You're Invited: First Friday Artwalk, July 6, 2018

(This post is currently in progress.  Please enjoy it as we construct it in advance of the show's opening, and feel free to contact the gallery in the meantime with any questions.)

Summer is here, and another Artwalk awaits you on beautiful Bainbridge Island!  Do come downtown to visit us and the other terrific galleries, shops, and restaurants.  We'll be offering snacks, a sip of wine, chats with friends old and new and, as always, fabulous art.

Here's what is not to be missed in July:

New Work from Gallery Artists

July 6 - 31, 2018

Paintings & Prints:

Jan Branham, Karen Chaussabel, Pam Galvani, Sandy Haight

Meg Hartwell, Renee Jameson, Kathryn Lesh

Studio Furniture & Sculpture:

Sean Carleton, Marceil DeLacy, L. Wendy Dunder, Bill Galvani

Jeff Harmes, Peter Nawrot

Wearable Art:

David, NEO, Begona Rentero

Introducing

Jewelry Artist

Beverly Sokol

First Friday Artwalk, July 6th, 6-8 pm

In Concert on the Plaza:

The Tracie Marsh Band

IMAGES SHOWN IN MONTAGE ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: 
Jan Branham, Tulips, Monoprint/Collage

Marceil DeLacy, En Pointe, Maple

Beverly Sokol, Wood and Silver Earrings

 

About the Show: 

Symbolically, July is the month of change and transformation, inevitably bringing with it a certain whimsy that naturally overtakes creative minds during the warmer months.  This can lead us down many interesting pathways, as will be on display in this Gallery artists’ show of work inspired by the ease and light of summer, in the genres of Paintings and Prints, Studio Furniture and Sculpture,  and Wearable Art.

Introducing jewelry artist Beverly Sokol, who works with simple tools and raw materials such as gold, silver and wood to create unique contemporary jewelry designs.

Visit the Gallery in person, as well as our brand new Artists' Page on the Website and extensive Online Shop.

About the Artists:

(Please click on the images to view more of their work.)

Paintings & Prints:

Jan Branham, Tulips

Jan Branham:  After retiring from a 35-year career as a public school art teacher, Jan has become a full time printmaker and is now an active member of the Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network (BARN), Southern Graphics Print Council, American Craft Council and Seattle Print Arts. She is currently involved in creating a body of work that she calls “ansisters,” using small snapshots of interesting individuals taken in the 1920s-‘50s as inspiration to create her own printed and collaged images that have developed a new life of their own on paper.

Karen Chaussabel describes herself as "a mixed media artist in the making."  Currently living on Bainbridge Island, Karen originally hails from France. She infuses her work with the nature and countryside of her youth, allowing her life experiences to impact her work. Karen works primarily in encaustic, pen and pencil, with mixed media. Along with her abstract and landscape work Karen presents a series of fruit- and vegetable-like forms, that give suggestions of the harvest, the heart's attachment to it, light, and summer.  (No show image available at this time; please click to visit her Artist Pages.)

Pam Galvani, Paros

Pam Galvani :  For many years, Pam taught history, calligraphy and English. Primarily a printmaker today, Pam has also been a  calligrapher for 40 years, incorporating gestural marks in her work. She is inspired by reading or hearing words, phrases or stories that resonate with her and by abstracting the original text, she hopes to discover and reveal ideas that go beyond what legible words may communicate. She travels widely and her art has been shown nationally and locally, including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

Sandy Haight, Inner Sanctum

Sandy Haight:   
Watercolor was first introduced to Sandy in a life drawing class. She loved the luminosity of the medium and continued to grow more familiar with the planning, strategy and execution of a painting. Thus watercolor and ink brush line became the basis for her illustration career for nearly twenty years.  She has always loved the sensuality of the medium, the glow of the colors and the fact that the paint moves and flows on its own, intermingling with other colors.  Her artwork appears on book jackets, ads, posters, logos and packaging all over the United States, in Canada, and Europe.

Meg Hartwell, Space and Time

Meg Hartwell: I was an operating room scrub nurse for fifteen years, passing scissor, clamp, even saws to help fix the human body. I was privileged to see and hold body organs, and x-ray images. Music was always playing in the background. The atmosphere in the room had a calm control in the midst of chaos. Tools or surgical instruments had a specific purpose and fascinated me. This experience influenced my art and shaped my life. The monoprinting process allows me to embrace happy accidents and mark making with an array of tools. I am creating a visual language inspired by vibrant colors, pop art, and abstract expressionism to evoke a sense of controlled calmness. I tear and cut, and approximate the printed tissue paper pieces into a final composition.

Renee Jameson, Red Mountain

Renee Jameson:  Renee is a monotype artist and currently the printmaker liaison for the BARN   (Bainbridge Artisan ResourceNetwork). Her work is represented in private collections in California and Bainbridge Island. She is inspired by the landscapes of Bainbridge and California, and tries to create a world that viewers can interpret and respond to in their own way. She considers herself an abstract artist and hopes to create a mood and atmosphere that will evoke an emotion or memory in the viewer.

Kathryn Lesh, Urn

Kathryn Lesh is a printmaker who is obsessed with the drama of light and the construction of space, which are starting points from which she explores the line between the abstract and the figurative. Her images capture people and moments that are abbreviated and abstracted enough to invite broad interpretation.

Wood & Steel Sculpture:

Sean Carleton, Shelf no. 23

Sean Carleton is a multi-disciplinary artist creating work in Bothell, Washington. A Washington native who has a lifelong passion for creating with his hands, his work ranges from unobtrusive yet sophisticated metalwork which supports beautiful Northwest hardwoods, to sculpturally artistic, dramatic metalwork as the emphasis of the piece. Carleton has been recognized for furniture design and quality by the Bellevue Art Museum and Northwest Woodworkers Gallery. 

Marceil Delacy, En Pointe

Marceil DeLacy’s love of carving began as a child living on the outskirts of Seattle. With a pocketknife, she created images from Ivory soap, then letter openers from kindling wood and arrows from tree suckers before graduating to the use of chisel and mallet. She learned her craft from the wood itself, letting it guide her eye and hand. In the early 1980s she began serious fine art sculpting, winning awards in juried shows and having her work shown in the Bellevue Art Museum. As human encroachment and climate change displace flora and fauna, her art serves as a way of giving voice to nature. To this end, she strives for simplicity of form and uses only a clear finish or no finish at all in order to let the natural color and beauty of the wood speak for itself. It’s a process she calls “listening to the forest.”

L. Wendy Dunder, Untitled

L. Wendy Dunder is a professional watercolor and acrylic painter, known for depicting landscapes, still life, animals, and people. Recently, however, her focus has shifted to creating sculptural lamps of bent wood and laminated paper.  Created from multiple layers of tissue paper glued in place over frameworks of materials such as thin-cut and bent wood, reed, bamboo, and welding rod, these illuminated sculptures spring to life as glowing wall sconces, table lamps and hanging lamps. Delicate and graceful in appearance, they are amazingly strong and functional.





Bill Galvani, whose professional background is as a museum director, carves using the traditional tools of drawknife, spokeshave, wood rasp, and knife. He prefers basswood, a hardwood that holds detail and takes a blade well. Carving shorebirds and ducks has encouraged him to study them, which has led him to participate in conservation activities that preserve birds and their habitats.  (No show image available at this time; please click to visit his Artist Pages.)

Jeff Harmes  (Biographical information and image available shortly.)

Peter Nawrot, Charcuterie Board

Peter Nawrot:  Originally from eastern Washington, near Spokane, Peter has been working as a high-end cabinet maker in the Seattle area. He is a passionate wood expert and real enthusiast on all wood types and specializes in figured woods from the Northwest.  He is now working on contemporary sculptures as well as functional pieces like food-related cutting boards, charcuterie boards, chopsticks and jewelry boxes.  His style may best be described as minimalism, featuring sleek, uncluttered lines and understated elegance.

Wearable Art:

David.Bali   (Biographical information available shortly.)

NEO, Coll 13

NEO  (Biographical information available shortly.)

Begona Rentero, Beautiful Raquel

Begoña Rentero:  A Spanish designer, originally from Granada, Begoña grew up in a family that had a profound respect for nature and the environment. These early influences developed into a passion for organic forms, color and movement inspired by nature. Begoña later translated this passion into a jewelry collection featuring a series of unique pieces. The colors and organic shapes of winter flowers, flora and sea fauna have inspired her latest collection of hand-made, exquisitely crafted jewelry. The pieces are made of special paper, fibers of silk, cotton, et cetera, that she prepares with a method she has developed to toughen them up for daily use, without compromising their delicate, organic aesthetic. Using only natural dyes her pieces both reflect and respect the environment and, as she says, "are so light you have to touch them to know that you're wearing them."

Beverly Sokol, Wood and Silver Earrings

Beverly Sokol  holds a BS in Textiles and Metals from Portland State University and further study in metals at the Oregon College of Arts and Craft.  An owner of a company which designed and produced fabric props for storytelling at schools and libraries throughout the United States for some 35 years, she now makes jewelry full-time at her studio near Portland. Her work has been exhibited at galleries in Oregon and California and she is a member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

 

Event Location/Contact Us/Visit/:

The Island Gallery, 400 Winslow Way E, #120, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Underground parking is available at The Winslow off Ericksen Avenue.

Web site:  www.theislandgallery.net

Shop: www.theislandgallery.net/shop

Blog:  www.theislandgallery-artblog.blogspot.com

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GALLERY HOURS

Tuesdays - Saturdays 11:00 – 6:00 pm

Sundays Noon – 5:00 pm

Closed Mondays

 

At The Gallery in June: Andrea K. Lawson - Rite of Spring Series

Through June, The Island Gallery will feature the vibrant floral still life work of Port Hadlock artist Andrea K. Lawson.  This, her Rite Of Spring Series, was inspired by a performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring Ballet, choreographed by Glen Tetley.  The exhibit is an offshoot of Andrea's recent popular The Island Gallery at Sotheby's Special Exhibition: Spring Portraits, presented in May of this year. 

Clicking on the images below will take you to visit more of Andrea's work on her Artist Pages, and her biography. 

The Rite Of Spring Series exhibit coincides with the yearly spring blossoming of

gardens here in the Pacific Northwest, and specifically honors our island's local

event, Bainbridge in Bloom, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.  Andrea's

vivacious floral paintings will be on display, performing greeting duty, in the

Gallery's Front Room.

 

Andrea K Lawson:  Surprise Summer Bouquet.  Oil on canvas

To local gardeners, Bainbridge in Bloom is a very special yearly event, showcasing

as it does the incredible level of artistry that members of the island community

bring to the craft of gardening and landscape design.  It takes visitors from

around the region and across the country behind the hedges and fences of six

stunning island gardens, to celebrate the joyful abundance of summer in the

Pacific Northwest.and the unique beauty of Bainbridge Island. 

The Bloom, as it is affectionately known hereabouts, is presented by

Arts & Humanities Bainbridge (AHB). 

Andrea K Lawson:  Summer Bouquet. Oil on canvas

It can safely be said that this artist lives and breathes color.  Her vibrant work,

inspired by nature, expressionism and dance, is on full display in this series of floral

still life oil on canvas paintings.  Her bold strokes, playful rendering of form, and rich,

melting light adds to all that color and creates vivacious movement that captures and

simply pulls the viewer into the pieces.

Andrea was born in Hollywood, California and received her BA from the University

of California Santa Cruz and her MFA from Parsons The New School of Design,

New York City. Her prize winning paintings, drawings and prints have been

exhibited across the United States and Europe. A select list of Andrea’s solo and

juried exhibits include: The Painting Center, New York, The Cape Museum

of Fine Art, Massachussetts, Gallery K, Los Angeles, Ronnebaekshholm Arts &

Culture Centre, Denmark, and Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris,

France. In Seattle and the Northwest: Washington State Convention Center, The

Corridor Gallery, Port Angeles Fine Art Center, Max Grover Gallery, Artisans

On Taylor and Northwind Arts Center.

Andrea speaks of her work:

Using expressive color and freely roving gestural line, I explore wild spaces as

well as dense human spaces. I am intrigued by the interaction between the two, such

as electric lights twinkling in a wild nightscape. Painting outdoors overlooking

the Puget Sound, I paint abstract landscapes with color that is not a copy but is a

direct response to my emotion and experience of the changing light on sky and

water as the sun moves along its path. Using sketches from dances, and photographs

that I take at political marches and parades, I paint the wild magic of community.

I create paintings about how human figures can be entangled in nature, struggling

to be part of or separate from their/our surrounding environment.

Andrea K Lawson:  Sweet Bouquet with Green Table. Oil on canvas

Of Andrea's work, Nancy L. Carcione (Curatorial Department of Costume and

Textiles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA) writes:  "Andrea’s

paintings evoke a spirit of freedom, movement, and expressiveness while

remaining fresh, energetic, and luminous. Andrea layers the oil paints in ... 

broad gestures, one color over another. The compositions are balanced

by areas in which the eye is allowed to rest, and through this device Andrea

is able to achieve subtle environmental nuances with a minimum of strokes."

From New York Artist/Instructor Carla Aurich:   “The expressive building and

scraping of paint becomes a witness to time and explores weather patterns

and atmospheric conditions of a single moment… a portal to an enchanted

environment...we are summoned through the portal into a lush landscape to

engage with the wonders of the natural world.” 

Andrea K Lawson:  Dahlias. Oil on canvas

The Rite of Spring Series exhibit runs through June 30, 2018.

Andrea's work and biography can be seen on her Artist Pages, by clicking here.