), and an Artist Trust GAP Grant recipient (2014). She is the Director of the Modern Color Atelier, a multi-year painting program at Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. She has led plein-air painting tours in Spain, Portugal, and Twisp, WA.
Chris Theiss, Heads Up, 2026, Porcelain, underglaze, sgraffito, 5 x 4.25 x 4 in
Chris Theiss began drawing in childhood, developing what he describes as a "super power" through constant practice and patience. Initially studying illustration in college with the aim of becoming a professional illustrator, his artistic direction shifted during his second year when he discovered ceramics. This led him to the technique of sgraffito, in which a layer of slip is carved away to reveal the clay beneath, allowing him to merge drawing with three-dimensional form.
Through hand-built ceramics, Theiss developed what he describes as "three-dimensional drawings," combining interior and exterior space in sculptural form. His work is informed by early influences from illustrated books, comics, and natural science encyclopedias, which fostered his identity as a visual storyteller.
Over time, his subject matter has evolved, with a recent focus on the human eye as a central motif-an element he finds layered, reflective, and psychologically resonant. Working primarily in black and white, he uses limitation of palette to sharpen attention to light, perspective, and form. While his work is often recognized for technical precision, Theiss emphasizes discipline, curiosity, and the pursuit of joy and original thought as the core of his practice.
Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, Treehouses 2, 2019, hand-stitched and found embroidery, linen, 25 x 16 x 1 in
Maggy Rozycki Hiltner is a full-time studio artist and living in Red Lodge, Montana. For over 30 years now, she has been collaging found embroidery and quilts with her hand-stitched imagery, giving these abandoned textiles new meaning and relevance. Her work has been published and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and she was a recipient of the Montana Arts Council Artist's Innovation Award. 'I've tasked myself with questioning the artifacts of my culture by changing their context and content. Working with handmade remnants of the past, I repurpose them to comment on the present, and I employ a multitude of anonymous assistants. I try to celebrate and elevate their abandoned handwork. I search antique shops, thrift stores and yard sales for embroidered linens and quilts, collecting the brightly colored flowers, foliage, animals, and patterns that appear in my work. What I cannot find I hand-stitch and mix in with the collected embroidery. I use the familiarity of the stitch along with seemingly lighthearted and cheerful designs to convey more serious subject matter. I often use humor to tell my stories, and very rarely is everything quite what it seems.'
Joan Stuart Ross, Another Frontier, 2026, Acrylic, oil, ink, collage on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1.5 in
Joan Stuart Ross creates work inspired by exploratory imagery and the invention of color through relationships, connections, juxtapositions, and dynamic arrangements. Her practice searches for a sense of life force, energy, and meaning by using color and shape as carriers of value, depth, and visual intensity. Through metaphorical form, she incorporates complementary and analogous color structures, along with symbols and glyphs that suggest an underlying, vital current.
Her paintings, prints, and drawings draw on natural and structural sources of growth, including poplar trees, hydrangea blossoms, oyster shells, grids, and implied text. Across media, she builds compositions through color, mark, rhythm, repetition, pattern, and disruption, creating visual fields that oscillate between order and variation. Ross's work reflects an expansive visual language shaped by observation, abstraction, and a continuous search for energetic connection within form and structure.
Leo Osborne, Swansong, 2020, bronze, 14 x 24 x 24 in
Leo Osborne has been an artist for a lifetime, with a practice that began in Boston and Cape Cod and later evolved in Maine, where he first developed his sculptural work. He is a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, a Master Signature Artist of the Society of Animal Artists, and a member of the International Artists for Conservation.
Now living on Guemes Island, Osborne has participated in the MONA Annual Auction since relocating there in 1993. His multidisciplinary practice includes wood sculpture, limited-edition bronze casting, and unique paintings on gold leaf with acrylics. In addition to visual art, he writes poetry and stories, extending his creative expression into language. Across media, his work reflects a sustained commitment to form, material, and narrative over decades of artistic practice.
Linda Okazaki, Spring Bouquet, 2020, pastel on tan rag paper, 34.5 x 26.75 x 1.50 in
Linda Okazaki's recent work emerges from an evolving dialogue between painting and landscape. Following her exhibitions Realms of Influence and Familiar Places at the Grover Gallery, her practice shifted outward from the studio toward the surrounding environment. Together with her husband, Ray Weber, she began transforming their garden into a cultivated space designed as a living palette for painting.
This project is informed by the garden at Giverny and the work of Claude Monet, as well as the symbolic botanical studies of Hilma af Klint. Okazaki also draws on her earlier academic work in art history and color theory, including the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose exploration of color as a perceptual experience continues to inform her approach.
Plants are selected and arranged according to chromatic relationships and perceptual dynamics, allowing seasonal change, light, and atmosphere to continuously reshape the visual field. Observing from her studio and within the garden itself, Okazaki uses this shifting environment as both subject and source for painting, where experience, perception, and color theory converge into an ongoing visual inquiry.
Alan Newberg, World on Fire: Guernica, Gaza, Ukraine, Somolia, California, 2025, Black walnut wood, 72 x 36 x 30 in
Alan Newberg describes art as both a way of thinking and a way of doing-an evolving process of responding to moments in life that demand attention. For him, each artwork emerges through hundreds or even thousands of decisions, gradually giving form to feeling. In this sense, process itself becomes content, with finished works carrying traces of their own making across time and space.
Working across sculpture in steel, clay, wax, cast metal, and carved wood, Newberg finds that material directly shapes meaning. Steel tends toward abstraction and precision, while clay and wax invite more fluid, representational forms. Wood, by contrast, offers a sensuous and responsive material encounter, especially in its subtractive carving process, where the form must be discovered within the block.
In World on Fire, carved from a six-foot black walnut log, an unexpected pocket of decay transformed the work's direction. What began as an abstract composition of shifting, plank-like forms became charged with narrative when the eroded cavity evoked imagery reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica. This encounter redirected the piece into a response to contemporary turmoil, revealing how chance, material resistance, and perception converge to generate meaning in his practice.
Devin River, Hive, 2025 Reclaimed, dyed, and commercial fabrics, batting, thread, 116 x 94 x .5 in
Devin River's practice transforms discarded and secondhand materials into works that affirm dignity, value, and presence. Working primarily with scavenged textiles, loose threads, and reclaimed fabric, River reclaims what is often overlooked or discarded, responding to a world in which excess production leads to waste. Through labor-intensive processes of cutting, sewing, and recomposition, these materials are elevated into intricate textile works that emphasize care, attention, and renewal.
River describes this practice as an antidote to internalized worthlessness shaped by systems of environmental, economic, and colonial harm. By transforming discarded materials, the work asserts the inherent value of both material and self, inviting viewers to recognize their own worth.
The studio practice moves between two modes: precise, patterned constructions that provide structure and calm, and more improvisational processes that embrace unpredictability. This tension creates a dynamic rhythm between control and spontaneity.
In the series The Bugs, River reworks traditional starburst quilt motifs, fragmenting and reassembling them into new visual forms using reclaimed textiles, sometimes hand-dyed, often sourced from free piles or donated materials.
Dan Friday, Feather A6, year, hand-sculpted glass, Approximately 13"
Dan Friday is a member of the Lummi Nation and a Skagit Valley based artist. He has spent the last 30 years creating works primarily in glass. The themes and images of Friday's work are often drawn from his Coast Salish heritage and are solidified in the world of glass art. Dan has taught at the University of Washington, Evergreen State Collage, Pilchuck Glass School, Pendland School of Craft, Chrysler Museum, and the Haystack Craft Center. In 2017 Dan started the Native Youth outreach Program at the Pilchuck Glass School.
He has had residencies at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA, the Corning Museum NY, Pendland Craft School NC, Chrysler Museum Norfolk Va, Torunga Wai Wai Gisborne New Zealand, TeAtinga Wai Kato New Zealand, and the Dream Community in Tai Pei, Taiwan. Friday has been awarded the BIMA Award from Bainbridge Museum of Art, Bill Holm Grant, the People's choice award from the Bellevue Art Museum, The James Earl Fraser Award from the Prix De West at the National Western Museum, an Artist Trust Fellowship, and the Discovery Fellowship through (SWAIA) the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. Dan was a contestant on the Netflix show Blown Away. His work can be seen on Fridayglass.com, many Museums and in private collections around the world.
Hart James, Orcas Ravine, 2025, oil and charcoal on canvas, 36 x 36 x 2 in
Hart James explores the relationship between the individual and the Earth as a shared, interconnected home. Working within the lineage of the Northwest Mystics, she extends that tradition into a contemporary abstract language. Her paintings evoke the energy of natural systems-the movement of water, the flow of air, and the presence of geological forms that anchor the landscape beneath us.
Working primarily in oil and charcoal, James uses abstraction to translate sensory and elemental experiences into visual form. Each work becomes an attempt to re-establish a sense of symbiosis between human presence and the natural world. Rather than depicting specific landscapes, her paintings suggest underlying forces and rhythms, inviting viewers to experience nature as a dynamic, living system that includes and surrounds them.
Aaron Loveitt, Traverse, 2026, Forged Steel, 11 x 48 x 2.5 in
Aaron Loveitt lives and works on Blanchard Mountain in Bow. His work is inspired by a deep reverence for the Pacific Northwest landscape, as well as exploration into the raw nature of metal, glass and other mediums. His sculptures become symbolic intersections of material, process and points of understanding around the phenomenon of this region's time and place. The geographic features of a region's landscape become the unique signature of that place. In turn, the sculpted steel of this work looks to express the energetic script drawn from my inspiration walking the North Cascade mountain ridge lines.
Kendra Larson, Night Garden, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in
Kendra Larson is a Portland-based artist whose work focuses on the ephemerality of Pacific Northwest landscapes and the evolving relationship between people and the natural world. Her paintings engage historical ideas of landscape while subtly addressing environmental awareness and contemporary ecological connection.
Larson's recent work explores the hidden life of forests, drawing on research from authors such as Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard. These influences inform her interest in trees as communicative, intelligent systems, where interconnection and resilience mirror human experience. Working in color-rich, atmospheric compositions, she transforms real places and trees into expressive fields of emotion and perception.
Deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Larson's practice continues the lineage of the Northwest Mystics and the Group of Seven, treating landscape as a site of spiritual inquiry and psychological reflection. Her paintings merge ecological awareness with elements of magical realism, inviting viewers to experience the forest as both sanctuary and mirror, and to reconsider their relationship with the natural world through wonder, empathy, and care.
Steve Jensen, Sapphire Bay, 2026, oil on vintage nautical chart, mounted to recycled aluminum, 20.5 x 20.5 x 1 in
Steve Jensen uses the image of the boat as a symbol of passage-voyage, transition, and the journey into the unknown. Rooted in a family history of Norwegian fishermen and boat builders, the motif carries both personal inheritance and cultural memory. Jensen reflects on how this lineage contrasts with contemporary realities, noting that it now feels easier to make a living as an artist than as a fisherman, a shift he reads as a troubling sign of environmental decline in marine ecosystems.
His work is also deeply shaped by personal loss. After the deaths of his parents and his longtime partner, Jensen created boats to carry their ashes to sea in acts resembling contemporary Viking funerals. These gestures transform mourning into ritual, linking grief to water, passage, and release. His father's suicide, his mother's illness, and his partner's death from alcoholism inform the emotional weight behind these works.
Through sculpture and ritual action, Jensen seeks to transmute profound personal tragedy into forms of beauty and remembrance, using the boat as both vessel and metaphor for continuity, loss, and transformation.
Jan Hoy, Rhythm Squared, 2024, clay with iron oxide finish, 8 x 10 x 10 in
Jan Hoy works from small, hand-built water-based clay forms that serve as the foundation for her larger sculptural practice. Finished with iron oxide, these intimate tabletop pieces often become prototypes for expanded works intended for outdoor and public spaces. Hoy translates the patterns and structures of the small sculptures into larger scales, adapting them to new materials and environments.
Her larger works are fabricated in materials such as Corten steel, mild steel with painted finishes, or stainless steel, each choice altering the character and presence of the form. This shift in scale and medium transforms the original clay studies into durable public sculptures, many of which are installed throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Hoy values the collaborative process of public art production, working with fabricators, engineers, and communities to bring each piece into being. For her, the transition from small studio objects to large-scale installations is both technically and creatively rewarding, offering the opportunity to share her sculptural language with a wider public.
Karen Hackenberg, Unnatural Disasters (triptych), 2025, Archival pigment on stretched canvas w/frame, 25 x 80 x 1.5 in
Karen Hackenberg's (B.F.A., RISD) paintings were featured in MoNA's 2024 Surge exhibition as well as in her solo exhibition, Sea Change: The Art of Karen Hackenberg, at Tacoma Art Museum. Her paintings' "green" sensibility has earned a place in museums and private collections, including Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Washington State Art Collection. She exhibits her work internationally, and is represented by Patricia Rovzar, Seattle, and Rebecca Hossack, London, UK. Karen uses humor and beauty to light a candle in the darkness of our eco-disaster weary minds. In her wry post-pop Unnatural Disasters paintings series, she interprets the effects of climate change such as recurrent large-scale fires, destructive superstorms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, habitat loss, and species extinctions.
Chuck Gumpert, Urban Relic 2600, 2024, oil & mixed media, 40 x 50 x 1.5 in
Chuck Gumpert is a Seattle-area artist whose practice spans bold abstraction, impressionistic landscape, and figurative work developed over more than two decades of professional exhibitions throughout Washington, Oregon, and California. His work has attracted national and international collectors and has been featured in interior design and architectural projects across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Gumpert's paintings are built through layered combinations of oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, and collage. These materials interact in complex surfaces that generate organic forms, gestural marks, and shifting spatial illusions. He describes his process as one of "intentional happy accidents," where chance and control coexist to create texture, depth, and atmospheric energy.
His work often evokes memory, place, and emotional resonance, inviting viewers to form their own interpretations. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, Gumpert sees each painting as a culmination of lived experience and imagination, offering a visual field where personal stories can emerge through engagement with color, form, and layered material.
Christopher Mathie, Crabstraction, 2026, Acrylic, 18 x 48 x 1.75 in
Mathie's acrylic paintings are filled with energetic movement, fluid emotion, and bold confident brushwork, as the artist builds up layer after layer of textural paint to achieve complicated coloration and highly activated tactile surfaces. Deconstructing his subjects to their most important lines and organic forms, Mathie's intriguing canvases invite viewers to engage very personally with his painterly attributes. Mathie conveys a realm that exists somewhere between reality and imagination. The Washington-state artist is widely recognized in the Pacific Northwest with over three-decades of exhibition history. His paintings have been exhibited nationally and are included in private and corporate collections nationally and internationally.
Erik Geschke, Exchange, 2026, Polymerized gypsum, fiberglass, wood, aluminum, graphite, 18 x 22 x 3 in
Erik Geschke creates mixed-media work that explores personal and social narratives through oblique, often ambiguous imagery. His practice draws on recognizable subjects-humans, animals, environments, and cultural artifacts-but recontextualizes them to create tension between familiarity and disruption. Through shifts in material, imagery, and titling, he introduces an uneasy coexistence of humor and unease, where comedy and tragedy overlap.
Geschke's influences range widely across art history, political propaganda, and popular culture, shaping both the conceptual and formal dimensions of his work. His intention is to first draw viewers in through recognition, then challenge perception through satire, absurdity, and contradiction.
In his recent series Subterfuge, he investigates themes of modernity, hierarchy, and artifice. Referencing human physiology, industrial design, and historical art forms, he reconstructs familiar fragments of the world while withholding their full context. Through manipulation of scale, material transformation, and strategic ambiguity, Geschke disrupts perception and invites viewers to reconsider the systems and assumptions that shape everyday visual experience.
Joyce Gehl, Moondance, 2022, mixed media resin, 24 x 24 x 2 in
Joyce Gehl is an artist living and working on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands, whose practice is shaped by the quiet complexity of the Pacific Northwest landscape. Her work explores emotional and imaginative relationships with nature, focusing on how it feels to be immersed in forests, shorelines, shifting light, and interconnected ecosystems.
Gehl begins with photographs taken outdoors, which she uses as the foundation for digitally composed landscapes. Through layering, blending, and iterative refinement, these images evolve into hybrid compositions that bridge observation and imagination. The works are then translated into painting and finished with resin, creating luminous, dimensional surfaces.
Her process builds multiple transparent layers in which painted marks appear suspended, producing depth and a sense of movement. Up close, the imagery breaks into mosaics of individual gestures, reflecting the living systems that inspire her work. The final resin surface subtly reflects the viewer and surrounding environment, integrating them into the composition.
Gehl's paintings invite contemplation on interconnection, emphasizing that humans are not separate from nature but part of its unfolding presence.
Meg Holgate, Nightflower, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 32 x 1.5 in
Meg Holgate creates paintings inspired by the transient, shifting qualities of the Pacific Northwest environment. Her work explores the fleeting and conditional nature of landscape, shaped by filmy light, atmospheric color, and an opalescent sense of place. Forms in her paintings often seem to emerge from or dissolve back into the landscape, reflecting a world in constant transformation.
Working with large, soft-haired brushes, Holgate applies veils of color that blend and accumulate to shape space, perception, and emotional resonance. Her compositions layer clouds, islands, water, and botanical forms into shifting structures that balance chaos and stillness. Rather than fixed representation, she aims for states of awe and ambiguity, where landscape becomes a field of perception rather than a static image.
Holgate views nature as an interconnected, time-sensitive system and a source of continual inspiration. Through painting, she engages with cycles of change, honoring the ebb and flow of life while exploring new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the natural world.
Kathleen Faulkner, The View from Here, 2020, oil pastel, 28 x 35 x 1 in
WINNER OF 2026 VISIONARY AWARDKathleen Faulkner creates work centered on the environment as it exists in the present moment, with a particular focus on the Pacific Northwest. Her practice reflects on ecological change, noting the visible impact of overconsumption on landscapes, wildlife, and biosystems. She acknowledges the loss of abundance compared to the past while remaining attentive to what still exists today.
Faulkner's work acts as a form of observation and record-keeping, tracking the shifting conditions of a specific region and its living systems. Rather than idealizing or reconstructing nature, she focuses on presence-what remains, what is changing, and what may be lost in the future. Her perspective is grounded in both mourning and attentiveness, holding space for the tension between past abundance and an uncertain ecological future.
Julie Sevilla Drake, Amuse Bouche, 2022, Quilt: Hand-dyed Cotton Fabrics, 30 x 27 in
There is only one question: how to love this world.
Julie Sevilla Drake has lived a lucky, rambunctious life filled with love, friendship, and adventure. The mess, mayhem, mischief and mystery of this world are the primal forces of her art, no matter what medium she is working in.
This past year Julie spent weeks upon weeks in wild places, hiking and backpacking and just generally travelling-from her house in the forest, to the mountains, then off to faraway lands.
In her quilts, she offers you a glimpse of what she's seen and how she loves-through color, shape, line and texture.
Julie Devine, Skagit Sky, 2025, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1.5 in
Julie Devine's work explores heightened spiritual awareness and emotional states experienced within wilderness landscapes. Her paintings are rooted in direct encounters with nature, where she seeks to translate sensory and contemplative experiences into visual form.
Using expressive brushwork and palette knife techniques, Devine builds shifting fields of color that move between warmth and coolness, creating dynamic atmospheric tension. These variations in color temperature contribute to a sense of movement and transformation across the surface.
Her work often suggests animism in the natural world, where landscape feels alive, responsive, and imbued with presence. Through this approach, she aims to convey joy, dissolution of self, and immersion in something larger than the individual. The result is an experiential painting practice that emphasizes emotion, energy, and the spiritual dimensions of landscape.
Linda Davidson, 03 23 22, 2022, Oil on linen on panel, 24 x 24 x 1.5 in
Linda Davidson has been working since around 2021 on a series of paintings focused on a short stretch of ravine along Thornton Creek in Seattle. Her work reflects sustained observation of a landscape that, like herself, is constantly changing.
Over time, both the ravine and the artist have proven mutable, shaped by shifting seasons, weather events, and ecological change-heavy rains, snow, drought, and the continual fall of leaves, branches, and trees. Working in direct response to these conditions, Davidson records moments of perception as they unfold, often under physically demanding circumstances of heat, cold, and distraction.
The resulting paintings form a cumulative study of place and time. Together, they act as a visual record of ongoing transformation, reflecting both the instability of the natural environment and the act of attentive looking within it.
Epiphany Couch, Touch Water, 2025, Hand-pieced fine-art paper photo quilt, cotton, driftwood, 12 x 12 x 1 in
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores generational knowledge, storytelling, and our relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds. Working across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage, she reinterprets traditional forms to create images, installations, and sculptural works that engage ancestral knowledge and invite new ways of understanding. Her practice is rooted in unconventional collaboration-across time, between generations, and with the natural world-recognizing these relationships as vital to sustaining memory, culture, and identity. Couch's work transforms personal and collective histories into heirloom-like objects that hold space for reflection, care, and healing. Drawing from family stories, archival research, her own dreams, and her childhood in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington), she creates work that is both intimate and expansive, blurring the line between artifact and art. As a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/mixed European artist, Couch centers cultural knowledge and community connection in both her process and presentation. In 2024, she was a commissioned artist for Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places, a featured artist in the Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and a Ford Family Foundation's Oregon Visual Artist Studios at MASS MoCA resident. In 2025, she was selected as the Indigenous Visiting Teaching Artist for the Residency at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, a GLEAN Program Artist-in-Residence, and the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant and a Precipice Fund Grant. Her work has been acquired for public and private collections and exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs across the United States. Her first museum solo show is forthcoming in May 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Lanny Bergner, Primordial Vessel, 2013, stainless steel mesh, coated copper wire, 27.5" x 11" x 11"
Lanny Bergner is a mixed-media sculptor based on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, whose practice has centered since the early 1980s on industrial metal mesh as a sculptural medium. Working with stainless steel and copper mesh, he cuts, flame-paints, and hand-forms the material using torches, pliers, and stitched wire seams, transforming it into semi-transparent, biomorphic, and geometric structures that range from small basket-like forms to large-scale installations.
Bergner's process emphasizes both precision and material transformation. The mesh is shaped into bas-relief surfaces and three-dimensional constructions that suggest living systems and natural forces. His imagery draws from plant biology, marine life, cellular structures, geology, and cosmological forms, creating works that hover between the organic and the industrial.
A graduate of the University of Washington (BFA) and Tyler School of Art and Architecture (MFA), Bergner's work is held in major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. Internationally exhibited and widely taught, his practice explores the intersection of natural systems, craft, and industrial material, revealing intricate structures where nature and fabrication converge.
Juan Alonso-Rodriguez, Indigo Flow #15, 2023, acrylic on unprimed canvas, 36 x 36 x 2 in
Juan Alonso-Rodriguez's work is driven by imagination and experimentation across changing subjects, media, and techniques. Born in Cuba, his early experience of displacement, learning a new language, and growing up separated from immediate family has had a lasting impact on his artistic perspective. Themes of outsider identity and the political forces that shape belonging often emerge in his work, sometimes subtly, sometimes more directly.
His practice explores the human condition-fragility, connection, isolation, love, and the self-inflicted harm humanity causes to itself and the environment. He draws inspiration from balance and symmetry, architecture, science, natural growth and decay, and the tension between organic and constructed landscapes.
In recent years, Alonso-Rodriguez has worked across both studio practice and public art, using collaboration to challenge assumptions about how art is created and received. He values the balance between solitary reflection and collective engagement, seeing art as a means to support social well-being while also expressing personal inquiry.
Richard Royal, Obelisk III, 2016, Solid Glass, 5" x 5" x 9"
Richard Royal's professional life has been a commitment to creativity in blown art glass, and for over 30 years has stretched the limits of large glass sculpture. Richard is a faculty member of the Pilchuck Glass School and was the first Artist in Residence at the Waterford Crystal Factory in 1998 and 1999.
A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant, Richard has recently been associated with the Corning Museum of Glass, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ohio State University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work is shown in numerous museum, public and private collections, including the IBM Collection, the Safeco Collection and the Westinghouse Collection.
Helmi Juvonen, Eagle, 1950s, block print, 14" x 17"
Helmi Dagmar Juvonen (1903-1985) was a Seattle-based artist known for her sensitive depictions of Native American culture across the Pacific Northwest. Working at a time when opportunities for women artists were limited, she persisted through poverty and mental illness, continuing to make art throughout her life.
Over two decades, Juvonen developed relationships with Indigenous communities including the Lummi Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Yakama Nation, and Makah Tribe. She was able to observe and participate in cultural and ceremonial life, which deeply informed her drawings and artistic record of emotion, ritual, and presence.
In 1953, she attended Treaty Day ceremonial dances in La Conner, and she produced hundreds of drawings of Native American artifacts held at the Washington State Museum. Her work is recognized for its observational intensity and its attempt to preserve cultural memory through drawing, blending documentary attention with expressive sensitivity.
Charles Laurens Heald, Not Forgetting April Showers, 1996, Acrylic on Canvas, 44 x 34
Jeffry Mitchell, Small Hulu Vase with Friends, 2023, painted wood, 6.25 x 4.25 x 3.125 in
Jeffry Mitchell approaches artmaking as an instinctive and devotional act, rooted in lived experience and shaped by influences that move fluidly between craft, graphic design, fine art, social practice, and spirituality. His work includes drawings, posters, illustrations, ceramics, furniture-like objects, and decorative forms that blur distinctions between art and craft, the precious and the everyday.
Mitchell's visual language is deeply informed by his biography: growing up in a large working-class family that moved frequently across the American West, learning domestic crafts from his mother and grandmother, and later studying calligraphy and ceramics while living in Japan. These experiences continue to shape his interest in labor, ornament, storytelling, and the tension between popular culture and elite aesthetics.
Working in the studio becomes a contemplative process through which memories, grief, humor, affection, and longing are quietly transformed into objects. Mitchell describes his works as offerings-like valentines or votives-made in the hope of expressing and receiving love.
Ingrid Williams, Repose 2, 2017, Casein and egg white, 12 x 14 x .02 in
Ingrid Williams has worked with casein paint for more than fifty years, exploring the medium's ability to merge abstraction and representation through gesture and material behavior. Beginning in Coupeville, she painted local scenes on furniture and wooden boxes, allowing the grain of the wood to become part of the composition. Because casein requires a rigid surface, the interaction between paint and substrate became central to her process.
Later, while working in the Skagit Valley, Williams developed poured painting techniques in which textures resembling water, clouds, sand, and hillsides emerged organically through the movement of the medium itself. Her approach emphasizes simplicity of gesture and the capacity of material to evoke natural forms without direct depiction.
Subsequent work created in Sekiu further explored these possibilities, particularly the luminous qualities of sand-like surfaces. Her recent paintings focus on the expressive depth and tonal range of ivory black pigment, continuing her investigation into abstraction, landscape, and the physical nature of paint.
John Schmitz, Shelter at Rosario Beach, 2026, Photograph, 8 x 10 in
John Schmitz is a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on the intertidal environments surrounding Fidalgo Island. His practice explores the shifting, transitional nature of island ecosystems, focusing on the rhythms, textures, and subtle transformations that define coastal life.
Through a contemplative approach, Schmitz seeks to capture the dynamic character of the intertidal zone-where land, water, weather, and living systems continually interact. His work reflects sustained observation and attentiveness to place, inviting viewers to slow down and engage with the quiet complexity of island environments.
Carol Adelman, The Truth About Miss Piggy, 2004, oil on panel, 24 x 18 x 1 in
Carol Adelman is an artist fascinated by the gap between representation and lived experience in painting. She works from observation, its imprint on her imagination, and from art historical imagery, to explore the construction of identity. Her representational images emerge from fragments of abstraction just as she sees herself emerging from fragments of experience, memory, and cultural projection over time. With a love of the absurd, she uses a variety of sources-including still life-but the lifelong bedrock of her studio practice is the live study of the human form.
Joyce Siniscal, Blue Peaks, 2025, Ceramic Stoneware, 8 x 12.5 x 12 in
Joyce Siniscal's grandfather, a retired architect, sparked her early interest in art. As a child, she watched him paint realistic portraits and landscapes in oils on canvas, an experience that deeply influenced her creative development. After moving to Seattle in the early 1970s, she became fascinated with ceramic art. Classes at the Cornish Institute helped her become accomplished in wheel-thrown pottery. She later moved to Clear Lake, Washington, where she established a home studio, creating wheel-thrown tableware that she sold at fairs and through a local shop.
Now living in La Conner, she focuses on creating unique functional pieces using rolled slabs of clay. The colors and scenes of the Skagit Valley are a continuing source of comfort and joy, shaping her work in clay and glaze.
Elizabeth Johnson, Contemplation, 2025, 120 film, 12 x 12 in
Elizabeth Johnson works exclusively in film photography, drawn to its ephemeral and unpredictable nature and the surprises it offers. Working with film allows her to step away from the immediacy of image-making and remain present with the moment itself. She photographs places and people with reverence for what has already passed, seeking to capture emotions as they exist in time and space.
Her work is especially interested in the juxtaposition of past and present life, as well as the wide range of communities across the Pacific Northwest-from rural ranching communities to artistic communities in Seattle. In addition to traditional film processes, she works with alternative techniques such as gum dichromate and cyanotype printing, acknowledging the history of the medium while adding depth and dimension to her subjects.
She is currently developing a project that examines lost sites of westward expansion, tracing the Oregon Trail, the Central Pacific Railroad, and the routes of Lewis and Clark. Through this work, she explores how locations central to the narratives of settlement in the Pacific region were used in the past and, in many cases, have since been forgotten.
Teresa Gillespie, Kingfisher Woodcut, 2025, Woodcut reduction print, 14 x 11 x 1 in
This woodcut reduction print is done in the Japanese style (Moku hanga), carved from the soft Shina wood from Japan. A belted Kingfisher sits on a tree limb, his eye intense on a scene off the page. The archival paper is mounted on a wood board and protected with a layer of wax.
Tom Semple, Excelsior, 2026, Acrylic on Paper, 12 x 12 x 3 in
Tom Semple has been painting the Northwest corner of the US for years. Rooted in place and fueled by the majesty of nature, Semple's work is inspired by his exploration of the mountains and shores between the Pacific and the Great Plains.
Tammie Dupuis, Salmon Run, 2025, Watercolor and relief print, 18 x 24 in
Tammie Dupuis's practice blends Indigenous and non-Indigenous methods, materials, and meanings. As a child of the reservation, she centers her Indigenous voice-historically silenced-while acknowledging her non-Indigenous ancestry. This dual awareness informs work across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation, and weaving, bringing Indigenous and Euro-Western approaches into dialogue without diminishing either tradition. In her paintings, she combines Euro-Western techniques with Indigenous pigments to express Indigenous thought; in sculpture, she uses contemporary materials to explore Indigenous metaphor.
For her ancestors, pigment functioned as spiritual technology-connecting maker to the unseen, recording visions, and offering protection and healing. Dupuis carries these teachings forward, engaging color theory as a site of resonance between traditions. Her work operates on spiritual, formal, and historical levels while examining Indigenous presence in gallery spaces and the layered histories of this continent. Rooted in Gerald Vizenor's concept of "survivance," her art affirms endurance, cultural continuity, and memory beyond narratives of victimhood.
Annie Haynes, Ladies Stare, 2025, Digital, 11 x 14 x 2 in
Annie Haynes, originally from Oregon and now living in Skagit County, creates work rooted in the belief that creativity fosters confidence, connection, and shared understanding. Inspired by the landscapes and communities of the Pacific Northwest, she paints recognizable locations using vibrant watercolors and acrylics. Through bold color and expressive brushwork, she captures the character of familiar places while inviting viewers to experience them in new ways. Her paintings reflect both the physical environment and the emotional resonance of memory, belonging, and change.
In addition to her representational work, Haynes develops abstract compositions influenced by neurographic processes, kaleidoscopic imagery, and fractured mosaic patterns. These pieces explore themes of connection, transformation, and inner reflection through layered lines and dynamic color relationships. Across both landscape and abstraction, her practice balances observation with imagination, emphasizing optimism, creative exploration, and the belief that art can inspire growth and meaningful engagement.
Charlie Kendall, I've been here before, 2024, Acrylic paint, 10 x 10 x 1 in
Charlie Kendall is an interdisciplinary artist working in illustration, graphic design, and art direction, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their practice is rooted in exploration, moving between real and surreal worlds to examine how imagery can shape perception, emotion, and meaning. Through visual storytelling, Kendall investigates connections between form, symbol, and lived experience.
This particular work centers on birds as both literal subjects and metaphorical figures. Birds possess a remarkable ability to exist simultaneously in reality and symbolism. They gather en masse for protection and community, demonstrating collective strength while maintaining individual agency. They can appear weightless in flight yet grounded when necessary, embodying adaptability and balance. Their movements are intentional and efficient, reflecting simplicity in their needs and clarity in their purpose.
By drawing on these qualities, the work reflects on themes of unity, transformation, freedom, and shared resilience, inviting viewers to consider how community and individuality coexist in both natural and imaginative realms.
Ryan Uhlhorn, Large Platter with floral accent, 2026, Stoneware Ceramic, 3 x 14.5 x 14.5 in
Ryan Uhlhorn is a ceramic artist working from his full studio and showroom in Alger, where he has been based since 2020. He has been working with clay since 1989 and received his BA in Ceramics and Printmaking from Western Washington University in 1995. His practice reflects a long-standing commitment to craftsmanship and environmentally conscious studio methods.
This large, shallow stoneware bowl demonstrates his attention to surface, form, and material response. The interior features a partial white engobe, creating a bright green tonal effect while allowing darker influences from the clay body to remain visible, adding depth and variation. The stamped floral rim is enhanced with a black matte glaze, which fills the impressions and highlights the decorative markings. Through subtle layering and thoughtful glaze application, the piece balances function and aesthetic detail while emphasizing the expressive qualities of clay.
Miwa Gardner, Grace, 2024, Watercolor, pastel on paper, 10.2 x 10.2 x 2 in
Miwa Gardner paints watercolor portraits that capture subtle expressions often overlooked. Growing up as a gaijin (outsider) in Japan, she learned kuuki wo yomu, the practice of reading the atmosphere-developing a heightened awareness of unspoken emotional cues as a way to navigate her surroundings. That sensitivity, deepened by years living in Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, Munich, and now Washington, informs the way she observes and translates emotion in her work.
She returned to watercolor in 2021 after the birth of her son, whose quiet expressions inspired her to begin again. Toddlers, in particular, move her; they experience deep emotion before they have words, and watercolor's transparency and fluidity allow her to explore that mystery.
Continuing to study and grow through workshops with artists such as Agnes Cecile, Kelogsloops, and Aine Divine, and influenced by painters including Christian Hook and Ali Cavanaugh, her style has evolved to render "unseen" tones in skin and delicate emotional details in the eyes-inviting viewers to pause and connect more deeply with one another's inner worlds.
Preston Singletary, Octopus and Killer Whale, 2011, Serigraph on paper, 15 x 22 x 1 in, Limited edition serigraph, pencil signed and unframed.
When Preston Singletary first began working with glass in 1982, he did not yet realize how deeply he would connect with the material. It was only after he began incorporating Tlingit designs and stories-drawing from his lineage in the Eagle moiety, Kaagwaantaan Box House, Killer Whale clan-that his work took on greater purpose. This artistic shift allowed him to merge ancestral storytelling with a contemporary medium, giving voice to both cultural heritage and artistic vision.
Singletary comes from a long line of strong Tlingit women. His great-grandmother, Susie Johnson Bartlett Gubatayo, born in Sitka, Alaska in 1880, later moved to Seattle and helped establish the family's foundation there. His grandmother, Lillian Abada, raised his mother, Jean Abada, and his aunts, Andrina Abada and Theresa Sherman, largely on her own. Their strength and guidance shaped his identity and instilled a lasting connection to his heritage.
Over time, his mastery of glassblowing and Tlingit formline design has deepened, strengthening both his craft and his cultural understanding. This journey continues to inform his artistic voice and his contributions to contemporary Indigenous art.
Sam Albright, Rheology #796, 2017, Photographic print, 16 x 11 x 1 in, Photo image of flowing sumi ink painting. Part of the Rheology series. Matted, glazed and framed.
This photographic image is part of Sam Albright's series Rheology: The Flow and Shaping of Matter. Each work begins with a brushstroke of sumi ink placed into a flat bed of water. Local earth pigments from Eastern Washington are then introduced, grounding the composition in regional material. Gravity and surface tension guide the movement of the inks and pigments, forming shifting rivers, pools, and layered patterns within the water's surface.
As the water gradually evaporates, particles settle and deposit onto the substrate, preserving the traces of these fluid interactions. During this transitional stage-when the composition remains in motion-high-resolution photographs are taken to document the ephemeral forms. These images capture what might be called "lost paintings": fleeting states that exist only within the flow of water and pigment before they resolve into their final sedimented form. This photograph preserves one such moment in that ongoing process.
Nancy Canyon, Winter Morning, 2020, Acrylic on panel, 11.5 x 20 x 1 in, Lynden's St. Joseph's Hospital bought nine paintings for their new clinic location.
Nancy Canyon grew up across the street from Audubon Park in Spokane, Washington, where she spent much of her childhood exploring nature. She carried her Brownie Box camera daily, photographing flowers, seeds, and leaves to bring home and later draw or paint. Alongside her love of visual art, she enjoyed playing classical music on the Hammond organ and riding her Schwinn bicycle to the river, experiences that nurtured both discipline and creativity.
Today, her paintings reflect a lifelong devotion to nature in both realistic and abstract forms. While hiking, she is drawn to water reflecting dappled light-tree limbs mirrored on the surface, rocky streambeds visible beneath. She photographs these moments and develops sketches in her studio, refining compositions until they feel complete. Her work focuses on details such as the veins of leaves, the structure of seed pods, petals surrounding the calyx, and the curling forms of water lily leaves. Abstracted reflections, filtered light, and the movement of native trees also inspire her imagery. Now living near a pond where she walks daily, she continues to paint changing trees-some shaped by wind, others fallen-finding ongoing joy and inspiration in nature's transformations.
Jose Castro, The Daily Buzz, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 x 0.5 in
Jose Castro's work explores the interplay of color, form, and emotion, creating visual experiences that are both vibrant and contemplative. Through abstract shapes and layered textures, I reflect the energy, tension, and subtle rhythms of daily life-capturing moments that are felt rather than seen. Each piece invites viewers to pause, engage, and interpret, fostering a dialogue between the canvas and the individual where perception remains fluid and personal.
Color serves as my primary language, expressing mood, sensation, and the unseen forces that shape human experience. Through abstraction, I seek to reveal the coexistence of chaos and harmony, encouraging a deeper awareness of the beauty and complexity that surround us. In this space between structure and spontaneity, I aim to create work that resonates emotionally while remaining open to interpretation.
Christina Jensen, Save Me, 2025, clay, 7 x 6 x .5 in
This piece is from a series of clay vessels created to remind us all that so many insects (bees) are precious and need the help of humans. Each vessel conveys the idea of an insect hive.
Junko Larossa, A pair of pears 1, 2024, Acrylic, 15.25 x 19.25 x 1 in
The quest for the crossroads between realism and abstraction defines Junko Larossa's creative practice. Her work moves between two modes of expression: the raw, impassioned energy of palette knife acrylic and the contemplative stillness of oil realism.
Whether driven by motion or stillness, Larossa's paintings invite viewers to pause and look again. Not everything reveals itself at first glance; what remains unsaid often carries the greatest weight. Through texture, light, and layered form, she explores the balance between immediacy and reflection, encouraging deeper observation and emotional engagement.
Ruby Lori Linscheid, Waiting for Richie, 2026, Watercolor, oil pastel, colored pencil, acrylic, 7 x 10 in
Ruby Lori Linscheid's work centers on the joy of the present moment, the instant the first mark meets the paper, the pastel blends into paint, and the colors begin to sing. Her practice embraces materials that encourage spontaneity and serendipity, while striving toward a sense of completion, satisfaction, and delight. She values the dynamic interaction between medium and gesture, allowing process to remain visible within the finished work.
Her recent body of work reflects a return to the studio following a hiatus devoted to teaching and raising a family. This return represents a renewed engagement with her artistic practice, the creative community of the Pacific Northwest, and the ongoing rhythm of studio exploration. She describes this transition as rejoining the parade, slipping back into the river of creativity, and reconnecting with fellow artists in the PNW.
These works are inspired by the increasing presence of ravens and crows in the region. Through vibrant color, spontaneous technique, and a semi-abstract approach, she seeks to portray their joyful, curious, rambunctious, and occasionally mischievous spirit. The resulting pieces balance energy and intention, celebrating movement, play, and the expressive possibilities of abstraction.
Brett Sandstrom, Salish Sea, 2023, Brushed Inks on Paper, 18 x 18 x 1 in
Brett C Sandström has been working in the world of abstracts for over thirty years - creating works that emphasizes mindfulness, intentionality, simplicity, and presence. Through controlled lines, these brushstroke compositions have become an intentional ritual for Brett to find balance and harmony. This piece is inspired by a search for balance in the artist's home near the Salish Sea. Brett takes great pleasure in supporting MoNA each year by donating a piece for the Art Auction
Al Schwartz, Untitled, 2026, acrylic/canvas on birch panel, 10 x 8 x 1.5 in
Al Schwartz is a contemporary abstract painter based in the Pacific Northwest.
He studied fine art at Western Washington University and the University of New Mexico and has maintained a professional studio practice for more than thirty years. For over two decades, he lived and worked in Hawaii, exhibiting through galleries and serving as an artist-in-residence at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the State of Hawaii Art Collection.
Schwartz's paintings emerge through an intuitive process shaped by rhythm, texture, and natural movement. He works without a fixed plan, allowing the painting to develop through layers of response and risk.
Each work becomes a balance between control and openness. His work explores rhythm, texture, and a natural, intuitive process. Paintings develop through layers of response, allowing chance and risk to guide the composition toward balance.
Jennifer Yates, Aquamarine Mycology, 2025, Stoneware, 9 x 8.5 x 8.5 in
Jennifer Yates's creative process does not begin solely in the studio; it is informed by experiences and interests that extend into daily life. Inspiration arises from foraging in the forest, baking in the kitchen, and paddling on the water. The sense of euphoria she experiences while exploring natural environments is echoed in the studio, where she translates those sensations into fine art.
The shapes, patterns, colors, textures, and repetitions observed in nature stimulate the visual language of her work. These elements become integrated into her designs, forming connections between environment and artistic expression. Through clay, she explores transformation-allowing the material to become fluid in fire, yet strong and enduring once completed.
The soda kiln is an essential tool in her process, creating atmospheric surface effects that enrich the material's visual depth. The resulting textures reveal intricate, microscopic qualities reminiscent of natural surfaces viewed under magnification. These details invite closer observation and awareness, reflecting the subtle ecosystems with which we coexist. Through her work, Yates encourages a heightened sensitivity to the environments that surround and sustain us.
Peggy Shashy, Red-shafted Northern Flicker Feather on Driftwood, 2025, Fused glass, driftwood, 13.5 x 4 x 3.5 in, Red-shafted Northern Flicker Feather on Driftwood
Peggy Shashy is a retired exotic and small animal veterinarian and award-winning fused glass and jewelry artist at the Garry Oak Gallery in Oak Harbor. She is always inspired by nature and her passion for birds and bird watching. She has traveled to Central and South America numerous times to observe parrots and other animals in their native habitat. Now that she has moved to Washington from Florida, she hopes to encourage the public to explore the beauty of the Pacific Northwest as well. Photographs of her work have been on the cover of the Avian Veterinary Medicine Journal and in Richard La Londe's second glass fusing book. She is using a modeling glass technique, crackle glass technique, and exploring glass paints in her current fusing projects.
Her work has been accepted in juried art competitions at the Pace Gallery "Day of the Dead" exhibit in Parker, CO, Jag Gallery "Small Matters" exhibit in Key West, FL, and VMX Veterinary Conference in Orlando, FL. Her most recent work was exhibited at the Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton. Some of her glass feathers are on display at the Flight Patterns exhibit in the Lynnwood Event Center and Wings Over Water exhibit in Blaine, WA. She has been accepted in other juried art competitions in Anacortes, Kenmore, and Vashon Island. She makes her own cabochons (polished stones) from rocks she has collected and wire wraps them. Her jewelry has been displayed at the Schack Art Center, PNW Art School in Coupeville, Vashon Center for the Arts, and Edmonds Arts Festival.
Tom Beckwith, No title, 2026, Digital artwork, 20 x 16 x 2 in
Tom Beckwith has been a regular exhibitor in La Conner's Art Alive and MoNA's Art Auctions displaying photographs, sketches, and digital artworks. He is an urban planning and design consultant with a Master's in Urban Planning from the University of Washington and a Bachelors in Sociology with Minors in Economics and Architecture from the University of Oregon. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Planners (FAICP) with over 49 planning and design awards. Tom has been a resident of La Conner for 20 years with his wife, daughter, and granddaughter.
Dru Hill, Boatworks, 2025, acrylic, 11 x 18 in
Dru Hill has studied, created, and taught art in the United States and abroad. She uses various medium and styles to express her vision of the world. She has worked as a commercial illustrator, graphic designer, fine artist, and teacher. She received a BA/FA from WSU, and later studied Commercial Art. She also holds a Masters of Education degree from EWU. Works by Dru Hill have been acquired by businesses and private collectors in the United States and Europe. She has shown extensively in galleries and many juried shows including: The Frye Art Museum, Pacific Gallery Artists, Northwest Watercolor Society, Western Federation of Watercolor Societies, Tubac Center for the Arts, and Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild (where she is a Saguaro Fellow).
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Joshua H Phelps, That Tropical Light, 2025, Large Format Photograph, 20 x 16 x 1 in
Joshua H. Phelps explores the interplay between humanity and nature through a combination of sly wit and irony delivered via photography. To wit, humanity has employed natural resources for millennia. Originally for survival, as culture developed, so too did the depth of our relationship to nature. Things became more than themselves, symbols of magic, power, myth, and maps of the known world. At times serious, this ambiguity can also extend into the realm of kitsch and even the lines in a parking lot. At a time when humanity's relationship to nature feels all the more precarious, perhaps it is time to step back for a moment and examine the rules of the game which we have been playing all this time.
Maralyne Powell, My Garden, 2025, photography, 11 x 14 x 1 in
Maralyne Powell has been a photographer for many years with a focus on portrait and fine art photography. Powell has been featured in many regional juried exhibitions and invitational shows. Her work was featured in the 2009 ART'S ALIVE! Emerging Artists Exhibit. She has won several Honorable Mentions, won 3rd place in the Seattle Professional Photographers Show as well as a Juror's Award. Her most recent work is focused on digital compositions and double exposure photography. This is a composite image of a field of poppies fused with daisies and printed on metallic paper.
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Alice Lee, Blue White Carved Porcelain Lamp, 2025, Porcelain, 13 x 6 x 6 in, Cylindrical shaped porcelain lamp w/ carvings and blue details
Alice Lee is a Seattle-based ceramic artist working primarily in porcelain, creating both functional vessels and carved luminaries. Her process begins on the wheel, where she forms vessels that are later carved to reveal texture, movement, and the interplay of light across the surface. Through this layered approach, she transforms simple forms into works that emphasize depth and subtle visual rhythm.
Her practice is shaped by her Asian American heritage and Buddhist philosophy. Raised in San Francisco's Chinatown by parents who immigrated from Vietnam and Hong Kong, Lee grew up surrounded by strong cultural motifs and symbolic traditions that continue to inform her aesthetic sensibility. Rather than replicating traditional forms, she draws from these influences to develop a personal visual language that reflects her experience of living between cultures in the Pacific Northwest.
Light plays a central role in her carved porcelain luminaries. As illumination passes through the translucent surface, layers of texture and carving are revealed, creating shifting effects as the viewer moves around the work. This interaction produces a quiet sense of movement and presence within a space. Lee is interested in how these objects can introduce warmth, mindfulness, and care into everyday environments, fostering moments of reflection and connection.
Larine Chung, Sunny Side Up, 2021, Oil on Panel, 6 x 6 in
Larine Chung's work explores the vibrant and dynamic world of play and childhood, examining how early experiences shape identity, emotion, and perception. Through painting, she seeks to capture the innocence, freedom, and expansive creativity that define formative moments. She is drawn to the fluid exchange between imagination and reality that occurs during play, recognizing how joy, discovery, and wonder often coexist with the complexities of growing up.
In her paintings, Chung employs bold color, whimsical forms, and abstract compositions to evoke the sense of uninhibited exploration characteristic of childhood. By manipulating scale, perspective, and texture, she creates visual spaces where memories and emotions become tangible. Her figures and scenes are often intentionally fragmented or dreamlike, reflecting the fleeting, layered, and sometimes disjointed nature of early experience.
Veronica Velazquez-Aviles, My Spirit Was Left in the Tulip Fields, 2023, Acrylic on gessoed wood panel, 14 x 11 x 0.55 in
Velazquez-Aviles grew up in Stanwood, Washington, near Skagit County's tulip fields. Since she was a baby, visiting them with her family became a lasting tradition. This painting reflects her longing and comfort in those memories, honoring her parents through a nostalgic, dreamlike color palette.
Mimi Ortiz, Sunbeams on Whatcom Falls, 2025, Oil, 16 x 20 x 1 in
Mimi Ortiz's work reflects her passion for painting landscapes en plein air whenever possible, and in the studio on cool, wet days. She draws inspiration from walks through the forests, coastlines, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, where trees, sunlight, wind, and water serve as primary sources of energy and creative influence.
Working in oil paint, Ortiz focuses on light, color, and movement as her central elements. Rather than recreating nature in literal detail, she seeks to suggest an environment that invites viewers to enter the painting through their own experiences of time and place. Her goal is to create space within the composition, allowing atmosphere and gesture to evoke a sense of immersion and connection.
Artists such as Henri Matisse, the members of the Group of Seven, and Emily Carr have significantly influenced her artistic development, shaping her approach to color, landscape, and expressive interpretation.
Kathryn Rantala, A Little Family, 2023, Assemblage/Sculpture, 11 x 9 x 3.5 in
Kathryn Rantala is a visual artist and poet who has lived in Edmonds, Washington more than 30 years. Since 2014, she has been working with found objects and miniatures to create what she calls "Stills" - assemblages, tableaux, portraits, or moments such as we would find in individual frames of a film where a personality, situation, concurrence, scene, action, reaction or apparent thought is captured for us to consider outside of the whole. Her aim is for pieces not just to be decorative but to project an aspect of their nature within new context, perhaps the context to which they have always aspired.
Brandon Allebach, Shilshole Bay, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 x 1.5 in
Brandon Allebach has been a professional artist for over seventeen years. Raised in Seattle, Washington for nineteen years, he finds inspiration from his past journeys and experiences. Painting with acrylic on canvas, he explores abstraction for emotional connection. Using sharp lines and contrast, he focuses on creating depth that interweaves the foreground and background.
Chris Baumgartner, White Haired Woman with Her Man, 2024, Acrylic, 24 x 18 x 1.5 in
In this series of abstracted human figures, Chris Baumgartner explores the many ways the human body can be presented graphically in a flat, static format. By intentionally removing gestures of movement, the figures emphasize structure, silhouette, and visual design rather than physical dynamism.
With over thirty years of experience in fashion design, Baumgartner draws upon an understanding of form, fabric, and visual presentation. The figures are "clothed" in ways that become central to their identity and expression, reflecting how garments shape perception and communicate presence. Clothing functions not merely as adornment, but as a defining visual element that informs composition, balance, and narrative.
Through this approach, Baumgartner examines the intersection of body, design, and abstraction, presenting the human form as both object and image within a carefully constructed visual space.
Austin Cullen, Float, 2025, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 16 in
Austin Cullen explores the evolving relationship between technology, representation, and the natural world. As technological systems change, so too does the way we perceive and depict our surroundings. Through this body of work, Cullen examines the ethics of display and the points of overlap between humanity, landscape, and the constructed illusions of the virtual realm.
The project reflects on historical and contemporary modes of access to nature. In the past, natural history museums served as primary gateways to unfamiliar landscapes, presenting curated environments through dramatic dioramas and miniaturized scenes. Today, digital platforms allow near-instant access to images and representations of distant places. By contrasting these experiences, Cullen investigates how shifts in medium influence perception, memory, and understanding.
The framing devices used to present nature-whether museum displays, interactive virtual environments, or digital imagery-function as interpretive windows. While these frameworks guide how viewers read and understand the natural world, they can also be examined as constructs that shape and mediate our relationship to land. Museums have historically educated audiences about the environment, yet they may also create a sense of separation from it. In an era defined by global climate crisis, Cullen's work encourages a reassessment of how institutions influence our perception of nature.
Erin Power, Domestic Watershed, 2024, Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 x 1.5 in
An interest in how humans experience and remember the environments they inhabit lies at the core of Erin Power's work. She is drawn to ordinary spaces and objects-landscapes, architectural structures, domestic interiors, and everyday forms-that carry subtle traces of human presence through light, surface, and material.
Her process often begins with observation. Power walks, photographs, and draws, studying how light moves across a place or object and how forms organize space. These studies serve as the foundation for studio work, where layering, editing, and simplification transform direct observation into distilled interpretations of lived experience.
Working across oil painting and printmaking, she combines attentive observation with refined composition and a restrained palette. Whether depicting a landscape, interior scene, or still life, Power is interested in the moment when light reveals quiet expression within an ordinary subject. Human presence appears not through figures, but through traces-paths worn into a landscape, the arrangement of objects, or surfaces shaped by daily use.
Lori Soderberg, Repose, 2022, Fused Glass, 20 x 4 x 1 in,
For over 25 years, Joel and Lori have called Edmonds home, drawing inspiration from the light and color of the Puget Sound. Together, they create vibrant fused glass art-ranging from luminous serving pieces and hand-pulled murrini bowls to intricate wall panels and combed glass sculptural works-that celebrate movement and color. Travel has played a vital role in shaping their artistic voice. Landscapes and vistas experienced across the globe echo through their designs-bold horizons, rhythmic patterns, and rich palettes that reflect both distant journeys and the coastal Northwest they cherish. Before dedicating more time to their studio practice, Lori taught in the Edmonds School District, while Joel has built a career as a software engineer in Redmond. Together, they bring a rare blend of creativity and precision to their craft - merging artistic intuition with technical expertise. Active participants in the local arts community, Joel and Lori have exhibited widely in Edmonds galleries, taken part in Art Walk Edmonds and the Edmonds Arts Festival, and have participated on the Edmonds Studio Tour since 2019. Their work is currently represented at Crow in Edmonds, Scott Milo Gallery in Anacortes, Schack Art Center in Everett, and Seattle Glassblowing Studio in Seattle. Their work can be found in private and public collections worldwide. "Life is too short to NOT be surrounded by beautiful colors, patterns and shapes."
William Mark Sommer, No Phones, 2015, Medium Format Film Photograph, Archival Ink Print., 14 x 11 x 1 in
WINNER OF 2026 JUROR'S CHOICE AWARD
William Mark Sommer is a multidisciplinary traveling visual artist who engages with the American landscape through creating a range of projects, books, and installations that utilize photography to illuminate narratives of nature, preservation, and empathy. Over the past twenty years, Sommer's creative practice has facilitated the development of meaningful relationships with diverse places, ecologies, and communities, while also deepening his self-understanding through metaphorical and metaphysical investigations in photography. Through these ongoing creations, Sommer seeks to foster connections to the land, examine how human actions shape environments, and highlight the unique narratives expressed through place, identity, and connection.Within his practice, Sommer has participated in residencies, publications, and exhibitions that have featured his art worldwide. Inspired by Steinbeck's travels across America, I felt compelled to embark on my own journey. In September 2015, I began an open-ended solo trip all around the Pacific Northwest. The anticipation of the unknown was ever-present, with countless new places to discover and only the road and a map to guide me across 2,600 miles of travel.
Pam DeVries, Just Being Koi, 2024, soft pastel, 11 x 9 x 1 in
Making art has long provided Pam DeVries with a sense of peace and balance. When her inner world-or the world around her-feels marked by turmoil or chaos, painting becomes a source of joy, clarity, and meaning. Through creative expression, she seeks equilibrium and a sense of renewal, finding comfort in discovering beauty in nature, in animals, and even in everyday human interactions.
Her work has often been described as "outsider art." Having received no formal training, DeVries believes this background contributes to a sense of freedom in her practice. Without adherence to conventional rules or academic structures, she approaches painting intuitively, guided by exploration rather than established methodology. This openness allows her to experiment and respond directly to color, form, and process.
Painting serves as a space for play and discovery. She delights in the richness of color and works across multiple media, primarily acrylic and watercolor, while expanding her experimentation in recent years to include soft pastels and oils. Each painting becomes an immersive environment-an internal world where she can work for extended periods of time.
Coizie Bettinger, Wandering Water, 2026, Pastel, 12 x 12 x 1 in
Mary Oliver's quote, "We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it," echoes Coizie Bettinger's understanding of art and its purpose. Each day, she is filled with delight, joy, peace, or astonishment while observing the ever-changing fields, sloughs, marshes, woods, water, and the shifting edges where land meets water. The ordinary yet unexpected beauty of these landscapes often stops her in her tracks.
Bettinger paints what she sees, guided by the feelings that inspire her, filtered through the kaleidoscope of her imagination. Her work translates direct observation into expressive form, emphasizing color, light, and atmosphere as vehicles for emotional response.
She works primarily with soft pastels-pure pigment in stick form, available in a wide range of textures, from buttery and smooth to gritty, crumbly, harder, or softer. She values the tactile nature of the medium, relishing the dusty surface and the pigment that stains her hands as part of the creative process. Discovering pastels has allowed her to more fully express and share her sense of joy and wonder at the fragile and precious beauty of the Skagit Valley.
Alice Dubiel, The Book of Shadows: turquoise kootenia, 2026, acrylic and mixed media resist on canvas, 15.24 x 15.24 x 6.30 cm
Alice Dubiel approaches her work as a series of visual essays exploring landscape, reproduction, and the intersection of cultural and natural systems. Influenced by ecological ideas of convergence, she investigates how life evolves along similar paths across time and environments. Working with acrylic, encaustic, mixed media, printmaking, and handmade papers, she layers maps, washes, imagery of plants and animals, text, and iridescent pigments to build complex surfaces.
Topographic maps and field-based practices-plein air painting, photographic documentation, and seasonal studies-inform her process. A residency in North Cascades National Park and experiences in Korea deepened her interest in temporality, geography, and traditional technologies. Through framed works resembling specimens and large installations that resist containment, Dubiel examines how systems of representation shape our understanding of land, ecology, and truth.
Johanna Paterson, Adrift, 2020, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 x 2 in
Johanna Paterson graduated from The Kansas City Art Institute in 1970. She moved to La Conner, Wa., drawn in by the Mystics and the greatness of art in the area. She feels that her search for that infinitesimal space where form begins to emerge from the mists began then, and yet continues. Her paintings are in private collections throughout the United States.
Dona Reed, R is for Raven, 2026, Linocut, assemblage black, 15 x 13 x 3 in
Dona is a printmaker from Anacortes. She works in linocuts of northwest subjects. Recently she has expanded into assemblage, where she frames her original prints in upcycled boxes and drawers and adds other found objects to create a more complex and interesting composition.
Annabelle Vergne, Forest Bathing, 2026, Acrylics, pastel and charcoal on canvas, 30 x 15 x 1.5 in
Annabelle Vergne was born and raised in France in a family of artists and also spent part of her life in Tunisia. Early exposure to the visual and performing arts later shaped her career as a dance teacher and choreographer. Now retired, she has fully transitioned her creative focus from choreography to painting.
Self-taught, Vergne draws inspiration and color influence from her North African cultural heritage, spirituality, and the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Her palette reflects the vibrancy and depth of these environments, blending personal history with place.
Living with multiple sclerosis and its physical and cognitive challenges, she views painting as both expression and healing. Creating is a necessity for her; the deep focus required by the process feels spiritual in nature and provides clarity and balance.
Laurel Emmons, Light The Dark, 2026, Acrylic, gesso, gold leaf, 30 x 10 x 1.5 in
Laurel Emmons has recently focused on creating work that incorporates greater layers and texture. Through a process of self-teaching, experimentation, and trial and error, she has discovered new techniques that allow for a deeper expression of complex emotions and lived experiences. This evolving approach has expanded both her technical range and conceptual depth.
Working with layered surfaces enables Emmons to explore subtle shifts in material, form, and meaning. She finds that this process supports a more nuanced articulation of feeling, creating space for reflection and transformation within the work.
In many ways, this method of making fosters a sense of connection to the broader human condition. Through texture, accumulation, and process, her work reflects contemporary experience while inviting viewers to engage with shared emotion and presence
Louis Anderson, Helga's Garden, 2026, Watercolor, 16 x 29 x 1 in
ouis Anderson paints mostly in watercolor. His style is impressionistic sumi executed with total confidence. Every stroke is a reflection of his whole being, rendered in his unique view of the subject. His favorite places to paint are his garden and Helga Jaques' award winning pond. Watching Louis paint, seeing his brush dance over the paper, one is reminded of the movements in ballet. A proficient painter, he is well known in the Pacific Northwest. He received a scholarship from Cranbrook Academy of Art and had his paintings shown in several Seattle Art Museums. Besides that, he participated in yearly Art Fairs. Louis resides now in a Family Home and painting every day keeps him young, He will be 88 in a few months.
Tom Bell-Games, Cage, 2025, Intaglio, 18 x 14 x 1 in, Edition of 10.
Tom Bell-Games is a printmaker and painter currently working in the Pacific Northwest. He holds a BFA in Printmaking from Miami University (Oxford, OH) and an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA).
His approach to image-making is intuitive, with gestures and marks on the page prompting an ongoing visual response. He is interested in how organic forms can convey and evoke emotion, and how two-dimensional symbols can generate a sense of connection to something beyond the image itself.
Bell-Games aims to create works that invite emotional engagement and perceptual response, exploring the relationship between expression and abstraction. In his current practice, he is particularly focused on painterly qualities within printmaking, utilizing techniques such as white ground, sugar lift, and aquatint to expand tonal depth, atmosphere, and gesture within the printed surface.
Tara Campbell, The Writer (View 2), 2025, Yarn, bone, mannequin hands, hemp twine, leather cord, 43 x 9 x 9 in
Before moving to Seattle in 2023, Tara Campbell was active as a painter in the Washington, DC arts community, exhibiting in group and solo shows. She received grants and commissions from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and has work in institutional and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Since her arrival in Seattle in 2023, she has begun creating visual art once again, with fiber arts as her medium. Crochet exists in a liminal space between craft and art, but by combining it with unexpected materials, the work can help shift and broaden perspectives on art and value. The softness of yarn may seem inappropriate to pair with the hardness of bone, but in a way, they belong together because of their fragility. Campbell is additionally a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She writes and teaches speculative and flash fiction, and is the author of two novels, two hybrid collections, two short story collections, and a chapbook of sestinas. Additional publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising.
Margaret Carpenter Arnett, Summer Evening, 2025, soft pastel, 16 x 20 x 1 in
Margaret Carpenter Arnett BSN, ATR was born and educated in England and has lived most of her adult life in the western United States. Artist, art therapist, teacher, and writer, she is an accomplished and talented painter. Primarily a watercolorist, Margaret now works with pastel, mixed media, and collage. She is a signature member of the Northwest Pastel Society and has participated in juried and invitational shows in California and the northwest. She works closely with the Museum of Northwest Art. Combining her art and nursing backgrounds, Margaret became an art therapist in !983 and led an art therapy support group at the University of Washington Cancer Center for sixteen years. She has worked as an art therapist in the community at large for the past forty years, and currently leads a group in Visual Journaling at La Conner Senior Center. Believing that art facilitates healing both through self-expression, and as a key to the door of the unconscious mind, she wrote and published "The Art of the Inner Journey" in 2011, and her memoirs "Invisible Threads" in 2022, The Art of the Inner Journey was re published in full color in 2024 and is available on Amazon, Barnes Noble and Readers Magnet.
Dianne Dickeman, Listening to the Sea, 2024, charcoal, gouache, watercolor, collage on paper, 17 x 14 x 1.25 in
Dianne Dickeman is a painter and drawer whose work is firmly grounded in the two-dimensional plane. The physicality of paint-and the visible evidence of process-plays a central role in her practice. Brush marks, scrapes, erasures, and the layered traces of revision remain present in the finished work, recording the history of its making.
She is also interested in a subtle sense of movement within the picture plane, where forms may appear flat against the surface yet simultaneously suggest depth and recession. This tension between surface and illusion is a recurring focus in her work.
Dickeman's imagery often draws from the natural world, particularly landscapes and water. Her work is shaped by memory, functioning as both influence and subject. Moving between representation and abstraction, she explores the shifting boundary where observation becomes interpretation and image becomes experience.
Kate Dwyer, Blue Garden, 2025, Fabric and thread mache', 12 x 18 x 16 in
Kate Dwyer is compelled to make things-gardens, paintings, necklaces, tortured eggshells, bowls, batiks, and other forms that resist easy categorization. The source of this persistent creative drive is uncertain; it does not appear to stem from upbringing or formal education, yet it remains a defining force in her life.
Dwyer approaches making as something both instinctive and surprising. She experiences creativity as an ongoing gift-one that brings both gratitude and an abundance of energy. Her practice is guided less by fixed intention than by curiosity and responsiveness, allowing each new work to emerge as part of a continuous, evolving exploration. Across materials and forms, she remains attentive to process, transformation, and the unexpected possibilities that arise through making.
Pete Fleming, Crossing, 2024, Tripe overprinted inkjet on newsprint., 9 x 11 x 1.5 in
Starting with light and touch, Pete Fleming's work explores the sensual and haptic materiality of contemporary images. His practice operates at the intersection of photography and print, engaging closely with processes of image-making, selfhood, and world-building.
The works presented originate from photographic film negatives created over a ten-year period across four countries. Fleming repeatedly returns to these images, developing a sustained dialogue with them over time. A quietness runs through the compositions, reflecting an evolving philosophy of attention, slowness, and deep listening. Crossing is the only work printed outside the traditional darkroom. In its lower left corner, a strand of dust appears against the horizon, an incidental mark revealed through scanning. For Fleming, this detail underscores the persistent presence of physical materiality, even within digitally mediated processes.
By working with newsprint, a material that shifts in tone under UV exposure, he reintroduces time as an active component of the printed image. His practice emphasizes change, impermanence, and the life of materials beyond the moment of production.
With nearly two decades of experience, Fleming works across print, drawing, video, sound, and performance. As a cultural worker, he has also produced exhibitions for museums, galleries, public institutions, and private clients over a similar span of time.
Lesley Frenz, Dreams Yet to Find, 2021, Acrylic on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 x 2 in
Untamed places speak to and connect us with the raw, earthly spirit within each of us, and Lesley Frenz believes they also have the power to guide the mind and heal the heart. Whether hiking deep into the wilderness or taking a solitary walk to a nearby lake or river's edge, she finds that the act of recalling these landscapes and translating them into paint becomes a restorative practice.
In moments of uncertainty or sorrow, Frenz pours emotion onto the surface, recalling places and sometimes people, and in doing so renews her connection to both. Her process follows the path of memory, building layers of texture and color that are repeatedly formed and removed and built up and scraped back, echoing cycles of earth's death and renewal. Aqueous glazes pool and drip, dispersing and disrupting like rain on water.
Each composition emerges gradually and remains unknown until it is revealed through process. She regards her paintings as prayers, as invitations to a quiet sojourn.
Robert Gideon, Parking Garage, 2024, Photography, 20 x 16 x 1 in
Photography is fundamentally documentary in nature. Whether capturing a moment in time for later reflection or layering emotion and interpretation onto a black-and-white image, photographic work ultimately seeks to communicate effectively and evoke an emotional response in the viewer.
Robert Gideon's work exists at the intersection of human empathy and visual perception, shaped by a desire to express appreciation for the small wonders of the world. His practice is driven by a compulsion to observe and interpret subtle patterns, contexts, and relationships of light and shadow within everyday environments.
Rather than focusing on grand subjects, Gideon engages in a form of daily visual meditation, attuned to overlooked and humble details. In these quiet observations, he finds moments of transcendent beauty. Through his photographs, he hopes to share this awareness and invite viewers to recognize and appreciate these fleeting, often unseen aspects of the world around them.
Mindi Katzman, Nuclear Skylight, 2022, graphite/pastel on wood veneer, 14 x 11 x 1 in
As above, (skylights), so below (mycelium). Where the visual spinning wheel lands is always a mystery. This picture is part of a series on skylights, drawn with pencil and pastel directly on wood. As with many artists, Covid made us look around and.use what we had with in reach. In this case, skylights with the constant change of light and shadow, and wood cradle boards, purchased for other projects.
L. Kelly Lyles, Squirrel with a Pearl Earring, 2026, Acrylic on Canvas Board, Found Object (Earring, Silver Frame, 13 x 11 x 2 in
L. Kelly Lyles embraces the idea that life is meant to be enjoyed, and she hopes viewers experience that sense of fun in her work. An interdisciplinary artist known for painting, art cars, colorful clothing, and arts networking, she works across multiple media and styles grounded in representational traditions shaped by years of classical training.
Humor is a central thread in Lyles's practice, reflecting a belief that laughter is especially necessary in challenging times. She is deeply engaged with language and visual wit, exploring the physical representation of vocabulary, as well as the scale and juxtaposition of unexpected subjects.
Her practice continues to explore humor, language, and cultural imagery with irreverence and joy.
Philip Malkin, Interior #25, 2021, Archival pigment print, 13.3 x 20 in,
Philip Malkin has been creating images of buildings within the human habitat for several years. His work explores the relationship between human-made structures and the surrounding environment, considering how these forms can tell a broader story about our existence.
Malkin invites viewers to look beyond the surface of the landscape or cityscape and to recognize an aesthetic presence within these constructed places. His photographs emerge from this perspective, encouraging a more attentive and reflective way of seeing.
He considers his images to be documents of what people build and how those structures shape, and are shaped by, the world around them.
Lynn Skordal, Lepidoptera, 2017, Paper collage on thrift store print, 16 x 13.5 in
Lynn lives and works in the tiny town of La Conner in the far Northwest corner of the US. After retiring from the practice of law ten years ago, she began making artist's books and small works on paper. Old-style cut & paste collage has been and remains a favorite medium, and she frequently also incorporates sewing techniques, thread, fabric, metal, wood and other materials into her pieces. The goal is always to tell a story that might startle, amuse or provoke. Lynn's work has appeared in many national and international book arts and collage exhibitions, in books and magazines, and is included in many public and private collections across the country.
Catherine Stevens, Joel Brock in his La Conner Studio, 2004, Photography, 12 x 14 x 1 in
Cathy Stevens is a photographer living in Mt. Vernon, WA. where she owned and operated Peeps Photography for more than 40 years. After graduating from Western Washington University in 1975, she planned a trip across the United States to document Bicentennial events in 1976. In 1977, she opened Peeps Photography in downtown Mt. Vernon. She was especially known for her portraits of children, and her images were featured on the covers of several national photography magazines. She also loved documenting artists in their studios and co-produced The Barn Shows, 1987-2003, book in 2019.
Suzanne Powers, La Conner Morning, 2024, Watercolor, 14 x 11 x .25 in, Painting
Light is what first attracts Suzanne Powers to a subject. Yet it is the mood and feeling of a space that holds her attention. Her paintings are rooted in a personal response to light, color, and form, translating direct observation into expressive visual experience.
Nature serves as her primary inspiration, particularly its balance of power and fragility. Powers works between studio practice and plein air painting, each informing the other. Painting on site allows her to respond spontaneously to changing conditions and to follow a composition wherever it leads. Studio work, in turn, provides space to refine technique, explore process, and expand creative direction. Her paintings are ultimately a celebration of the natural beauty that surrounds us, shaped by attentiveness, responsiveness, and a sustained dialogue with place.
Bob Hogan, Sea Breeze, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 x 1 in
Bob Hogan is a regional artist based in Anacortes, Washington. The beauty of the San Juan Islands provides him with a continuous source of inspiration. His work explores local color while incorporating a subtle contemporary edge, focusing on landscapes, wildlife, and the iconic natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
Working primarily in acrylics, Hogan continues to refine his style and approach, creating paintings that aim to evoke meaningful memories for those who have experienced the region. His intention is to capture a sense of place that resonates emotionally with viewers and reflects their connection to the landscape.
In addition to his painting practice, Hogan co-illustrated the best-selling children's book The Tortoise from Anacortes with his wife, author Claudia Hogan.
Carolynn Wicker, Summer Walk Down Boulevard, 2025, Oil Paint, 16 x 12 x 0.625 in
Carolynn Wicker works primarily in oil painting on canvas. Her practice focuses on landscapes and seascapes that she feels carry strong emotional resonance or meaning. As a Pacific Islander living on Coast Salish land, she maintains a deep connection to environments shaped by wind, water, and shifting atmospheric conditions.
Wicker uses oil paint, color, and light as expressive tools to shape mood and feeling throughout her process. Rather than aiming for direct replication of a photograph or specific scene, she is more interested in evoking emotion, memory, and nostalgia. Her paintings invite viewers to experience themselves within the landscape rather than simply observe it, encouraging a sense of immersion and emotional connection to place.
Helga Jaques, Last Year in Mallorca, 2026, Acrylic, 11 x 21 x 1 in
elga Jaques-Aspacher was born in Upper Austria in the little town of Vorchdorf near Linz. She got a degree in Home Economics in Linz . After graduation, she spent a year in England as "Au Pair" and then went on to the French part of Switzerland in order to perfect her French. While in Lausanne, she noticed the high quality of Graphic Schools. While studying graphics and working in a cafe to support herself, she met her future husband Fred. After working for two years in the photographic Dept. of they immigrated to Seattle in 1965. They have two children and a grandson. She continued her studies with some noted local watercolorists and became a signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society. Memories of her home country are reflected in her many paintings of Austrian ancient houses, castles and villages . Besides painting, she enjoys gardening, cooking, backpacking, skiing, mushroom hunting, travelling to exotic countries and Austrian Club activities.
Carla Bucknell, Flying with Grace, 2023, Encaustic Mixed Media, 13 x 13 x 2 in
Carla Bucknell graduated with honors from the University of Washington with a degree in Clothing Design, Textiles, and Art. She built a long career in the sportswear fashion industry, holding major design positions at Britannia Sportswear, Demetre Sweaters, and Roffe Skiwear, as well as working in design and color consulting with other Northwest-based sportswear companies. This career involved extensive travel throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. During this time, she also pursued art and music privately for personal fulfillment.
After leaving the fashion industry, Bucknell began an independent study of visual art, dedicating significant time to exploring techniques and forms of artistic expression. Photography became an important part of this practice, and she has developed an extensive library of wildlife and nature images. She is particularly drawn to birds of the Pacific Northwest, with a special fascination for crows.
Her current work focuses on encaustic mixed media, using traditional wax layering techniques with historical roots. She often begins with a painted foundation on a wood panel, building images through multiple layers of encaustic wax. Forms are sculpted and developed using various tools, with colored wax applied using a heated brush to create depth and texture. Through this process, she has developed a distinctive approach that differs from many traditional encaustic practices.
The inspiration for her work is deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest-its mountains, oceans, islands, and wildlife. Her long-standing relationship with the Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA) in La Conner, Washington, where she has helped curate exhibitions, remains an ongoing source of inspiration. Her work has been featured and sold at the MoNA annual art auction since 2018. She continues to be influenced by both historical and contemporary artists of the region.
Neil Berkowitz, Ravenna Overgrowth #8, 2026, Multilayer photographic achival pigment print on paper, 18 x 24 x 2 in
Neil Berkowitz asks viewers to look more deeply and to question casual observation. This inquiry extends across his two-dimensional visual work, time-based pieces, and interactive installations. These practices share a commitment to extensive layering, both visually and conceptually, often incorporating composited audio as a critical element in time-based and installation works.
His multilayered compositions reward close attention, inviting viewers to engage with dense detail and shifting relationships between elements. Unlike much lens-based photography, Berkowitz often works from an "empty frame," allowing for expanded possibilities in constructing images that explore transparency, texture, color, and structure in ways that would be difficult to achieve in a single-layered photographic approach.
The layering in his work operates both aesthetically and thematically, creating multiple entry points for interpretation. Rather than describing his photographic practice as altered or manipulated, he emphasizes its intentional construction. Like other forms of art, these works are made with purpose and are meant to signal their own constructed nature-inviting viewers to question, interpret, and consider how meaning is formed.
Mark Danielson, Doorway, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 10 x 8 in
Mark Danielson's work grows out of an interest in landscape painting, architecture, and the graphic design of the mid-20th century, and connects these influences to the computer-fabricated environments of the present day. His practice explores the intersections between these disciplines and the spaces they occupy, examining how visual languages shift across time and media.
Within this framework, various formal elements interact and respond to one another, informed by both observed and constructed worlds. Danielson's work considers how historical aesthetics and contemporary digital systems overlap, merge, and inform new ways of seeing and organizing visual experience.
Sue Danielson, Abundance, 2019, collage, 18 x 15 x 1 in, Framed. Paper size 14" x 11".
Seattle's watershed runs from the peaks of the Cascade Mountains through old- and new-growth forests, subdivisions, towns, and cities. It flows through culverts, tunnels, rivers, and creeks before reaching reservoirs, lakes, or Puget Sound. Over many years, Sue Danielson has developed an intimate connection to this watershed by tracing its waterways on foot, following its shifting "veins" through the landscape.
Her experiences in these environments serve as the foundation for her abstract paintings, collages, and installations. While walking the watershed, she often holds paradoxical emotions; grief for the forest under pressure from entropy, climate change, and development, alongside awe at its persistence, complexity, and abundance. The presence of wildlife within these systems remains a continual source of wonder.
Working from memory and emotional response, Danielson translates these experiences into layered compositions of chromatic lines, shapes, and patterns that reflect the dense stratification of growth and the shifting perceptions of space shaped by wind and light. Her process incorporates aerial perspectives and draws from, then departs from, traditional mapping as a visual framework.
Kay Mattson Ferris, In the Artist's Garden, 2024, Watercolor, 27 x 34 x 1 in, Painting of my backyard garden.
Charlene Hall, Monument to Mayhem, 2025, Watercolor, 19 x 9 in,
Charlene Hall is an artist based in the Skagit Valley working in watercolor and mixed media. With a background in theatre set design, she is drawn to the ways light, atmosphere, and composition shape our experience of place.
Her watercolor paintings focus on capturing the quiet beauty of the landscape-the fleeting qualities of light and the sense of presence within a specific moment. Observation and restraint are central to this practice, allowing the transparency of watercolor to evoke mood, depth, and spatial feeling.
Alongside this work, Hall's mixed media practice takes a more intuitive approach, using texture, layering, and material exploration as a way of responding to landscape in a less literal form. Across both practices, painting becomes an act of attention-a way of honoring the land she lives in and the subtle, continuous shifts of light that define it.
JW Harrington, Reach, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in, 1.5"
JW Harrington often focuses on non-objective abstraction, offering few or no direct visual cues linking the composition to recognizable human or physical objects. Through this approach, he explores how abstract imagery can convey and evoke meanings that feel more universal and enduring than the transient forms of nature and lived experience.
His work considers abstraction as a space where interpretation is both deeply individual and broadly shared, highlighting the connections between natural, physical, and human systems. The title The Impossibility of Knowing reflects his interest in the relationship between memory, imagination, and perception, and how these forces compare to what is considered "real" or directly observed.
In these paintings, solid shapes, figures, or silhouettes interact with mirrored outlines against shadowed backgrounds. Forms are paired with reflections, shadows, or implied temporal counterparts, suggesting past, future, or alternate states of being. This interplay generates visual tension as shapes are pulled in opposing directions, while also creating interpretive openness as each element engages with its complement.
James Papp, Over the Falls, 2015, photographic print, 21x18 in
Mystery and awe inspire photographer James K. Papp's art. He has been deeply involved with his local waters, from his countless hikes along the Cascade Mountain Range's streams, lakes, and waterfalls to 40 years of working in marine shipping. For him the camera is a magical portal to connect more deeply with the world.
This is a view from the top of Nooksack Falls east of Bellingham, Washington. The rushing whitewater, the sculpted rock, and the dark evergreens combine to create a powerful drama and that Papp captures in his photograph.
Fred Videon, Tropics, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, 19 x 20 x 1 in
Fred Videon is an artist living and working in Port Townsend, Washington. Raised in Montana, he discovered his first artistic interest in black-and-white photography as a teenager. He later earned a degree in Engineering from Stanford University. After graduating, he began studying painting and drawing, eventually completing a BFA with an emphasis in painting at the University of Washington. Following a 30-year career in technology, he moved to Port Townsend in 2020 and returned to making art full time.
Each of Videon's paintings is a process of discovery. Through repeated cycles of revision and repainting, he searches for shapes and lines with character. He is drawn to ambiguity, suggestive spatial relationships, and subtle shifts in light and form.
His work embraces visual uncertainty, allowing ambiguities, spatial tensions, and unexpected relationships to emerge through the painting process. He is interested in the ways compositions can suggest depth, movement, and atmosphere without fixed resolution.
Videon's practice is guided by an attention to visual relationships and moments of surprise. He ultimately seeks to create work that is both beautiful and evocative, inviting viewers into a space of open interpretation and sustained looking.
Suze Woolf, Whitehorse from Sauk Mountain, 2025, Watercolor on paper, 15 x 11 in
Suze Woolf spent her childhood drawing. She studied ceramics and printmaking at the University of Washington while working as a technical editor. Early in the development of computer graphics, she moved into graphic and interface design and managed a skunkworks team creating demos of computational futures. These intersecting experiences continue to inform her multidisciplinary practice.
Today, Woolf works across painting, paper casting, artist books, pyrography, and installation. She considers herself fortunate that a wide range of lifelong skills converge in her artistic career. Her professional practice also includes curating large traveling exhibitions, juried competitions, and contributing work to nonprofit fundraising efforts. She maintains a large plein air mailing list that circulates weekly for six months each year. Her work has been supported through grants, exhibitions, and residencies from arts organizations, national parks, and artist colonies.
Woolf's artistic practice began with landscape painting, often as a way of creating emotional records of place. She continues to bring drawing materials on every outdoor hike, maintaining a direct and ongoing engagement with observation in nature.
Painting outdoors from life is both demanding and deeply immersive. For Woolf, it is a "flow" state that integrates sensation, skill, and sustained attention, offering a direct experience of perception and environment in real time.
Kristin Frost, Laurel Forest, 2021, Graphite on paper, 8 x 11 x 1 in
Kristin Frost's work responds to the specific elements of place; atmosphere, season, light, and time. Working primarily in graphite, ink, and watercolor, her drawings and paintings are observations of the Pacific Northwest landscape and our fluid relationship to it.
She seeks out natural settings that draw the viewer inward, using texture and contrast to create focal points and to shape narrative through spatial relationships. Whether inspired by trees, sky, water, or objects set against the land, her work reflects both the simple and extraordinary connections people share with the natural world.
Through attentive observation and subtle composition, Frost's practice explores how landscape can hold memory, presence, and emotional resonance.
Bella Kim, Echoes of Eden, 2026, Recycled Materials, 41 x 21 x 4 in
Bella Kim creates leaf-like forms from sewn fragments of recycled plastic packaging and fabric. Through stitching discarded materials together, she transforms what was once overlooked into new patterns, textures, and visual narratives. Her process is intuitive, allowing the materials themselves to guide composition and structure.
Her practice is inspired by Jogakbo, a traditional Korean patchwork wrapping cloth made from small fabric remnants. Growing up watching the women in her family sew, Kim developed an early connection to hand-stitching that continues to shape her work today. She now collects discarded plastics, washing, sorting, and stitching them into new compositions that reflect both material care and environmental awareness.
Expanding on historical practices of reuse-where fabric remnants were repurposed within the home-her work extends this tradition to contemporary materials, incorporating plastic packaging and other household discards. In doing so, she addresses themes of consumption, waste, and ecological responsibility.
Through this piece, the story of Eden becomes a metaphor for human agency. Everyday decisions-what we consume, discard, or preserve-collectively shape the future of our environment.
Yonnah Ben Levy, Winter Raindrops I, 2026, acrylics on canvas mounted on wood, 17 x 23 x 1 in
Yonnah Ben Levy's work emerges from her deepest sense of self. She believes in redemption, a quality she has witnessed in her own life, and gratitude for the world and for life is deeply embedded in her artistic practice.
As a teacher, she seeks not to create followers of a particular style, but to help unlock the creativity within each individual. She often describes herself as more of an artist in residence than a traditional instructor, while also remaining a lifelong learner who continually acquires and shares new techniques. Her experience working in various art production studios has also shaped her view of herself as a kind of "factory worker," engaged in both making and process.
In her workshops and teaching at an art center, she places equal importance on listening to her students. Each participant brings a unique background, story, and perspective, which informs the shared creative experience.
In 2013, Ben Levy received a Certificate in Pastoral Leadership from Seattle University, where she participated in a cohort of clergy as the only non-clerical member. During this time, she hosted individual art sessions as part of her practice. She views both teaching and art as grounded in humility and presence, understanding art itself as an act of faith.
For seven years, she taught at the Grunewald Guild in the Cascades, an organization centered on the motto "art and faith," where she was also the only Jewish instructor. In collaboration with her husband, she has created numerous large-scale paintings for hospitals, produced both through commission and from existing works.
Evy Halvorsen Holstein, Incoming, 2026, oil on canvas, 16 x 16 x 1 in
Evy Halvorsen Holstein is drawn to artistic challenges and often shifts styles in search of new ways to express her ideas. Metaphor is a central focus in her current practice, along with the ongoing challenge of translating internal concepts into visual form for the viewer. Her process frequently involves multiple revisions, with paintings reworked several times before reaching resolution.
Recently, her work has moved toward storm imagery, severe landscapes, and dramatic atmospheric conditions. Within these scenes, she suggests passages, safe havens, and beacons of safety, creating tension between vulnerability and refuge.
Holstein's work engages with themes of mortality and the perceived dangers of the universe, as well as the psychological states they can evoke. For her, the surrounding space-complex, subtle, and ever-shifting-has a profound influence. It functions simultaneously as sanctuary and adversary: a place that nurtures creativity while also challenging her to exceed her artistic limitations. This duality forms the foundation of her practice, driving her to create work that is visually compelling, emotionally resonant, and intellectually engaging.
Christie Houston, Dusk Flight, 2025, Sewn ecco printed paper, Sumi ink, string, burlap, dried wheat, 33 x 21 x .25 in
Christie Houston works primarily with paper, drawn to its versatility and its ability to hold texture, shape, and form. Her practice is rooted in experimentation, using paper as a means of exploring material possibilities and discovering new directions through process.
Much of her work is inspired by nature, particularly its lines, surfaces, and shifting color relationships, ranging from bold contrasts to subtle tonal variations. She is interested in how these elements can be translated and reinterpreted through layered and tactile approaches.
Houston's process is intuitive and exploratory, often involving trial and discovery. For her, the work is centered on pushing the boundaries of what paper can do, continually seeking new ways to engage with the material and keep the process open and evolving.
Jon Schmidt, The Eyes Have It, 2025, Stone sculpture, 12 x 6 x 5 in, Laguna Lace (Mexico) on a granite base
Jon Schmidt's sculptural practice is deeply rooted in a respect for the inherent qualities of stone. Each work begins with the intention of enhancing, rather than imposing upon, the natural character of the material. His practice is conceived as a dialogue with the stone, where its unique textures, colors, and forms are not merely a foundation but the central focus of the work.
Through careful carving and shaping, Schmidt seeks to reveal and amplify the intrinsic beauty within each piece of stone, allowing its natural qualities to guide the final form. This process emphasizes presence over intervention, enabling the material to remain at the forefront of the sculpture.
The resulting works invite viewers into a direct encounter with the essence of stone, fostering an appreciation for its raw, untamed elegance and the quiet strength embedded within its structure.
Jim Lilly, A Brief Encounter, 2026, Acrylic on Wood, 12 x 16 x 2.25 in
Jim Lilly's work is rooted in a lifelong connection to the lakes and waterways of Puget Sound, shaped by childhood summers along Hood Canal and years of fly-fishing regional rivers. The Salish Sea remains central to his practice, serving as both inspiration and responsibility. As environmental conditions have changed, his response has grown more complex, balancing admiration for place with concern over ecological degradation. His work functions as both reflection and inquiry, responding to lived experience, memory, and current environmental realities.
Lilly creates sculptural "reliquaries" that merge medieval altar-like structures with industrial aesthetics, using traditional sculpting methods alongside laser-cut fabrication. These trompe-l'oeil works suggest distressed materials such as metal, wood, and stone, populated by carved fish, whales, and crabs as objects of reverence. Fragmented text introduces tension and meaning, inviting interpretation between beauty and critique.
Born in Seattle, he studied painting at Pomona College and earned an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, studying with Karl Benjamin, Roland Reiss, Michael Brewster, and Connie Zehr.
Patrick Anderson, Drapery Twist "Untitled", 1997, pastel on paper, 28 x 20 x 1 in, Gray scale pastel on paper of drapery folds using light and shadow
Born in San Francisco (1961), Patrick grew up in Northern California and developed an interest in printmaking and fine art while attending high school. He studied history at New York University, where be began to engage in the art world of the late 1970's and early 80's East Village and Soho scene. In 1981 he relocated to Seattle, where his love of mountain wilderness and art combined. Patrick has exhibited widely from the Old Print Shop, NYC to Carolyn Staley Gallery, COCA, Kirkland Arts Center, University of Washington, Davidson Gallery, and many other Northwest venues.
Felicia Andreotta, Peak-a-Boo, 2022, Oil, 20 x 20 x 1.5 in
Felicia Andreotta is based in Bellingham, WA. Inspired by the Pacific Northwest, she creates atmospheric and abstract landscapes using palette knives as her primary tool. This approach allows her to build movement and texture, giving her work a sense of ethereal quality. Felicia's process is unique, starting with a concept then gradually developing the shape of each piece, resulting in visual poetry.
Chaim Bezalel, Winter Sun, 2011, encaustics on linen mounted on wood, 24 x 14 x 2 in
Chaim Bezalel began as a photographer in the 1970s and retains a documentary sensibility, often working in series. Over time, he found traditional photography too constrained and influenced by the precision of darkroom practice and the visual saturation of contemporary advertising. In response, he began exploring image degradation and material transformation, using photography primarily as a starting point for painting rather than an end in itself.
His work often originates from his own photographs but is translated into paintings on rough handmade paper, burlap, or raw linen, emphasizing texture, imperfection, and material presence. Early experiments included toy and inexpensive cameras, reflecting an ongoing interest in chance and limitation.
Bezalel studied documentary film and photography in college and maintains a mental archive of images informed by both his upbringing in New York and years spent living in Israel. His practice is further shaped by a deep engagement with art history and a belief that taste and perception can be developed over time.
Elvira Butler, Graceful, 2022, photography, 20 x 22 x 2 in
Elvira Butler's photography has been a lifelong passion, evolving from early nature studies toward more abstract expressions. Her work emphasizes dynamic energy and seeks to actively engage the viewer through movement, composition, and visual rhythm.
She works primarily in-camera, with final refinements made using digital tools. This blend of capture and post-production allows her to shape images while maintaining responsiveness to the original moment of creation.
Butler's work has been exhibited in galleries and published in magazines, calendars, and art catalogues. She has received recognition in international juried competitions, including the Monochrome Awards and a second-place placement in a national monuments competition.
Carrie Larson, Crossing the Low Divide, 2020, mixed media -paper, botanical prints, colored pencil, 12 x 36 x 1.5 in
A foundation in artist's bookmaking informs Carrie Larson's mixed media practice, from her fascination with paper to her use of thread as a drawn line-one that may also literally and metaphorically bind disparate elements together. She is drawn to materials and processes that invite touch, emphasizing tactile qualities that encourage connection and presence.
Central to Larson's work is the act of shaping a cohesive whole from fragments, a process she views as both restorative and unifying. Influenced by the natural environment, her work explores a sense of place distilled into essences, textures, and sensations that evoke a quiet visual poetry.
While her artist's books and installations often engage personal and societal themes, her two-dimensional works inhabit a reflective natural space, offering moments of contemplation for both maker and viewer. Through layered surfaces and subtle compositions, Larson seeks to create meditative environments that provide calm and stillness in contrast to the noise and fragmentation of contemporary life.
Donna Watson, Flight Pattern, 2026, Cold wax and oil paints, 18 x 18 x 1.5 in
Donna Watson has lived in the Pacific Northwest for many years, including the past twenty-five on Camano Island, where her home overlooks water and distant mountains. Across the landscape, she is continually drawn to the thin strip of white light where water meets land, a subtle horizon line that has become a lasting source of fascination and inspiration.
Traveling through the Skagit Valley, Watson is equally moved by the sight of large flights of birds, which evoke a deep sense of connection and renewal. These experiences form the foundation of her current body of work. A painter for many years, she now works primarily in cold wax and oil, drawn to the medium's capacity for layering and atmospheric depth. Through repeated applications of paint, she creates surfaces that convey emotional resonance and spatial ambiguity.
Her recent work centers on horizons and birds in flight. For Watson, the horizon represents both a physical meeting point and a symbolic boundary between the known and the unknown. The birds moving across this threshold embody hope, transition, and freedom, reflecting her deepest sense of place and belonging within the landscape she calls home.
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John Howard, Melt 2, 2025, Hot cast glass, steel, LED, enamel, 14 x 12 x 7 in
John Howard is a Seattle-based sculptor. His figurative works incorporate cast glass, steel, LED, and enamel. His practice examines how traditional craft techniques impart individuality to computer-designed objects. John's sculptures are designed in CAD and hand-built in traditional materials like wood and glass. This introduces a series of progressive, organic errors and transforms a digital object that can be perfectly and infinitely replicated into a physical object with singular character. John's work for the 2026 MoNA Art Auction is part of his current series, "Imperfect Characters". Objects in the series are designed in CAD software and hand-built from wood. When this happens the crisp edges and perfect angles of the CAD are disrupted by the bevels, warps, and natural grain of the wood. Next, the wooden forms are then pressed into sand to make molds for traditional hot casting. The act of pouring molten glass causes portions of the sand to collapse or erode creating more unexpected details. The glass is then mounted in a steel frame fabricated to conceal lighting elements. When displayed, the lighting highlights the artifacts introduced during the process. The illogical fight against perfectionism is motivated by John's 20-plus year career in commercial art. There, the same digital tools enable effortless perfection but make it easy to produce work lacking human warmth. His current series grapples with this by reversing the pursuit of perfection to rediscover an object's hidden individuality.
Heidi Epstein, Winter Rose in the Wind, 2025, Dry pastel on paper, 21 x 17.5 x 1.0 in
This pastel by Heidi Epstein is part of a series of six works previously exhibited together as a visual poem titled Winter Rose. The series includes pieces such as Winter Rose In the Wind, Winter Rose A Perfect Design, and Winter Rose Its Scent Falling From the Sky.
Created during January and February of 2025, these dry pastel works were inspired by a single rose in Epstein's garden as it endured the effects of winter weather. Over time, she became captivated by the rose's simultaneous fragility and resilience, finding within it both beauty and sorrow.
Through subtle shifts of color, texture, and atmosphere, the series reflects on impermanence, endurance, and transformation. The rose becomes both a specific subject and a poetic symbol-an image shaped by the passage of time, the harshness of season, and the quiet persistence of life.
Holly Hudson, Tree Sconce, 2025, Glazed porcelain, 10 x 10 x 6.5 in
Inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, Christian religious art, and creation myths from cultures around the world, Holly Hudson's work seeks connections across systems of belief in order to explore shared human experience. Her practice reflects a desire to uncover common spiritual and cultural threads at a time when social and political divisions are increasingly emphasized.
Raised in Southeast Alaska, Hudson experienced a convergence of influences early in life, attending Catholic school during the week and Methodist church on Sundays while also being surrounded by the art and traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the region. The tension and coexistence between monotheistic and animistic worldviews continue to inform her work and remain central to her artistic inquiry.
Hudson is particularly interested in comparative mythology, especially recurring patterns within creation stories across cultures. These narratives serve as a foundation for imagined worlds in which the divine feminine is restored and humans, plants, and animals coexist in interconnected and transformative ways. Through hybrid forms and symbolic imagery, her work envisions relationships that dissolve boundaries between species, spirituality, and myth.
Ron Pattern, Clamdiggers, 2000, Watercolor on Arches cold press paper, 21 x 28 x 1 in,
Ron Pattern approaches painting with a sense of childlike curiosity and heightened sensory awareness, seeking to capture fleeting moments and the emotional resonance of lived experience. Immersing himself daily in his local environment, he becomes captivated by the shifting drama of light and shadow, as well as the tensions created through texture, line, and form. These observations become the foundation for his studio practice.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Pattern is drawn to the medium's capacity for bold realism in both landscape and portraiture. He also works in watercolor and egg tempera and is a Signature Member of the Northwest Watercolor Society.
Throughout his life, painting has served as a way of understanding and expressing his emotional connection to the world around him. For Pattern, art is both an act of observation and a deeply personal response to environment, memory, and experience. Through pigment and brush, he seeks to translate what he sees and feels into images that carry both immediacy and reflection.
Janel Bragg, San Juan Islands Reflections, 2021, casein on paper, 25 x 34 x 2 in
Janel Bragg is a painter from Anacortes, Washington. She is currently represented by Bridgeman Images with offices in London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Milan, Artfully Walls in the US and UK, and Pictufy in Stockholm, Sweden. Prints of her work can be found on retail sites Anthropologie.com, Art.com, ArtfullyWalls.com, and many sites across Europe. She sells her paintings and cards at The Museum of Northwest Art Museum Store in La Conner, Washington. She received her education from Skagit Valley College, Washington State University as well as completing an internship at Dorling Kindersley Publishing in New York. She has also just completed a Certificate in Botanical Illustration from Cornell University. She is making art her lifelong pursuit and continually studies composition, color theory and art history.
Matthew Cory, Connections, 2020, acrylic on board, 35 x 39 x 3 in
Matthew R. Cory's work centers on figurative acrylic paintings, drawings, and digital illustrations that explore the relationships between humanity, nature, and spirit. Combining interests in metaphysics, philosophy, and the natural world, his compositions often incorporate a subtle sense of humor intended to engage and invite viewers into layered narratives.
Many of Cory's figures exist "in medias res" captured in moments that suggest both a preceding story and an uncertain future. This sense of suspended narrative encourages viewers to imagine how a scene emerged and what may happen next. His work aims to function both as a unified composition and as an environment rich with smaller discoveries and visual pathways.
Cory combines energetic color, repetitive patterning, figurative imagery, geometric structures, symbolism, and abstraction to create dynamic visual tension. By juxtaposing patterns with solid forms, and balancing modern and ancient, material and spiritual references, he creates works that seek harmony within complexity and contradiction.
Jo Cosme, House but not a Home, 2020, Photography, 24 x 16 x 1 in
Jo Cosme is a Puerto Rican artist working in photography and installation whose practice explores how Puerto Rico is represented both on the island and from the outside. Raised in Puerto Rico, Cosme draws from personal memory and collective history to examine the gap between lived experience and the simplified "paradise" imagery often promoted through tourism and media.
The work focuses on portraying Puerto Rico as a complex, evolving place shaped by resilience, contradiction, culture, and community rather than as a romanticized destination. Cosme is particularly interested in public and transitional spaces, such as airports, where perceptions of place and identity are formed quickly and collectively.
Through photography and installation, the work seeks to create representations that feel recognizable and grounded for those connected to Puerto Rico while also encouraging broader audiences to engage more thoughtfully with the island's realities. The goal is to present Puerto Rico not as an abstract idea, but as a lived experience shaped by generations of history and cultural continuity.
Jennifer Harrington, Purple Reflection, 2002, Mixed Water Media/Collage, 16 x 20 x 1 in
Jennifer Harrington views art as a balance between two essential forces, much like the wings of a bird working together in flight. One wing is technical execution-composition, color, articulation, and structure-while the other is the ability to engage emotion, memory, and intellect. Her process begins through observation and intuition, allowing experiences to move through the body and emerge physically through the act of painting. Layers of paint, collage, and varnish create surfaces rich with texture, depth, and atmosphere.
Working primarily through abstraction, Harrington explores the internal world and the challenge of expressing experiences that are often difficult to define in words. Symbolic imagery arises organically through dreams, meditation, journal writing, and lived experience. Recurring motifs include birds, wolves, dogs, deer, black-and-white trees, screens, and shrine-like forms. Recent works have been influenced by her experiences living within a Buddhist retreat center, where contemplation, ritual, and quiet observation continue to shape her visual language.
Nicolette Harrington, Timefulness, 2026, oil stick on wood panel, 20 x 24 x 1.5 in
Nicolette Harrington is devoted to art education. Her studio in La Conner was built in 2010 with her husband who creates the beautiful wood frames on her paintings. She currently serves as a town Arts Commissioner, a Director of Arts Alive, and participates in many local art events. She offers art labs for adults on Sunday afternoons. She believes the world is best manifest in art. Boundaries dissolve, pointing the way to the sky, deep vistas and experiences that sustain the soul. Mt. Baker often appears to express illumination and inspiration. No greater cathedral exists. Her images reflect personal experiences hiking and kayaking in the Northwest.
Lucy Mae VanZanden, In the Clouds, 2024, Canon Rebel Photography, 24 x 32 x .5 in
Skagit Valley artist, Lucy Mae VanZanden, grew up on the Fir Island flats and learned at an early age to work with her hands, and learned a deep appreciation for oddities, connecting with people, and adventure. Lucy's shop is in an old barn along the slough in the Skagit Valley, equipped with a wood burning stove and a beautiful view of the farm fields and the Olympics in the far west. The shop serves two purposes; a headstone business her father owned until 2007, when he generously offered Todd's Monuments to Lucy, which she has now owned and fully operated for 19 years, and two; her art studio, shared with her husband Pieter. Lucy also enjoys engraving artsy rocks along with engraving glass, wood, Braille rocks and other unique requests. She has fallen in love with taking photos and especially loves action shots of the local birds and animals. She loves photographing along the Skagit River while kayaking or in the boat, and can find beauty in her surroundings wherever she goes.
Pat deCaroUntitledunknowngouache on mylor work17 x 14 in
Daria Agafonova-Knight, Homeland, 2025, photography, cyanotype, drywall, wire, old window, 18 x 28 x 1 in
Since 2022 and the beginning of the war, Daria Agafonova has become increasingly interested in how national borders shape identity, perception, and political consciousness. Her work reflects on the idea that the less people move beyond the boundaries of their own countries, the more those borders become embedded within their thinking and self-definition. Rather than focusing on one nation alone, she approaches this as a broader human condition, examining how limited perspectives can influence understanding across cultures and societies.
Relocation and displacement over recent years have also led Agafonova to reflect deeply on homesickness and the meaning of "home." Her current series, Ethereal Memory, consists of cyanotype prints that function as echoes of fleeting yet deeply felt experiences from different periods of her life.
These works evoke memory as something both fragile and persistent, exploring longing, belonging, and the emotional landscape of return. Through layered imagery and the atmospheric qualities of cyanotype, Agafonova creates meditative spaces that invite viewers to reconsider ideas of place, identity, and emotional connection beyond geographic borders.
Marianne Partlow, Starting, 2012, Soft Pastel on coated paper on foam core, 16 x 16 in
When Marianne Partlow turned to pastel, she realized that the medium required a more simplified approach to process and design in order to preserve its immediacy and raw energy. Seeking this balance, she began revisiting earlier paintings, isolating areas of intensity and focus that could function as distilled expressions of larger ideas.
Often inspired by nature and architecture, her pastel works act as visual fragments or signals, suggestive forms that point toward broader sensory and emotional experiences. Through abbreviation and reduction, Partlow creates compositions that emphasize presence, atmosphere, and movement rather than detailed representation.
Color plays a central role in her work, functioning both emotionally and symbolically. Through layered yet direct applications of pastel, she explores how color can communicate energy, memory, and meaning with immediacy and clarity.
Jessica Olson, Crossroads, 2024, mixed media, 24 x 48 x 1 in
Through a multitude of mediums Jessica Olson weaves color, texture and lines, connecting moments and intention with emotion, giving each piece of work a unique voice.
Kyle Bjorklund, Life's Progression #7, 2025, Encaustic on linen over panel., 24 x 15 x 1.5 in
Referencing Jasper Johns' observation that "Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing," Kyle Bjorklund's work explores the transformative nature of perception and association. His paintings emerge from the intersection of two distinct influences: the muted atmospheric palette of the Pacific Northwest and the abstract visual language of ancient Tantric art from the northern Indian subcontinent.
Traditionally created as meditative tools, Tantric paintings employ deceptively simple forms intended to focus contemplation and awareness. Bjorklund is drawn to the strikingly modern quality of these abstract compositions and the way they resonate across time and culture.
Through encaustic painting, one of the oldest artistic mediums, he synthesizes these seemingly disparate experiences into layered, contemplative works. The resulting paintings balance restraint and complexity, combining atmospheric color, abstraction, and meditative structure to create spaces that invite reflection, perception, and quiet psychological engagement.
Terry MacDonald, Driven to Abstraction, 2020, Acrylic/Mixed Media, 20 x 20 x 1.5 in,
Terry MacDonald is an Anacortes artist. Her work has been described as "joyful art." Bright colors, whimsey and texture are employed in most paintings, whether they are the birds, wildlife or florals she is most well-known for, or the abstracts that feed her need to be free and expressive.
Rebecca Meloy, Flooding, 2026, acrylic, rag paper, collaged papers, 14 x 13 x 1.25 in,
Rebecca Meloy's visual voice is innately strong supporting the environment. Works from the 'Regenerative Energy: Water, Land, Trees, Sun' series are paintings that embrace priority habitats. Diversity of shorelines and lowlands create living environments for wildlife. In the Skagit County, many water loving birds. These moist havens are transition zones for communities, growing wild food, and providing protection for wildlife. Rebecca Meloy's land based art is influenced by her Scandinavian heritage from Finnish farmers, Swedish ministers, and pioneer Norwegians who emigrated and homestead in the Minnesota Boundary Waters. Born in the north woods she grew on a small Oregon farm. She has lived in Bellingham Washington for 46 years.
Sheila Sondik, First Fuki, 2017, Monotype, 20 x 16 in
Every exploration of the Pacific Northwest landscape offers Sheila Sondik new arrangements of light, form, and texture that inspire continued discovery. The motifs she chooses to work with reveal additional layers of depth and meaning as they are translated through drawing, carving, and the etching press.
Sondik practices a wide range of printmaking techniques, embracing both the technical process and the element of transformation inherent in the medium. She is especially drawn to the way a print becomes the mirrored counterpart of the original image created on the plate, introducing both surprise and reinterpretation into the work.
Her studio practice mirrors the sense of exploration she experiences outdoors. Through the tactile and often unpredictable nature of printmaking, Sondik creates works that reflect close observation, curiosity, and an ongoing dialogue with the natural world.
Gary Gillespie, Tell Me Why, 2025, Mixed media collage, 24 x 22.5 x 1 in
"Tell Me Why" depicts a wounded bird through angular, fractured forms. Editors of Phil Lit Journal recently selected it for publication in the Spring 2026 issue, placing it as a finalist for their cover art contest. It was GJ Gillespie's 205th publication. In addition, the piece generated a strong response at Ethereal Journeys: Abstract Figures and Dreamscapes, Gillespie's solo exhibition at the Coupeville Public Library in January 2026. Working in the tradition of the Northwest Mystics, who created haunting bird figures as symbols of spiritual transformation, "Tell Me Why" explores vulnerability and resilience through layered abstraction, reflecting the visionary legacy of Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan while speaking in a distinctive collaged voice. GJ Gillespie is a mixed-media collage artist based in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, Washington. His work has appeared in 210 literary and art journal publications, 71 exhibitions, and earned 23 awards. He is Professor Emeritus of Communication at Northwest University and has completed six artist residencies at the UW Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan Island.
Mohammad Handjani, Silent Space, 2025, Photograph, 24 x 18 in
Mohammad Handjani's work focuses on the quiet, often overlooked moments of everyday life. He is drawn to subtle details-the movement of light across a surface, the presence of a shadow, or a brief pause within an otherwise busy environment. Though seemingly simple, these moments carry emotional weight, memory, and a sense of stillness that he views as deeply human.
Photography serves as a way for Handjani to slow time and deepen observation. Rather than constructing scenes, he responds to what already exists, allowing moments to unfold naturally. Working primarily with available light and familiar surroundings, he creates images that feel grounded, intimate, and unforced.
Rooted in attentiveness and presence, his practice explores how ordinary spaces and fleeting experiences can reveal quiet narratives when approached with patience and care. By focusing on what is often ignored, Handjani invites viewers to pause, look more closely, and reconnect with the subtle beauty embedded in daily life. Ultimately, his work is less about documentation and more about creating space for reflection-suggesting that meaning often resides within the quiet in-between moments.
Karen Schmidt, Fremont Canal Tugboat, with Barge and Crane, 2023, Watercolor, 10.5 x 15.5 in
Karen Lee Schmidt moved to Seattle 17 years ago from New York City, where she had a 30 year career as a children's book illustrator. In Seattle her focus veered toward the fine arts, and now, instead of bunnies and silly dogs, she paints the Northwest: landscapes, industrial and urban scenes. Karen loves to work "plein air," in watercolor, oils, and charcoal. While in New York, Karen studied at the Art Students League, The School of Visual Arts and The National Academy of Design. She has continued her painting studies here in Seattle, with Tom Hoffmann, Terry Furchgott, Mitch Albala, and Charles Emerson. Karen has shown her work at many juried shows in the Northwest. These include Royal Nebeker Gallery (Astoria, Oregon,) Seattle BallardWorks Galleries, Magnuson SPACE Gallery, University House Galleries,The Seattle Locks Gallery, the Bremerton CVG Show and The First Street Collective. While in New York she showed with The Society of Illustrators. One of her many picture books, "HOPTOAD," (written by Jane Yolen) won the KIND award from the ASPCA.
Sarah Banks, Babylon, 2015, Mixed Media Collage, 20 x 24 x in
Sarah Banks' work explores the visible and lingering effects of history on people, landscapes, and cultural memory. She is particularly interested in what she describes as "invisible cities and towns"-places shaped by conquest, empire, migration, labor, and decay, where layers of history accumulate over time. Her work considers how large historical forces continue to affect individuals and communities, from ancient civilizations to contemporary working lives.
Working across paper cut, printmaking-including serigraph, intaglio, and monotype-and painting, Banks combines observation, research, and material process to investigate these themes. Long periods of travel and artist residencies in Portugal, Spain, and Washington State have deeply informed her practice, providing both visual and historical points of departure. Sketches and studies developed during travel are later reexamined and expanded within her Seattle studio.
Banks is a member of Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle Print Arts, and Northwest Collage Society. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles, North Carolina, and Portugal, and is included in both public and private collections in the United States and abroad.
Margaret Davidson, Teapot, cup and saucer, colored pencil on rag paper, 21 x 21 x 2 in
Margaret Davidson's work explores the relationship between the drawing mark and the surface on which it exists. Whether working in realism or abstraction, she is interested in the tension between the physical reality of the drawn mark and the illusion created through representation. For Davidson, this interplay is central to the experience of drawing itself.
She often works within the still life tradition, a genre she finds especially subtle and compelling. Beyond the objects depicted, she is interested in what still life can reveal about the person who selected, arranged, and lived with those objects. Through careful observation and composition, her drawings examine presence, memory, and human experience through seemingly ordinary forms.
Davidson works almost exclusively in drawing, on paper and other surfaces, embracing realism as a means of exploring abstraction, structure, and perception. She holds a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has taught at Gage Academy of Art and has also worked as a scientific illustrator.
Nicole Lang, Near Cape Meares, 2025, oil on cradled panel, 16 x 20 x 2 in
Nicki Lang is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative practice embraces experimentation and exploration across materials and forms. After spending a decade crafting leather goods, she turned to painting with a palette knife, creating expressive Pacific Northwest landscapes inspired by the region's atmosphere and terrain. This work is part of her ongoing series Love Letters to the Northwest, painted from reference photographs taken along the Oregon Coast.
More recently, Lang has expanded her practice into hand-built ceramics, exploring both sculptural and functional forms through clay. Her work reflects a playful and intuitive approach to making, grounded in curiosity and a strong connection to place.
Christen Mattix, Resting Girl, 2024, oil, 18 x 24 x 2 in
Christen Mattix is a painter whose work centers on slowness, presence, and the quiet beauty found in ordinary life. She was part of a two person show with Susan Bennerstrom at Rick Leonard Gallery in 2025. Her work has been shown at the Whatcom Museum, Bainbridge Island Art Museum, and SAM Gallery, among others. Mattix's work graces the Permanent Collection of the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, the City of Burlington, and numerous private collections.
Mary Skomerza, Green Lake in Pink, 2026, Oil on linen, 30 x 24 x 0.75 in
Mary Skomerza draws inspiration from the moody and atmospheric landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. From the subtle tonal shifts of gray clouds to the vivid light of sunsets across open fields, she is captivated by the region's balance of quiet restraint and dramatic beauty.
Working primarily in oil on linen, Skomerza creates landscapes with softened edges and luminous surfaces that evoke a dreamlike sense of place. Her paintings move between observation and imagination, blending real environments with emotional atmosphere and memory.
Through layered color and light, she seeks to create spaces viewers can linger within-images that feel both familiar and otherworldly. Her work invites contemplation and offers glimpses into landscapes shaped as much by feeling and perception as by geography itself.
Perry Woodfin, Enchantment, 2026, Acrylic on Canvas, 16 x 20 x 1 in
Perry Woodfin's life as an artist began at the age of two while sitting on his mother's lap on Vashon Island, watching her draw before being handed the pencil himself. That early moment marked the beginning of a lifelong commitment to art that has continued for more than eight decades.
Now living on Whidbey Island at the age of eighty-three, Woodfin reflects on a life shaped entirely by creative practice. Art has never been separate from his identity, but rather a constant presence and enduring way of engaging with the world.
His work is grounded in a deep dedication to making, sustained through years of observation, experience, and personal expression. Across a lifetime of creating, Woodfin has remained guided by the same instinctive impulse that first drew him to the act of drawing as a child: the simple and enduring desire to make art.
Liz Park, Caribou Scratch, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 x 1.5 in
Liz Park creates unique portraits of the natural world, seeking to make something unfamiliar from familiar subjects of wildlife and landscape. Her work integrates realistic detail with abstract elements to form strong, balanced compositions, often placing animals in suspended or unexpected environments rather than their natural settings.
Drawing is central to her practice. After rendering her subject as faithfully as possible, Park allows the work to shift into a more intuitive phase, introducing shapes, lines, and expressive marks to achieve visual balance and energy. She often works from personal reference photographs, preferring to depict animals she has encountered directly, as these experiences inform a deeper sense of character and narrative within each piece.
Her process on canvas involves layered acrylic washes, gravity, and controlled chance through tools like spray bottles, allowing texture and underpainting to remain visible as part of the composition. On wood panels, she responds to sanding, staining, and varnishing, incorporating natural grain as an active visual element. Park's work emphasizes collaboration with material and process, allowing nature-whether animal, surface, or medium-to remain visibly present.
Kimberly Balla, Dust and ruins, 2021, oil and metallic pigment on panel, 24 x 24 x 1.5 in
Kimberly Balla's work is rooted in experimentation with paint as a chemical and material system, using unconventional mixtures to generate unexpected textures and patterns. Through a process developed over more than thirteen years, she combines traditional oil paint with modern mediums, allowing controlled chemical interactions to produce unique surfaces that feel both accidental and intentional.
Her practice engages an "alchemical" approach to painting, where material transformation mirrors cycles found in nature-building, breaking down, and reforming into new visual structures. These processes result in works that explore themes of emergence, impermanence, and continuity within natural and perceptual systems.
Balla is particularly drawn to recurring symbolic forms such as the circle and ring, which appear across cultures in motifs like halos, mandalas, and the Enso. Influenced in part by ideas associated with Carl Jung and the collective unconscious, she explores the circle as a universal structure of meaning and connection.
Fractals also play a central role in her imagery, reflecting patterns found in nature, mathematics, and systems of scale from micro to macro. Through these forms, her work seeks to evoke a sense of interconnectedness, creating immersive, dreamlike environments that invite viewers into what she describes as a liminal, hypnagogic space of familiarity and wonder.
S. Clifford, Plateau, Acrylic on paper, 22 x 22 x 30.5 in
Susan Clifford's work exists at the intersection of abstract expressionist landscape and Pacific Northwest modernism, where gesture, light, and memory carry as much weight as geography. Influenced by painters including Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn, she builds her surfaces slowly - layering, scraping, and revising until each painting feels like a remembered place rather than a recorded view.
Years of working with found objects and memory-based assemblage inform her approach, treating each canvas as an accumulation of experience. The Road Trip series translates the shifting skies and forested ridges of the Pacific Northwest into fractured fields of color that hold both movement and stillness, echoing the way memory edits and replays the landscape.
Elise DiGiuseppe, Lost Turquoise, 2022, Oil and cold wax with crayon and collage, 24 x 18 x 1.5 in
As a painter working abstractly, Elise DiGiuseppe combines oil, cold wax, collage, and mixed media to explore botanical forms, the subversion of nature, and the tension between built and natural environments. Drawing remains central to her process, and each painting is infused with layered mark making and gestural line.
After a long career in public librarianship specializing in youth services and children's literature, DiGiuseppe returned to her original passion as an artist. She transformed a backyard tool shed into a working studio, building both a daily creative practice and a growing presence online. Her work reflects a sustained curiosity about growth, decay, structure, and transformation, balancing intuition with careful observation. Through texture, abstraction, and layered surfaces, she creates paintings that invite close looking and evoke the complexity and resilience found within the natural world.
Abigail Drapkin, Nora at the Studio with Daffodils, 2024, Oil on canvas, 28 x 24 x 1.75 in
Interiority is both the setting and psychological terrain of Abigail Drapkin's paintings. Her figures press into corners, recline upside down, and wedge against one another within compressed domestic spaces that at times fracture into geometric planes. Rooted in lived experiences of womanhood and shaped by conversations with family, friends, and models, the work explores motherhood, caregiving, relationships, aging, and the quiet tensions of domestic life.
Drapkin often begins from direct observation, painting her subjects while in conversation with them, then continuing after they leave. Through layered marks and shifting structures of light and geometry, she searches for balance between observation and emotional memory. Books, seedlings, newspapers, thread, and other fragments of daily life become symbols of responsibility, intimacy, and the persistent noise of the outside world.
Influenced by Frantisek Kupka, Gustav Klimt, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, and Richard Diebenkorn, her paintings move between figuration and abstraction, dissolving bodies into patterned geometries and layered color. By painting herself and the women around her, Drapkin subverts the historical male gaze, replacing fantasy with lived experience, vulnerability, stillness, and emotional complexity.
Cory Goulet, A Head of His Time, 2025, Paper Collage, mixed media, 24 x 24 x 1 in
Cory Goulet is an award-winning Master Pastelist and mixed media artist whose work embodies an intuitive abstract style. Through layered compositions of line, shape, and color, Goulet explores the balance between chaos and harmony while inviting viewers to form their own personal connections to the work.
Central to the practice is the transformation of discarded and overlooked materials. Goulet incorporates found and revitalized papers, vintage elements, and handcrafted papers produced in the studio, creating richly textured surfaces that reflect themes of renewal and reinvention. Each piece emerges through a spontaneous and intuitive process guided by experimentation, memory, and the subconscious.
By breathing new life into ephemeral materials, Goulet transforms what was once forgotten into something resonant and meaningful. The work celebrates process, imperfection, and the quiet beauty of reuse, revealing how fragments of the past can be reassembled into new visual narratives.
Raili Janese, Canada Geese. A Flock, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1.5 in
Raili Janese explores the quiet coexistence between wildlife and city life through vibrant, character-driven paintings. Centered on urban animals that adapt to and inhabit shared human spaces, the work captures fleeting moments of awareness and connection between species.
Janese is especially drawn to encounters in which animals pause to observe rather than flee, translating these moments into vivid and expressive compositions. Through color, gesture, and personality, the paintings emphasize the resilience, curiosity, and presence of the creatures that move alongside us within the built environment.
By focusing on these everyday interactions, Janese invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the natural and urban worlds and to recognize the subtle, enduring relationships that exist between people and the animals woven into the fabric of city life.
Barbara Nash, Pivot 5: Ogallala Tears - the color of groundwater, 2026, Watercolor and colored pencil, 27 x 27 x 1 in
With a background in geology, Barbara Nash examines the ways humans act as geologic agents, shaping and transforming the physical landscape. Her Pivot series explores the aesthetic, cultural, and environmental consequences of the unsustained over-extraction of groundwater for agriculture.
Drawing from patterns found in irrigated landscapes and altered terrain, Nash's work reflects on the tension between human innovation and environmental vulnerability. The paintings consider how systems designed to sustain growth can simultaneously deplete and destabilize the natural resources on which they depend. Through abstraction and layered form, Pivot invites viewers to contemplate the long-term impact of human intervention on the land and the fragile balance between cultivation, consumption, and sustainability.
Kate Rusek, Nothing is Required of You Here 4 (La Albiceleste), 2023, porcelain, industrial mineral glaze, palladium luster, 3 x 10 x 4 in
Kate Rusek's sculpture, installation, research, and writing examine the connective edges and dissonant intersections between humanity and the natural world. Rooted in Post-Natural Studies, her work engages materials and objects through complex processes in which the synthetic yields to organic fluidity.
Rusek forages history-laden excess from society to construct scenes that interrogate the binary between living and manufactured worlds, emphasizing somatic experience, craft, and deep time. Her current practice explores novel casting techniques to create vessels of accumulation, translating biomedical discards into porcelain micromarine-inspired organisms.
These works stitch together considerations of fertility, reproduction, and legacy across human and non-human kin. Working with clay, she captures forces of fluidity, water, and air, grounding the medium in its Earth-based origins. This deep-time orientation situates her practice within "old-growth thinking," where past, present, and future converge in intimate, handheld forms.
David Ryan, Soft Green over Cobalt Turquoise, 2023, Oil on Arches oil paper, mounted on canvas., 28 x 22 x 1.5 in
avid Ryan's work sits within a continuum of spontaneous, meditative painting that stretches from the Chauvet cave paintings of 35,000 years ago through Chinese landscape traditions, Zen painting, and Abstract Expressionism to the present day. He situates his practice within this lineage, embracing a sense of continuity across time, gesture, and perception.
His work unfolds in phases. As one phase ebbs, another flows, each connected even when the relationship is not immediately visible. While each piece is preceded by study and preparation, its completion often occurs in a single, spontaneous session or decisive flourish, allowing intuition to guide resolution.
Ryan's practice is also grounded in a deep appreciation for artist's materials-paper, pencils, pens, paint, brushes, canvas, and linen. These simple tools are treated as sites of infinite possibility. For him, a blank surface or a sharpened pencil contains the potential for countless images, each one emerging from the quiet intersection of readiness, material, and impulse.
Lori Vonderhorst, February, 2020, acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 x 1 in
Lori Vonderhorst grew up in a house of stone in northern New Jersey. She moved to Seattle in 1979 and was immediately drawn to the Northwest's mystic landscape; it's lush forests and stormy tides. Her studio is filled with nests, stones, shells and artifacts collected throughout the years. Working with pencil, paint and collage, her narrative compositions invite the viewer to imagine the before and after; the moment a feather falls, a stone tumbles or a flower turns to seed. Her work is an intimate visual response to experience, emotions and memory. After a 40+ year career in graphic design, Lori now spends her days in the studio painting, drawing and assembling found objects. In 2025 she was awarded a residency at the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, California.
Ron Wigginton, Atmosphere, 2005, Co-polymer and metallic on honeycomb aluminum panel, 15 x 11 x 1 in
Ron Wigginton is a Fellow of the Morris Graves' Foundation where he painted the "Loleta"series (Solo Exhibition - Fresno Art Museum, and the "Washi" series (Solo Exhibition - Ugi, Japan). He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and taught at Cornish School of Art, UC Berkeley and Davis and exhibited extensively in Portland and Seattle including representation by the Foster/White Gallery and in Japan. He lives and works between his studios near Yosemite and in Bellingham. His paintings are included in the Permanent Collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art, The Portland Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and many Pacific Northwest private collections.
Ria Harboe, In Conversation, 2025, Acrylic, 36 x 24 x 1.5 in
Ria Harboe's work is rooted in an ongoing search for a heightened level of awareness-one that exists just beyond the visible world. Across her practice, there is a consistent attraction to the mysterious and the ineffable, a sensibility that reveals itself through shifting light, atmosphere, and perception.
While wandering in nature, Harboe is drawn to moments when the familiar becomes subtly otherworldly, when light transforms the landscape into something more eerie, dramatic, or charged with presence. These fleeting conditions inform her painting process and her desire to extend what is already seen into something slightly beyond recognition.
Her aim is not to replicate the natural world, but to intensify its latent strangeness, amplifying atmosphere and sensation. In doing so, she creates works that hover between observation and imagination, where the boundaries of reality soften and perception becomes an experience of transition and wonder.
Jonelle Johnson, It's Gold, 2025, Monotype, 30 x 35 in
Jonelle Johnson's prints emerge in a space between intention and its dissolution, where process and chance shape the final image. Her printmaking practice embraces unpredictability, allowing for welcome surprises that arise through material interaction and layered decision-making.
At the heart of her work is an interest in how a two-dimensional surface can be disrupted to create a visceral sense of depth. A single brushstroke or mark can shift perception, suggesting dimensional space within a flat plane. Johnson explores this phenomenon through overlapping shapes, calligraphic gestures, and rhythmic accumulation of line.
In this way, her studio practice becomes a site of discovery, where control and accident coexist. The resulting works reflect the "magic of printmaking"-the moment when process reveals something unexpected, and meaning emerges through the tension between intention and absence.
Kathleen Kemly, King's Meadow; Sister Lakes, 2025, Mixed Media Acrylic on Panel, 30 x 21 x 1 in
Kathleen Kemly finds solace and peace in nature, whether hiking through forests or watching rainstorms roll across the city from her porch. These moments of connection foster a sense of continuity with all living things and inform the foundation of her painting practice.
An avid backpacker, she has explored the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, as well as landscapes across the western United States, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. These experiences shape her visual language of color, rhythm, and form, through which she seeks to convey the felt presence of place.
Kemly's paintings often begin in direct response to nature, where she experiences a kinship with trees, clouds, and mountainous terrain. In this space, she perceives a persistent "thrum" of life that endures despite human disruption. Her work aims to translate this energy into visual form, inviting viewers into a moment of immersion and reflection.
Through abstraction rooted in lived experience, her paintings become portals-offering an encounter with the essential vitality of the natural world and a reminder of its fragility and importance.
Johannes Kunst, op zolder1, 1974, pencil ink gouache, 11.5 x 14.5 x 1 in
Johannes Kunst was a Dutch-born artist who emigrated to the US in 1958. He studied graphic arts and worked in the field for years. Eventually he turned to his art which he was dedicated to pursuing for the rest of his years. Kunst's artistic journey spanned four decades, during which he explored a variety of styles and techniques. His compositions often feature biomorphic shapes, symbolic imagery, and a whimsical, childlike quality that exudes spontaneity and freedom. Johannes style is imbued with a strong narrative quality, reflecting personal experienced, fantasies and deeply rooted memories. Kunst's work has often been interpreted as an exploration and elaboration of the traumatic experiences of WWII. His years as an artist served as a means of self-expression and self-healing allowing him to navigate and transform his personal history into something resonant.
Ava Reynolds, I Saw a Star, 2026, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 x 1 in
Ava Reynolds is a surrealist portrait painter and multimedia artist with a perspective that allows for art beyond the physical limitations of the human imagination. In 2022 they underwent a near death experience after a overdose from medical malpractice, and it changed fundamentally how they interacted with and experienced the world. "While it was terrifying it almost felt like it was a gift.", "I never understood life so clearly until I looked at death." Ava explores the other aspects and levels to our existence they have crossed paths with through paintings, portraiture and sometimes even quantum physics. Usually using simple forms such as faces to explore space, time, life experience and creation. In 2025 Ava was also diagnosed with a chronic illness due to all the past medical problems. It has brought an array of daily challenges that Ava seeks refuge from and draws experiences from as well. Ava shares the extremes of life and a raw unbreakable story of resilience, with each stroke.
Cynthia Richardson, Out on a Limb Again, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 x .75 in
Cynthia Richardson is an artist and retired architect living in Anacortes, Washington. Cynthia started painting in college, but put her brushes aside for many years of graduate school, raising children, and a full-time architectural career. Rediscovering the pleasures of painting a few years ago, she now shows her work in several galleries, and enjoys the challenges of this new creative adventure. While Cynthia paints a variety of subjects, landscapes are a special interest, along with the birds, animals, trees and flowers that share our world. She enjoys creating scenes that invite the viewers into the picture so that they can imagine themselves being in that place, or be reminded of somewhere they've been. Cynthia was honored to be a featured artist in LaConner's Art's Alive 2017 Invitational Show. Many of her paintings have been selected for juried shows at the Anacortes Arts Festival and the Edmonds Arts Festival. Her paintings are displayed in the permanent art collections at Island Hospital and Skagit Valley Hospital, and the Anacortes Public Library and she is an Artist's Magazine award winner.
Grace Weston, Heaven Help Us, 2004, Archival pigment photographic print, 10 x 10 in
Grace Weston works in the genre of staged photography, constructing miniature scenes using characters, props, and sets that are sourced, altered, or fabricated from scratch and then photographed. Her practice transforms the miniature into a narrative device, where child-like fantasy scenes are often punctuated by the anxieties and complexities of adulthood.
Although no actual people appear in her photographs, Weston uses these constructed worlds as a lens through which to tell expansive stories about human behavior and emotion. Vivid color, humor, and carefully arranged detail are balanced with underlying psychological tension, creating images that are both playful and unsettling.
Through these carefully staged environments, her work reflects on the human desire for control in an unpredictable world. By amplifying this tension within small-scale, fictional spaces, Weston invites viewers to recognize both the absurdity and tenderness embedded in everyday attempts to make meaning and order.
Kristen Ingman, Bridge Over Whatcom Falls, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 36 x 2 in
Kristen Ingman draws primary inspiration from the colors, forms, textures, and compositions found in nature. Often encountered on trails, she can be found photographing moments when light sifts through trees or reflects off water, treating these fleeting conditions as an essential part of her creative process.
Her work translates these observations into watercolor, gouache, and oil paintings that reflect the landscapes she has experienced while running trails throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. These environments serve not only as subject matter but also as a source of emotional grounding.
Ingman's paintings aim to communicate the sense of peace, wonder, and joy she experiences outdoors. Through attentive observation and responsive mark-making, she seeks to capture the ephemeral qualities of light and atmosphere, allowing viewers to share in the immediacy of those natural moments.
Karen Kosoglad, Seated Figure Member, 2026, Mixed media collage and paint, 20 x 16 x 2 in,
Karen Kosoglad's work is inspired by direct observation, with close attention to gestural configurations and the subtle ways they form meaning. There is often a deliberate ambiguity present, at times blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.
As William Kentridge writes, "Ambiguity and doubt is the bedrock of what happens in the studio." This idea has long aligned with my own practice. My creative process unfolds through looking and responding-allowing form, intention, and discovery to emerge gradually as the composition develops.
My work is rooted in questions of memory and reflection. Over time, it has become a way to hold space for remembrance, particularly in relation to my father, who passed away in 2001. What I remember and what I see are inseparable from emotional states that directly shape the work.
This process connects me to the actuality of form, gesture, and figure. The figure, in particular, becomes a site for moments of intimacy, love, and memory-quiet traces of lived experience held within the act of making.
Susan Cohen Thompson, Gathering at Sunset, 2022, ceramic, 8 x 11 x 1 in,
Thompson's imagery flows out of her perception that the Earth and Cosmos are alive with consciousness. Her softly calming and dreamlike style flows from her heart centered perspective of the living land that embraces life. In Thompson's cosmology, the birds are symbolic of a dream she had where 1000 birds flew out of her hands and traveled the globe whispering to humans how to be more Earth honoring. All the birds in Thompson's art are part of that thousand. The work hopes to evoke that feeling.
Jean Arnold, Flatiron Road 2, 2024, oil on linen, 20 x 20 x 2 in,
Jean Arnold grew up in the Palouse region of the Northwestern United States, a major agricultural landscape often called the "Tuscany of America." Its rolling hills and sinuous contours shaped an early visual sensitivity to landform, pattern, and structure. These graphic field systems led to a sustained interest in combining abstraction with observation in Arnold's work.
Arnold has returned to the Palouse to engage more deeply with its seasonal variation, plowed contours, and biomorphic field shapes, which continue to serve as a source of visual inspiration. A central concern in the work is human interaction with the land, particularly how agricultural contour lines record both underlying topography and systems of industrial use shaped by heavy machinery.
An elevated "eagle's eye" perspective recurs throughout Arnold's practice, from early aerial survey-inspired paintings (1994-95) to work made in Italy during graduate study (1997-98). Later work (2011-2023) focuses on large-scale mining landscapes near the Kennecott Copper Mine, reflecting concern with environmental impact. Across these bodies of work, contour and landform remain a persistent thread.
Craig J. Barber, Gathering Tulips, 2021, Archival Pigment Ink on Rag Paper, 24 x 36 in, Limited Edition 2/4
Craig J. Barber's work documents food production on small farms in early 21st-century North America. His photographs offer an introduction to the daily working lives of farmers and farm workers: the continuous cycle of planting and cultivating, irrigating and harvesting, preparing crops for market, and caring for livestock. These tasks repeat without pause, year after year, revealing what it takes to feed us and sustain the landscapes farmers tend.
While this project focuses on a small region of the Pacific Northwest-Skagit Valley-the labor of farming is universal.
Peter de Lory, Upper Racehorse Creek Falls, Whatcom County, WA 2020, 2020, Photograph, archival pigment print, 21 x 26.5 x 1.75 in
Peter de Lory began making photographs of the landscape on Cape Cod at the age of sixteen. Growing up on a narrow spit of land surrounded by ocean anchored his early sense of place and attuned him to the relationship between land and water. Later, traveling west to study in San Francisco, he was struck by the scale and vastness of the American landscape.
Looking back, de Lory sees the evolution of his work as mirroring the environments and structures he has inhabited. He describes his approach as that of a "romantic structuralist," a term he coined to define a practice grounded in formal clarity and straightforward structure, which in turn allows space for emotional and interpretive openness.
His work consistently returns to the interplay between memory, myth, and lived reality-a tension well suited to the framing capacities of photography. Committed to a regional approach, de Lory understands his role as an intermediary between viewer and environment, re-representing place in a way that removes it from the everyday and opens it to layered meaning.
Alida Latham, Salt Evaporation Pond Walvis Bay Namibia. Purchased 2013, Photograph26"H x 37"W x 1" framed
Alida Latham is a Seattle based photographer who travels the world documenting the culture, wildlife, and environment she sees. Her work has been shown at Honeychurch Antiques in Seattle and has been published in National Geographic.
Arthur S. Aubry, Switchbox @ King County Airport 1/6, unknown date, C print photography28 1/2" H x 28 1/2" W x 3/4"deep
Arthur Aubry photographs details from industrial landscapes around the Northwest with great formal control and grace. He has exhibited locally at such venues as Esther Claypool Gallery, Linda Cannon Gallery, and more recently at University of Puget Sound and Arizona State University. His work is included in the permanent collections of Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and the Microsoft Art Collection among others. Aubry runs his own commercial studio business in addition to his work as a fine artist. He has begun a relationship with the Gitterman Gallery in New York and has an upcoming show there in late 2006.
Jazz Morgan, Moon's Woven Stories, 2026, OIL, 20 x 24 x 2 in, rust background purple flowers expressive
Artists are runners, carrying stories from earlier times and maintaining a direct connection to nature. Jazz Morgan's imagery is expansive, combining bold use of color with rich gestural marks and open spaces that invite viewers to become active participants in the work.
The paintings emerge through a process of planting, tending, and harvesting the inputs of lived experience.
Steve JensenGhost Shipdate unknownfound objects and boat resin17 x 19"
Steve Jensen's family is from Norway. His father was a fisherman, as was his grandfather; another grandfather was a boat builder. This lineage of working on the sea forms an important part of his personal and artistic background.
Jensen reflects that, had he inherited his family's fishing boats, he believes it may now be easier to make a living as an artist than as a fisherman-a reality he views as a troubling commentary on the state of the marine environment.
Following the death of his parents, he constructed a boat for their ashes and committed them to the sea in a contemporary interpretation of a Viking funeral. He later made a similar vessel for his best friend and former partner of twenty-four years, again returning the remains to the ocean.
Joanne Shellan, Blonde on Blonde, 2022, Oil on Panel, 30 x 24 x 1 in
Joanne Shellan is a painter whose practice is driven by a deep, absorbing commitment to the medium. She describes the physical act of painting-thick paint applied in deliberate gestural strokes-as something that "makes my heart sing." Everyday moments of light and shadow, such as light breaking into a coffee shop or shadows moving across a city street, serve as constant sources of inspiration. Her work seeks to pause fleeting scenes, holding them within the four edges of a canvas through strong compositional structure.
As an extrovert and colorist, Shellan invites viewers into her paintings through saturated, expressive color that often exceeds what is seen in reality. Her representational work is infused with energy and an impressionistic sensibility. Rooted in an ethic of hard work and optimism passed down from her immigrant family, she embraces a positive outlook in both life and art.
Although she felt a lifelong connection to creativity, she began formal painting at forty, after discovering watercolor while her second child was in preschool. She later moved into oils and acrylics, finding her artistic home in painting. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited in solo and group shows in venues including the Governor's Mansion in Olympia, the Museum of History and Industry, Evergreen Hospital, and the Strom Jewish Community Center, and is represented by fine art galleries.
Brooke Borcherding, Wetlands in the Rain, 2022, Acrylic plein air, 24 x 36 x 1.5 in
Brooke is a full-time award-winning artist working out of Wallingford, Seattle WA. Her acrylic landscape paintings depict familiar places in her own innovative and deconstructive technique using broken color mark making. She paints both en plein air (on site) and from photos in the studio, aiming to capture the beauty of everyday places with a style to stimulate our perception. People have described her work as a contemporary take on Cezanne's cubism or a modern impressionism, which enables the viewer to engage and investigate a scene further. Brooke has been painting almost 20 years and earned her BFA from the University of Oregon in 2010. Although she obtained an art degree, she considers herself a self-taught artist when it comes to landscape painting, as most of her "brush miles" come from a prolific output, working from observation and abstaining from any landscape workshops. Over the past decade as an exhibiting artist she has become nationally collected, shows in galleries on the West Coast and has earned numerous awards for her vibrant work. Last summer she took home 1st place at the 2025 Whidbey Island plein air paintout.
Richard Longstreet, 2025 06, 2025, Oil painting on board, 36 x 24 x 2 in
Richard Longstreet has been learning and teaching art for over sixty years. While he has accumulated degrees and credentials, his primary sources of learning have been individual artists he has encountered or worked with-whether briefly or over extended periods-as well as every student he has ever known.
He believes that art is, beyond any decorative or polemical function, a synthesis of all that is felt or known, however contradictory. His work is grounded in an interest in the pre-conscious layering and juxtaposition of diverse impressions in the formation of meaning.
Longstreet describes his practice as a form of "conscious dreaming," intended to engage the viewer's own deeper perception.
Lisa Daniel, Strength of a Samurai, 2025, Acrylic, fiberglass & glass beads on panel, 30 x 30 x 2 in
Lisa Daniel creates large-scale mixed-media abstract paintings through the pouring, directing, and manipulation of layered materials including fluid acrylics, gels, paper, fabric, and other elements applied to canvas. Her work explores the interplay of color, texture, depth, and transparency, inviting viewers into intricate surfaces where forms continually emerge and shift.
Each piece begins with a considered composition and palette. Her process is intentional and methodical: multiple canvases are placed on the floor, and paint is poured from above, guided by tilting surfaces and wedges that control movement. Layer by layer, the work evolves through a process that demands patience, precision, and sustained attention.
At the same time, the drying process introduces unpredictability. While waiting for layers to set can be challenging, Daniel often responds to the temptation to intervene mid-process, allowing disruption and spontaneity to reshape the work. These interventions can transform the surface, generating unexpected textures and forms.
Her practice is defined by the tension between control and chaos, and by the ongoing search for moments when the surface resolves into something compelling and alive.
Chris Stine-ElliottElementals2012Collage25 x 21 x .5
William Cumming, Umbrella, 1998, Acrylic, 25 x 21 1/2
William Cumming's (1917-2010) works walk the boundary between realism and abstraction. Though he was a figurative painter, his interest was not in photographic detail but rather in recording a moment in time. He was known particularly for his talent at capturing movement: the physical gesture of bodies in motion and the animated spaces between them. He elided or omitted details and often obscured the faces of his figures in some way. The subjects of Cumming's works often reflect his daily life.
The figurative paintings by renowned Northwest Master William Cumming are a fantastic celebration of color and life here in the great Northwest. He continues to capture people and animals in motion. His loose brush strokes of vibrant color define forms in light and shadow, coaxing the viewer into a conversation of invigorating life.
William Cumming is a native of Kalispell, Montana, and grew up in Tukwila, Washington. Largely a self-taught artist, he began his career as a painter working on the WPA Federal Art Project in Seattle from 1938 to 1940. William Cumming was the youngest member of the "Northwest School" of artists, whose members included Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson.
In 1961 the Seattle Art Museum devoted an exhibition to his work, and he has had one-man exhibitions at numerous galleries since that time. In addition to an active career as a painter, William Cumming has spent many years teaching art.
Bruce Hall, Glove Stories, 2004, Photos, 40 x 200 x 1 in, Photos of lost gloves. In-situ. Framed and artfully presented
Glove Stories began after Bruce Hall's wife pointed out a few lost gloves lying unnoticed along the street. Once he began noticing them, he saw them everywhere. What started as curiosity became an obsession. Hall photographs lost gloves exactly as he finds them - never moved, arranged, or staged.
The collection has grown into an archive of nearly 2,000 images documenting these overlooked objects and the quiet human presence they suggest. A child's mitten in the rain, a worn work glove on gravel, or a single leather glove in snow each hints at an untold story.
From this archive, 120 photographs have been framed and artfully presented in public exhibitions. Displayed together, the images transform ordinary discarded objects into a study of repetition, chance, absence, and memory.
Glove Stories invites viewers to slow down and reconsider the unnoticed details embedded within everyday life.
Margy Lavelle, Permutations, 2025, oil and dry pigment on canvas, 24 x 24 x 2 in, painting
Margy Lavelle has painted and drawn for most of her life. She began drawing as a child and completed her first oil paintings at the age of fifteen. She later moved from Fargo, North Dakota to Seattle, Washington, where she attended the University of Washington School of Art, graduating in 1976 with a BFA in painting.
During her studies, she had the opportunity to work with Robert Jones, Alden Mason, Norman Lundin, Mike Dailey, and spent an independent year with Jacob Lawrence. She also studied with Elaine de Kooning through the Centrum program in 1978. Alongside raising a family and supporting herself through work, her art practice at times took a secondary role.
Lavelle now lives in the Skagit Valley, where she has returned to working as a full-time artist. The region's changing light and open vistas have inspired a renewed approach to painting that re-engages drawing through oil paint and brushwork. What once felt separated in her practice-drawing and painting-has now merged. She describes a renewed sense of freedom and buoyancy that carries through into the work.
Tracy W Powell, Wing, 2020, stone sculpture marble on slate, 18 x 7 x 7 in
For Tracy Powell, carving wood and stone has been a wonderful learning experience, especially here in Skagit Valley Salish Sea neighborhoods.
Kathy Roseth, Wheel Bound, 2023, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 18 x 1 in
Wheelbound combines imagery of the traditional "Storm at Sea" quilting pattern with the familiar sight of Canada geese, stepping their way through colorful triangles, their curving backs mirroring the straight/curved lines of the pattern, enmeshing them. Roseth has long been fascinated by the austere power of traditional Amish quilts, having spent the first twenty years of her artistic production as an avid quilter exploring how simple geometric patterns establish a framework through which fantastic color progressions and color effects are possible.
Karen Bakke, PNW Menagerie, 2026, Soft Pastel, 38 x 14 x 1 in
As the Impressionists have done, Karen Bakke enjoys observing nature, painting en plein air and breathing that life into her studio paintings. She is not held back by any one type of subject or medium and is persistently creating challenges for herself. Karen strives to find that certain "je ne c'est quoi" - evoking a memory, a mood, or passion.
Nelleke Langhout NixBeanswarm1993Polaroid Transfer15" x 14.5"
Emily Counts, Shifting Circling Hover Moth, Glazed stoneware, brass, epoxy clay, Flashe paint, 26.5 x 17 x 2 in
Emily Counts creates mixed-media sculptures and installations that engage craft traditions while exploring femininity, matriarchal identity, memory, and nature. Through the pairing of contrasting materials-ceramics, wood, fabrics, electrical components, glass, and plastics-she builds relationships between disparate textures and surfaces, seeking balance between hard and soft, opaque and transparent. In works that incorporate ceramics with colored light or translucent materials, she merges nostalgia and historical aesthetics with a contemporary, sometimes futuristic sensibility.
Many of Counts's works are figurative and autobiographical. Ceramic busts and life-size figures, often dressed in carefully detailed garments, serve as composite representations of influential women in her life, particularly those from her matrilineal heritage who have passed away. Physical details such as hairstyles, patterned clothing, and bodily stance reference these individuals directly. Her surreal, commanding female figures explore the tension between visibility and vulnerability, and what it means to take up space. Their strength is defined not through violence or domination, but through tenderness and resilience.
Cycles of transformation in nature also inform her work, with recurring motifs of wilting flowers, ripe fruit, and otherworldly animal companions symbolizing renewal, decay, and consciousness. Her shift between human and animal forms reflects a curiosity about inner life, empathy, and the unknown or mysterious aspects of non-human experience. Drawing from childhood memories of textiles, typography, and vintage illustration, Counts traces enduring visual obsessions while using memory as a foundation. Her work ultimately suggests open-ended narratives that invite viewers into shared meaning and personal reflection.
Julie Baer, Crater lichen (Diploschistes muscorum), 2025, Mixed media on wood panel, 24 x 24 x 2 in
Julie Baer's work reflects deeply felt encounters with local nature, focusing on small-scale, often overlooked native land- and waterscapes as they shift through seasonal cycles. She seeks to capture the immediacy of a first glimpse of a scene, following the changing shapes, colors, and compositions shaped by movement and shifting light.
Her approach balances scientific attentiveness, aesthetic abstraction, and a sense of human spirituality. She aims to surprise viewers with uncommon vantage points-looking down, up, close, and inward-encouraging the same sustained attention she brings to her subjects. Central to her work is an interest in the complex design and recurring patterns of nature: intricate life forms on aging trees, dense intermingling of growth and decay on the forest floor, dynamic activity within water, and fragmented skies filtered through canopies.
Through heavily layered mixed-media surfaces-including painted paper, metallic pigment, glass beads, seashells, sea glass, and pebbles-her compositions become textured and uneven, as though life is emerging from within them. Often without a fixed focal point, the works reflect the mobile and sometimes disorienting ways nature is experienced.
Baer's practice is also shaped by environmental awareness and concern for habitat loss. By honoring local ecosystems, she aligns her work with calls for native restoration and rewilding. Her work ultimately invites viewers to reconnect with nature, reflecting research linking time outdoors with wellbeing, and encouraging attentive, restorative engagement with the natural world.
Jeffrey ThostensonUntitledAcrylic on Arches paper32" x 24" Framed
Jeffrey Thostensonwas a voracious reader and a longtime artist. He spent long hours in the La Conner Memorial Library and the Mount Vernon City Library pouring over art books and periodicals, reading thrillers, and searching out obscure mystical religious writings. His painting are abstract- acrylics on paper or woods.
William Cumming, Critic's Agony, no date, 14" x 12" x 2"
Analvis Somoza Jimenez, Raiz de Voces, 2026, oleo, 70 x 50 x 0.5 cm
Analvis Somoza Jimenez's work explores the human condition through an expressive and symbolic language where the emotional, spiritual, and symbolic intertwine. Rather than depicting external reality, the work seeks to reveal the internal forces that shape it, using distortion and transfiguration of the human figure to approach emotional truths beyond language.
Each piece becomes a space where the intimate turns collective, and memory emerges as a living network of presences, tensions, and resonances. The human figure serves as a site for exploring identity, vulnerability, resilience, and transformation, while bodies and faces function as symbolic entities embodying states of consciousness rather than individual portraits.
Cuban identity, shaped by Hispanic, African, and Indigenous syncretism, informs this visual language as an "interior Caribbean" where ancestral and contemporary influences coexist. The series Los Dandys centralizes themes of duality, elegance as resistance, and identity as mask and revelation.
Through intuitive, layered processes, color and gesture articulate psychological tensions. Multiple faces reflect identity as collective memory-an evolving weave of voices, echoes, and shifting presences.
Anna Skibska, What a Day!, Glass, 0 x 10 x 0 in
Anna Skibska's work sits at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, three-dimensional line drawing, and even storytelling. She uses a powerful acetylene torch to melt and stretch glass rods, creating slender and transparent threads, that are then joined to create perfectly balanced sculptures. Her signature technique, known as the Anna Skibska Technique, was developed in the early 1990s.
Skibska graduated from the Painting program at the Academy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland in 1984. She later was a professor of fine arts and architecture at the Academy of Art. In 1988, her work was selected for the respected New Glass Review journal, and the Corning Museum of Glass recommended her as an instructor at Pilchuck Glass School. She was grateful to escape the artistic isolation of communist Poland to teach at Pilchuck. Prior to immigrating to Seattle in 1996, she had already exhibited her work extensively throughout Europe and Japan. She went on to exhibit internationally, including in the Tuileries in Paris, Musee-Atelier du Verre, Museo del Vetro in Murano (coinciding with the Venice Biennale), National Museum in Wroclaw, and in a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. In 2004, the flameworking studio in Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, WA was officially named the Anna Skibska Flameworking Studio. Anna Skibska continues to be an influential artist in the Seattle art community.
Joe Reno, Bathers in Paradise, 1988, Oil on canvas, 16" x 20"
Born 1943 Seattle Washington, Joe Reno, as a young artist worked in the mailroom at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and took night classes at the Art
Students League. Aside from this period in New York and military duty in Germany, both in the 1960's, Reno has been a life-long resident of Seattle, with a home in the Ballard neighborhood.
At the age of six, Joe completed his first mural in wax crayon, from floor to ceiling on a wall at home. Reno has said that his reason for being is to make art, and he spends nearly all his time at it, sometimes producing dozens of paintings a week and other times taking months to finish one.
"When you're painting," Reno has said, "it's a state of Ecstasy-like peanut butter."
William Hughlett, Untitled, Photo print under archive glass, 21.7 x 41.5"
Bill Hughlett is a Seattle-based fine art photographer and long-time supporter of the Pacific Northwest arts and culture scene. While his primary career has been in venture-capital and fund administration, he is an avid photographer and an active participant in the regional photography community.
Jennifer Frohwerk, Garden Window, 2016, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 x 2 in
Jennifer Frohwerk studied abroad in Italy after completing her university degree. While in Florence, she took a drawing class in which she sketched the interior of the Chiesa Santo Spirito, sitting cross-legged on the stone floor with her drawing board in her lap. During a critique, her professor encouraged her to move beyond ornate detail and instead consider how to draw the space contained by the architecture-how to depict the air itself and the filtered light.
This idea became formative in her practice: how to represent not only objects, but atmosphere, movement, and the sense of awe within a space. She continues this inquiry in Seattle through en plein air drawing and painting, working outdoors to capture architectural forms in neighborhoods such as Queen Anne and Capitol Hill. Indoors, she studies windows, curtains, and the shifting boundary between interior and exterior worlds.
She also revisits childhood slides as a source of inspiration, drawing on contemplative images shaped by early experiences of reading, observation, and imagination.
Bezalel Levy, Leque Island I, 2022, mixed media with acrylics on rice paper mounted on linen, 24 x 52 x 2 in
Bezalel-Levy is the combined signature of a 36 year husband and wife collaboration in the arts. Chaim Bezalel and Yonnah Ben Levy reside at Stanwood House, an historic building which houses their private gallery. Also on the compound are their studios. Workshops in ceramics and painting have been conducted for 25 years. They have exhibited internationally, including at the Cambridge University Museums, and also nationally and locally. Their work is in public collections including the Skagit Regional Hospitals, Snohomish Courthouse, Seattle Public Art collection, and the the Bainbridge Island and Mona museums' permanent collections. They also work individually in painting, ceramics, and sculpture.
Leque Island, located west of Stanwood between Port Susan and Skagit bays, was once entirely tidal marsh. In the late 1800s, early settlers built dikes around the perimeter of the island to convert the area to farmland. Today it has been restored to marshland for fish, birds, and wildlife.
Anne Martin-McCool, Sun Moon Day, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30 x 2 in
Anne Martin-McCool's work explores the beauty and complexity of the natural world through an abstract lens. Drawing inspiration from traditional landscape painting, she uses bold brushwork, vivid color palettes, and an expressive, intuitive approach to create works that are grounded in observation yet transformed through abstraction.
Her aim is to evoke atmosphere and emotional response, encouraging viewers to develop a deeper connection to the environment and to reflect on the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through the abstraction of natural forms, she seeks to capture not only what landscapes look like, but what they feel like.
Working in acrylics, inks, and mixed media, her process balances spontaneity with intention. Materials are allowed to guide the development of each piece as layers accumulate gradually, until a final composition emerges. Through this approach, she strives to distill the essence of the landscapes that inspire her while also creating images that feel new, unexpected, and alive.
Don Wesley, Bald Starling, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 x 1.5 in
Don Wesley's practice has been shaped profoundly by teachers, mentorship, and education. He describes educators as central to both his development as an artist and his broader personal growth, offering guidance, support, and formative direction.
While studying art at Western Washington University in the mid-1990s, Wesley worked closely with painting professor and mentor Ed Bereal, who emphasized the idea that art can function as a "lever for change," a principle that continues to inform his work. Another professor, Margery Amdur, introduced him to the use of non-art materials and techniques for making acrylics behave like oils through mediums and suspensions. His study of dance under Nolan Dennett also informs his understanding of movement and the depiction of physical gesture in his work.
Wesley is an artist and teacher living and working in Skagit County, with studios in Day Creek and La Conner. His engagement with nature began after arriving in Washington State from Ohio in 1989 while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Lewis. After completing his service, he earned a degree from Western Washington University in 1995 with portfolios in painting, illustration, and graphic design. In 2025, he completed the Washington State Arts Commission's Teaching Artist Training Lab (TATLab) and now teaches art for grades K-12 throughout Skagit County through the Museum of Northwest Art's Creative Connections program.
Kate Oltmann, Eagle with Bull Elk, 2026, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 x 2 in
Kate Oltmannt lives and works in rural Northwest Montana, on land where her family homesteaded and built structures in Glacier National Park. Her work is rooted in land, labor, lineage, and the traditions that have shaped-and continue to shape-the American West.
Working in cyanotype and oil paint, she integrates quilt patterns passed down through generations. Often dismissed as "craft" due to their association with women's work, these patterns become a central visual language in her paintings. They function as echoes of the women whose labor built and sustained the West, even as their stories remain largely unrecorded.
Oltmannt is interested in depicting the West as it exists now, where tradition is not a relic but a living practice carried forward by families and communities. Her paintings operate as both record and reflection, honoring the quiet labor of women while examining contemporary life through pattern, gesture, and material grit.
Katie Kratzer, Sunset Sea Spray, 2022, acrylic on raw canvas, 38 x 52 x 1.5 in
Katie Kratzer (b. 1985) is a painter based on Mercer Island, Washington. Her work explores color, instinct, and vibrational energy - compositions made from a meditative place, often with her eyes closed. Katie Kratzer works channeling source energy, releasing inhibition and allowing instinct to guide her mark-making. Her process embraces spontaneity and fluidity while exploring the relationship between intuition and composition. The result is a celebration of layered color and expressive, gestural marks, drawing inspiration from music, joy, and visceral experiences. She comes to painting through an unusual convergence. Twenty years as a professional graphic designer - brand experience for Alaska Airlines, art programming for Kaiser Permanente WA, environmental graphics for REI - gave her a deep fluency with color theory and visual communication; and work recognized with a SEGD Global Design Merit Award and an Interior Design Magazine Best of Year Finalist. She studied color under Pantone's Leatrice Eisman. And then there is synesthesia - sounds arriving as fields of amorphous color, music becoming a physical space she moves through and paints from. Dyslexia, rather than a limitation, taught her to think non-linearly, to trust what arrives intuitively over what can be reasoned through. Together these ways of perceiving the world have led her to believe that the best work doesn't come from her so much as through her - that in the right state, painting becomes less an act of making and more an act of listening. She works in action, not calculation. Occasionally the canvas itself becomes a mark - ripped, sewn, or intervened upon in the same intuitive moment as the paint, never as an afterthought. Some of her most honest work has been made in stolen hours - on the bathroom floor during a toddler's nap, at the kitchen sink while her husband took the kids out for an hour. She has three young sons, whom she includes in an evolving series, Painting with My Sons - always moved by their uninhibited marks and their complete absence of doubt. The practice has had to learn to live inside a life, not apart from it. She has come to believe that constraint is not the enemy of the work. Often, it is the work. Her paintings draw from joy, grief, motherhood, memory, and the conviction that color carries its own vibrational frequency - that a painting made from a genuine place carries that energy into whatever room it enters, into whoever lives with it. A piece changes meaning over time - as she does. She has sold and shown work through her studio practice since 2017, with commissions for residential clients and corporate environments, and auction exhibitions including the Museum of Northwest Art. Her deepest affinities are with the 9th Street women: Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Hartigan. The painters who trusted the body, the instinct, the mark that arrives before the thought does.
David Kane, Seaside, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in
Kane Story David C. Kane was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and the bulk of whatever education and training he received was obtained there, although from whom he might have gained his early knowledge of and flair for drawing and painting is somewhat conjectural. It is known that he studied art for a time in the 1960's and 1970's at the University of Washington, where he would have studied under Jacob Lawrence, Michael Spafford, and Everett DuPen among others. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree sometime in the late 70's, Kane seems to have remained in Seattle, eking out a precarious living by his art, augmented from time to time by a succession of menial jobs. From the 1980's until well into the early years of the 21st Century, Kane remained active in the local art scene, such as it was, producing shows on a regular basis for local galleries, taking part in regional exhibitions, and occasionally teaching. By the mid-twenty-teens, he had exiled himself to Mount Vernon, north of Seattle, where we find him an enthusiastic participant in the legendary, vibrant Skagit art community. A tireless worker for the betterment of Art, he is admired by all who know him and a credit to his profession.
Laura Lasworth, Natural & Grafted Branches, 2010, Oil on wood panel, 12 x 12 x 1 in
Laura Lasworth received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Since her first solo show in 1981, she has consistently exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her work has been featured in publications such as Art in America, Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post. Lasworth was born and raised in Chicago, IL. After many years living in Los Angeles, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, in 2002, where she currently resides.
Laura Lasworth is a painter who's known for her use of sophisticated literary, philosophical, and personal symbolism. In her elaborate cycles of paintings, her method is like a long form writer where each cycle functions as a chapter, from which a continuing narrative emerges. Across the decades, laden trees, stormy skies, lace cloths, and broken branches have become familiar motifs of her personal vocabulary. In her solo shows, viewers encountered imagined interiors, symbolic still-lifes, and various landscapes that feature ever-changing weather patterns over mythical fields where admired persons may make an appearance, or absent fathers and missing children return. Through her art, she aims to provide viewers with a respite in a space that reflects our common humanity, away from the unjust, complex, and complicated world we find ourselves in today.
Valeriya Bugatti, Fairy, 2016, acrylics paint on Canvas, 24 x 18 x in
Valeriya Bugatti's work is a process of devotion measured not in hours, but in depth. Each piece begins with research into history, culture, textiles, movement, and symbolism, approached with a commitment to authenticity, respect, and precision. She spends extensive time constructing not only an image, but a layered narrative that develops gradually over time.
This body of work explores identity, feminine strength, and ancestral memory, engaging the tension between historical reality and contemporary interpretation. Rather than replication, her goal is resonance-creating work that feels emotionally and materially truthful even when reimagined.
Texture, composition, and detail are central to her process. Each artwork is treated as a living environment in which clothing, gesture, and atmosphere carry meaning and contribute to the narrative. The intention is to evoke presence rather than simply produce an image.
Still in the ongoing process of artistic development, Bugatti views each finished work as a point of departure for further research and refinement. Her practice is understood as evolving, with the aim of inviting viewers into that evolution. If her work sparks recognition, curiosity, or emotion, she considers it to have fulfilled its purpose.
Robert Matinjussi, Basket of Shadows, 2026, Tempera, 24 x 18 in
Robert Matinjussi is a deeply observant artist who sees the world through a lens of detail and subtlety. For him, painting is not about solving problems or adhering to formulas, but about capturing the essence of an image.
He understands style as something akin to handwriting-distinct, personal, and reflective of individuality. Each mark or stroke carries a sense of personal perspective, shaped by how he perceives the world rather than by prescribed rules or prevailing trends.
For Matinjussi, observation becomes an intimate act of translation, where what is seen is filtered through perception and re-expressed as personal vision.
Mark Larson, Out of the Office, 2025, Oil on panel, 30 x 48 x 1.5 in
Mark Larson's work explores the meeting place between external landscapes and the inner lives we carry into them. He is drawn to the sublime landscapes and architecture of Italy, the high ridges and deserts of the American West, old-growth forests, and the thundering beaches of the Pacific Coast-not only as scenery, but as repositories for memory, grief, and gratitude.
Working as an oil painter, Larson builds images that function as thresholds, existing between the real and the symbolic. Architectural fragments, mythical animals, and manmade objects appear alongside recognizable natural landscapes, creating spaces where dream and reality intersect. In works such as Out of the Office, a computer desk is placed within a thundering surf, reflecting on the fragility of human endeavor in relation to the power of nature.
Ultimately, his work invites viewers to consider their own crossings: the people they have loved, the places that have shaped them, and how lived experience transforms landscapes into something sacred and personally resonant.
Kathleen McCarty, Rumba, 2026, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 x 1.5 in
Kathleen McCarty is an abstract painter interested in creating work that uplifts and energizes a space through color and presence. Her paintings develop through a process of discovery, in which she releases control and allows color, movement, and composition to guide her toward unexpected outcomes.
She grew up in Wisconsin and earned her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, including a year of study in Florence, Italy. After graduation, she moved west and eventually settled in Northwest Washington, where she has lived for many years. The Skagit Valley's coastal light, waterways, and landscape continue to deeply influence her work.
A key shift in her practice came when she began working on raw canvas laid on the floor rather than prepared canvas on the wall. Through pouring and staining, each layer interacts organically with the next. Working without a fixed plan, she allows each painting to reveal itself over time.
Her daily three-and-a-half-mile morning walk-through water, cliffs, cedar forests, and wildlife-is a significant source of inspiration. Each walk offers a different experience, which she carries back into the studio as energy, observation, and momentum.
Kelsey Fernkopf and Steve Gilbert, Magic Meadow, 2025, Archival pigment print, wood frame with a plywood backer under museum glass, 60 x 84 x 180 in
Kelsey Fernkopf is a visual artist who creates site-responsive light installations using luminous neon glass tubing. Drawing on more than three decades of experience fabricating neon, he places geometric neon forms in forests, open landscapes, and urban environments. Situated in unexpected surroundings, his site-responsive work reveals each location through immersive, radiant forms that echo architectural fragments and operate as symbolic markers. Encountered in the wild, these installations are both phenomenological and threshold-like: ephemeral points of arrival that alter perception and soften the distinction between here and there, between nature and the neon element itself. Steve Gilbert translates these transient installations into digital archival pigment prints. His photographic sensitivity captures the sculptural and spatial qualities of the work, as well as the unique luminosity of neon. His images are not simply documents, but extensions of the work itself. His photographs hold the tension between presence and disappearing, capturing moments where luminescent form and environment briefly converge. They suggest temporal openings to other worlds, preserving the experiential threshold while transforming it into a lasting contemplative form.
Cie Goulet, August Day, 1989, Monoprint, 26" x 37.5'' x 1.5"
Cie Goulet is an American contemporary artist known for her rich, vibrant monotype prints and oil paintings of warm landscapes, particularly the vineyards and oak groves of the Pacific Northwest and California
Scott Sueme, A Rare Spruce, 2019, Acrylic on panel, 36 in. X 36 in. X 1 in.
Scott Sueme is a contemporary Canadian artist known for his hard-edge abstract paintings and assemblages that explore the interplay of color, geometry, and texture. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Sueme transitioned from a background in graffiti and graphic design to focus full-time on fine art. His practice bridges digital composition with hands-on, meticulous craftsmanship.
Zhu Naizheng, Quiet Evening, 1986, Ink on paper, 33.5 in. X 27.5 in. X 1 in.
Zhu Naizheng (1935-2013) was an influential Chinese master painter and calligrapher best known for pioneering a unique bridge between Western oil painting techniques and traditional Eastern aesthetic philosophies. Born in Haiyan, Zhejiang Province, he graduated from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1958 and later returned there as a prominent professor and academic leader.
William Ingham, Quake, 1994, Acrylic on board, 18 x 14, Framed 25 x 21
William Partridge Ingham (1944-2025) was a prominent Seattle-born American painter celebrated for his vivid, large-scale Abstract Expressionist works. Over a career spanning more than three decades, his unique approach fused bicoastal influences-specifically drawing from the New York School and Minimalism-while capturing the creative evolution of modernism within the Pacific Northwest art scene
Bailey Arend, Woodfired Plaque 1, 2, 3, 2014, stoneware, three plaques, each 10" x 5" x 1"
Andrew Bailey Arend is an artist who explores relationships between body, action, material and ecology. His work generally takes form as sculpture and also touches on performance, drawing and photography. He has participated in residencies and fellowships including Lighthouse Works, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Mid - Atlantic Keramic Exchange (MAKE), and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Andrew Bailey Arend received his MFA from Alfred University in 2016. He is currently a Lecturer and Lab Operations Assistant Manager for the Art Department at Appalachian State University.
Kathleen Adkison, Sherpa Paean, Oil on canvas, 40" high x 80" wide; Frame: 42" high x 82" wide
Kathleen Gemberling Adkison was born to recreational parents in Beatrice, Nebraska and her earliest memories include family excursions into nature. She moved with her parents to Seattle in 1936, attended West Seattle High School, and began to study privately at night with the regionalist realist artist Leon Berbyshire.
Richard E. Fuller, the founding director of the Seattle Art Museum curated her first museum exhibition and introduced her to Mark Tobey around 1960. Her life and art changed after that. Mark Tobey became her most influential teacher. She studied privately with Tobey and Morris Graves from 1946 until 1950.
In 1948 she moved to Spokane, becoming steeped in the stark geological landscape of the Spokane area where she was able to begin "thinking, seeing, and painting with a heightened sense of self." In the basement of her house she brushed, pooled, poured, and dripped paint onto fully stretched and primed canvases set on the floor. She created "Change-Over," what Matthew Kangas calls "her first fully successful abstract painting," for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair exhibition.
Kathleen Gemberling Adkison is considered, after Clyfford Still, the major modernist painter to emerge from eastern Washington, abstracting rocks and vegetation into lustrous oil paintings that remain close to the ecological "mysticism" of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. Although she has never discussed her work in terms of mystical symbolism, her artwork emerges from a profound reverence for nature. The Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture owns four oil paintings spanning Adkison's career in addition to one work on paper. The Museum mounted a late career retrospective for the artist in 1999.
Terry Furchgott, Untitled, 1986-1987, Pastel over watercolor, 28.5 x 38.25
Terry Furchgott has made art her career and her passion for over fifty years. She is represented by the Harris Harvey Gallery in Seattle, WA. Working primarily in acrylic and soft pastel, her paintings focus on the figure and are notable for their depth of color, strong, innovative compositions and exploration of archetypal human relationships and of the Feminine. Furchgott received an honors degree in art history from Radcliffe College and studied classical drawing and painting at the Camden Arts Center, London. She brings a broad understanding of art history, seasoned practical experience, a continuing creative excitement and a questioning mind both to her creative process and to her work as a teacher.
Furchgott has been the recipient of Individual Artist Awards and Fellowships from the Washington State Arts Commission, the King County Arts Commission and Artist Trust. Along with her studio work she has also pursued a successful career in public art, completing large-scale commissions for the Seattle Center House, the Kent Regional Justice Center, the United States Post Office, the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, the Fairbanks School District, Olympia High School and the Washington State Arts Commission among others. A community activist, Furchgott has used her talents as an artist to design and coordinate several key community projects including the Art to the People Project, a multidisciplinary arts celebration of Seattle's African Americans, and The First Street Artist's Collective, an ongoing mentoring and critique group for emerging and established Seattle artists.
She is represented in key Northwest collections and her work can be viewed at the Microsoft Corporation, the WA Sate Arts Commission, the Seattle Center, Virginia Mason Medical Center, the UW Medical Center, Continental Bank, McDonald's Corporation, Providence Hospital, Group Health, Federal Home Loan Bank, and the United States Postal Service.
Lavone Newell-Reim, Untitled, Date Unknown, Acrylic Painting, 24"x24"x1.5"
Lavone Newell-Reim was an influential abstract painter, author, educator, and a cornerstone of the Pacific Northwest art community. Often described as a "mother figure" to the Skagit Valley arts scene, she spent decades cultivating a creative sanctuary at her home and barn on Fir Island, Washington
Janie Ackerman, Ancient Lore, 2014, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24, 32 x 26 framed
Janie Ackerman is a Skagit Valley artist who began painting with oils in 1994, receiving formal training in the Russian impressionist style. She currently works in oil, acrylic, and collage, frequently applying multiple layers of paint, which are then rubbed away to reveal a time worn essence.
Coizie Bettinger, Lingering in Joy, 2012 Pastel, 18.5" x 24"
Coizie Bettinger's earliest memories include gathering armfuls of daffodils and lily of the valley with her mother and playing a child's piano with her father. Her father was an artist, and both parents expressed their creativity through cooking, flower arranging, sculpture, and gardening. She also shares a sketchbook in which she and her father each painted Cape Cod lighthouses.
In college, she maintained her commitment to the arts while majoring in biology. She later married her college sweetheart, Dicken, earned a graduate degree in Family Support and Education, and had two children, Nina and Ben. Her professional work focused on supporting young and new families, families at risk, and adoptive families, eventually directing adoption programs in Vermont and helping place approximately 400 babies and children with parents.
Throughout these years of study, family life, and social work, she continued to paint consistently, sustaining her artistic practice alongside her commitments to family and community.
Jay Steensma, Untitled, 1991, 5.5 inches X 6 inches
Jay Steensma was born in 1941 in Moscow, Idaho and died in Seattle in 1994. He received his B.F.A. from the University for Washington in 1962 and painted steadily for the rest of his life.
Though primarily a painter, he also made sculptures, prints, and photo-collages. Chalices, snakes, houses, clouds, and fish were some of his predominating subject matter. He usually painted in shades of gray and added small bits of primary colors for shock value. He was well known for using the motifs of his mentor Morris Graves. According to friend and colleague Charles Krafft, Steensma loved the idea of whipping out drawings and paintings in a frenzy of creative energy. He was also a master of scale. His work ranged from wall-filling oils to postage stamp size drawings.
Paul Thorne, Whelk Shell coffee table, 2003, Wrought Iron, hand forged 17 1/4" x 25" x 52 1/2" (height x maximum width x length),
Paul Thorne's ancestors come from a long line of skilled workmen including a blacksmith, carriage maker, tool and die maker, pattern maker, machinists, locomotive engineers, mechanical engineers and teachers. Paul has been a working blacksmith since 1983 and has worked in the metal working industries his entire adult life. His architectural and sculptural work is found in fine homes throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has demonstrated in numerous conferences and taught students, apprentices and fellow smiths out of his own shop for many years. You will find his teaching thorough, understandable, patient and enthusiastic. Paul's passionate life calling is to create beautiful ironwork and pass on this craft to the next generation of blacksmiths.
Thomas Wood, Dock on the Slough, 2011, Four-color etching, aquatint, edition of 50 20 x 21 framed (image 10 x 12)
Thomas Wood was an established painter and award-winning printmaker whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Wood's diverse prints from 40 years of printmaking range from oneiric fantasies to naturalistic views and employ such varied techniques as etching, drypoint, mezzotint, Chine collé and engraving. Wood's oil paintings often center on the sublime aspects of the Northwest wilderness.
Dean Andersen, Untitled, 1964, bronze scupture, 12"x3"x3" including base
Charles Stavig, Art 101, 2007, Mixed Media, 32.5" x 19"
Charles "Chuck" Inar Stavig was a multi-talented Pacific Northwest artist, educator, and building designer deeply embedded in the arts community of Washington's Skagit Valley and surrounding regions.
Paula Peterson, Building on the Beach, 1984, Oil and Oil Pastels on Paper, 30 1/4 x 24 1/4 x 3/4 in
Manfred Lindenberger, Rush Hour, 2005, Acrylic on Canvas, 18" xx24"
Manfred Lindenberger was a German-born American painter widely recognized for his vibrant contributions to Northwest Impressionist and Modern art. Based primarily in Seattle, Washington, his style evolved significantly over a career that spanned more than half a century, shifting from realistic landscapes to abstract, energetic crowd scenes
Dederick Ward, Smoke + Cloud/Anderson Mountain, 2000, Oil on Canvas Board, Framed 13 x 17 x 1.5 in
Dederick Ward was a prominent self-taught Pacific Northwest contemporary oil painter who spent over three decades capturing the region's vast atmosphere, topography, and deep time. Based in Anacortes, Washington, his distinctive style directly fused fine art with his professional background in geology.
Book: Dale Chihuly, Chihuly Over Venice, 1996, Photos and copies of sketches, 19 x 13 in
Dale Chihuly is an iconic American artist who completely transformed the studio glass movement by elevating blown glass into large-scale, fine art sculptures. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941, he has spent over six decades pioneering innovative techniques that push molten glass to its absolute structural and aesthetic limits
In September 1996, American artist Dale Chihuly completed his monumental, multi-year international project Chihuly Over Venice, hanging 14 massive hand-blown glass Chandeliers at various public sites and over the canals of Venice, Italy
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