November at AOT

Judith Bird
Judith Bird’s Silk Originals are luscious doubled silk scarves. Bird uses white silk of many jacquard weavings, black fabric and black and white prints; all the silk is hand dyed. Many pieces are shibori, or shape resist dyed. A popular name for this is tie dye, but in her case she it is “fold and dye.” Tiny little packages of folded silk are pressed then dipped either in dye on the edges or a resist chemical.

Bird finds color ideas everywhere in her life. A sunny walk on a leaf shaded trail, sometimes music gives colors, a funky magazine article might give her a push, a fashion shoot with a glamorous elephant, toenails painted to match her sequined eye makeup, windows are frames for the views to her garden which is there in all its moods, seasons and times, even a friend’s painting, as in After Scape III, inspired by Stephen Yates’ Scape III.

Charlotte Watts
“Taking still pictures that defy time and space, capturing images that inspire action, all the while daring the viewer to look intimately within his soul,” is what Charlotte Watts’ photography is all about.

Watts was born in southern California but schooled all over the United States, eventually returning to Ventura, CA to practice Emergency Medicine and her real love--photography, having photographed since age 8. She was able to study under Ansel Adams and his colleges, and photographed primarily in B&W. In 1990 she moved to the Olympic Peninsula. In 2000 she retired from the practice of medicine, but this move allowed her more freedom to experiment with the digital process and color. Her work has been frequently shown at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center, in Seattle galleries, and the Ansel Adams and Yosemite Galleries. Recently she has been teaching workshops for the Ansel Adams Galleries in Yosemite.

As artist and physician, she believes that the camera does not stop the moment, rather the image is recorded by humans as a “brain-print” and recurs again and again as déjà vu, or music, or dreams; thus her images almost always contain some motion–a motion that sets the eye and brain going in a continuation of the perceived.

Charlotte lives on the Peninsula in a wildlife sanctuary where she can practice her other passion—raising and releasing Wood Ducks into the wild.

Victoria Maase Stoll
After a fifteen year career as a painter and sculptor, during which time she taught college, exhibited frequently, was awarded grants and fellowships, Victoria Maase Stoll's life long interest in rocks led her to take a few basic metalsmithing classes while living in Santa Fe. She continued to teach herself jewelry-making techniques and eventually opened a gallery on Canyon Road, exhibiting her paintings and jewelry, as well as the work of other contemporary artists.

Working with a variety of gems, fossils and often very rare mineral specimens, all of her work is one of a kind and fabricated in mixed metals, often with high karat gold accents. Sometimes subtle and earthy, sometimes large and bold, often the work is quirky and always unique.

Like her work, Stoll's lifestyle is unique. For most of her tenure in New Mexico, she lived in the mountains in a rustic cabin with no plumbing, water or central heating. A real chop wood and haul water existence. A desire to garden led her to Cape Cod where she currently lives in a large Antique home with three large geriatric dogs and extensive gardens. Future plans include a move to Port Townsend to paint, garden and continue playing with stones.

cloud atlas + SlowART

In October Counsel Langley presents Cloud Atlas, a series of new paintings inspired by David Mitchell's novel of the same name. The book consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to the far future after a nuclear apocalypse. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or watched) by the main character in the next. Mitchell has said of the book: "All of the [leading] characters except one are reincarnations of the same soul ... identified by a birthmark. ... The "cloud" refers to the ever-changing manifestations of the "atlas", which is the fixed human nature."

And, heldover by popular demand, Harold Nelson's SlowART. Art is catching up with food in it's need to step back, slow down and be conscious. Robert Hughes puts it this way "We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water; art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media." Nelsons are is literally slow to creat, handmade, not digitized or mechanized. Its message is layered with complexity, both visual and emotional. Take your time.

August at AOT

Internationally recognized master printmaker Ken Parker returns to Artisans on Taylor bringing with him a new body of work. Parker presents large-scale silkcreen prints of overstuffed vintage armchairs. The life-sized studies make “you want to curl up in them,” says AOT Director Teresa Verraes.

Parker describes printmaking as “2D sculpture!” Silkcreening is one of his favored printmaking techniques. He uses the silkscreen process on its own and also with collograph to form a hybrid highly unique to the artist, the collo/silkscreen print. Making prints up to four meters square in some cases, his is a very sophisticated, accomplished work.

Parker holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster at Belfast and continues to exhibit his prints and sculpture and teach on both sides of the Atlantic. The prolific Irish artist has spent the summer in the region teaching printmaking at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. AOT is proud that he has made the time to show some of his new work in Port Townsend, which was once his home for several years.















Also, featured at AOT are Peter Gritt and Brent Wickline, two artists whose small-scale works are powerfully delicate. Working with ink on paper Gritt’s line-work drawings emerge “from deep within his uncensored imagination.” As a child he was “lost in the world of comic books,” which he first taught himself to copy before pushing his own edgy drawing style and seeking subjects beyond the reality of his source materials. Inspired by old Sears catalogs and thrift store finds Gritt uses his sense of the ridiculous to twist sedate images into outlandish fantasies.

Wickline’s table-top kinetic sculptures move with the slightest of provocation. Created from twisted wire, splashes of brilliantly colored plumage and various odds and ends they achieve a simple elegance and perfect balance. They give the viewer an irresistible impression that the work is reacting to their presence.

Opening Reception is Saturday, August the 2nd from 6:00 to 8 p.m. Artisans on Taylor is located in Downtown Port Townsend at 236 Taylor Street, across the street from the Rose Theatre. The gallery is open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.




























IMAGES: Armchair Study 2, Large Armchair, & Rosita & Armchair Study, Silkscreen prints by Ken Parker.
Elephant Walk, Ink on paper by Peter Gritt.
Feather sculpture by Brent Wickline.

Fused Glass by Lizbeth Harper

I am fascinated by the whole process of fusing glass. Opening the kiln after the glass has been fired reveals a treasure. The glass has transitions from a raw edged, cold feeling piece to something soft, sensuous and vibrantly colored.

Currently, I am happily exploring the may possibilities fused glass offers. My glass wall art mounted on different metals creates a reflective piece that is contemporary and striking. Each design, never preconceived, reveals a unique play between form and color. As I work on the piece, I try to let the glass "speak to me" and move in a direction that is both harmonious and balanced. Creatively, I find each piece a new and stimulating adventure.

Youth Artist Stephanie Johnson

Artisans on Taylor welcomes back youth artist Stephanie K. Johnson, 17, as their featured artist for July. This award winning painter has developed her own playful impressionistic style.

This past year has been punctuated with many artistic endeavors. Stephanie participated in Seattle’s National Portfolio Day and came away with offers from several prestigious American art schools.

Her dramatic oil originals for this year’s exhibition includes a sunlit home in Port Townsend, European and domestic café scenes, a Japanese Koi, and several Tuscan landscapes.

Stephanie’s work in oil has broadened and become more developed. Her “Walking through Sant’ Anna” painting won best in show at the Woodinville Community Art Show, Teen division and her ‘Inside Sant’ Antimo” won first place.

Stephanie has studied for the past seven years under international artists Teresa Saia and Milan Heger. Her teachers Dianne Brudnicki and Laurie Garcia have also given her direction. Collectors in Europe and North America have enjoyed her colorful and expressionistic paintings.

Her recent works, in oil will be available through the month of July at Artisans.

Please join Artisans on Taylor and meet this talented young artist at a reception held Saturday July 5th, 5:30 – 8:30 pm, during gallery walk. Light refreshments will be served. Artisans on Taylor is located at 236 Taylor St., across from the Rose Theatre. The gallery is open daily, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.




























IMAGES:
1. Sunset at the Villa
2. The Tuscan Vineyard
3. The Pergola
4. Waiting
5. Walking to Work

Signs of Spring!

Watercolors by Katy Gilmore & Jewels by Mary Edwards
+ Special guest craftsman interior designer Karen K. Hovde and Project Dove, a peace installation by Sierra Nyokka�
The signs of Spring seemed a bit shy this year. But the sun is out and Mothers day is upon us.
Treat yourself to a trip downtown Port Townsend and tour the galleries.

This is a truly beautiful show and will bring forward your favorite memories of this incredible
season.

Cheers!

Women in Art, Month I

Paintings by Anne Grgich, Alison O'Donoghue, Cheri O'Brien
and New Jewelry by Sharon Saindon

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 5th, 6 to 8PM

Born and raised in Portland, OR Alison O’Donoghue has been painting and exhibiting her work for over 20 years. Described by Anne Grgich her paintings are “obsessive mazelike arrangements . . . . intestinal realities and accessible entanglements with positive and negative spaces. O’Donoghue starts with a smooth black layer of paint and detailed brushlike drawings in white. O’Donoghue’s then adds a vibrating color palate that moves her tales endlessly to their own rhythm of reality and with volume, dimension, light and shade in fluid emotion seeming to be endlessly streaming out of her fingertips building an unreality moving in space for the viewer to see where imagination leads to make their own conclusions."

Artisans on Taylor welcomes back Anne Grgich. The curator of one of AOT’s most well-received exhibitions, Internal Guidance Systems: Visionary Art Tour, returns with a large body of her own work.

Speaking on her work Grgich says, “So much is involved in my work and where it comes from, all at once: bold and luminous, painterly, gritty, grotesque, hysterical, historic, collage onslaughts treated to various ends for color (as a palette), as form, as reference, reverence and design—all overlain with the calligraphy of my own religious vernacular—a feverish automatic painting vocabulary with infinite, mutating dialects.”

From Professor of Art History and Theory and Director of the School of Art & Design Colin Rhodes we learn, “Grgich began making spontaneous art at the age of fifteen, mostly by clandestinely painting in her family’s books, or making junk constructions. She first introduced collage into her work around 1988, but took it to a higher level in 1997 during a period of illness. During her convalescence she worked in bed, making paintings on file cards and CD’s and organizing collages from material she had collected. When she had recovered, later that year she began to produce collage paintings—images of people encountered over time in the street and in mind journeys that manifest themselves and recombine, according to her mood, in the process of creation. Recently, she has described her faces and people as ‘manifestations of conglomerated persona, in a way acting out these characters’. In a way they are a displacement for action in the world out there; fragments of experience, thought and interaction brought together to produce new possibilities out of contemplation. As she puts it, ‘bundling images, separating them’, then looking for ‘interrelating pieces to build meaning and feeling’. Seen separately these faces are individually commanding, but seen together, they form not so much a series of portraits as a group of living presences.”

Cheri O’Brien is a Pacific Northwest native currently residing and painting in Everett. She is a self-taught professional artist of nineteen years continually inspired by her many muses, both real and imagined. The fabulous river and mountain views from her studio window as well as the Palouse region are romantically captured. Considered an 'artist's artist' by her peers, she also creates humorous paintings of people and animals in interesting situations. Her latest work has been glass enamel paintings and fused painted stained glass.

In the words of Joe Heim of the Seattle Times, "Each painting is a contained one-act play. O’Brien’s figures convey real emotion. Pernicious humor, loneliness and boredom are revealed in bold vividly colored paintings."

O’Brien’s work is collected throughout Washington State and as the world sits up and takes notice of this eclectic artist with a unique voice, her paintings are making their way across the whole Continent and eking into Europe and Japan.

Port Townsend metalsmith, Sharon Saindon, presents a new body of jewelry designs. You most likely find her in her 10 x 10 foot shop in the late afternoon. Savoring the twilight Saindon is often at her most creative in the evenings.

As a student her focus was on sculpture, but her turned to jewelry as she became interested in the psychology of body adornment. “By wearing jewelry people emake art and soulful expression part of their everyday lives.”

Saindon is known for a straight-forward elegance which honors the inherent beauty and strength of metal. This distinctive style is born of a simple design process, “Doodle in a book, scratch out the ugly ones, doodle again, make one out of copper. If it’s ugly, toss it in the recycle bin, if it’s only kind of ugly let it sit on the desk and hope that I can figure out how to make it prettier.”[PICTURED, from top: Crash Course by Alison O’Donohgue, Bus to Guadalajara by Cheri O’Brien, Earrings by Sharon Saindon]