Ballard Art Walk and artists...
This is a salute to my youngest son (in the
preface) and a recounting of a recent adventure he and I had in Ballard during
their monthly "Second Saturday" art walk. Ballard is an exciting art venue,
perhaps as much so as Pioneer Square and we talked with a number of artists
during our trek through one of Ballard's art spaces - Building C on Leary Way at
14th Avenue NW.
Preface:
I know I'm getting
on in years when I have my youngest son turn 21 today. Adam was born 21 years
ago while I was working on the Spacelab 1 mission. Leif was born immediately
following the Viking 1 and 2 landings on Mars - the next January, in 1977.
He'll turn 28 early this new year. My own mom is still alive, and kicking and
doing relatively well - still on her own in Charlotte, NC (in the city, no less,
not too far from where their light rail may run and reasonably close to the
airport, though she hates to fly). She's 87, turned that this past August. Me,
I'm three-quarters of the way from 57 to 58 and though I still am perfectly
healthy, there's every telltale sign that I'm in my "middle" years. Of course I
hate it. I get these creaks and aches in my joints. I don't have the strength
I had when I was 22 and in the Army. But, here's the complete kicker which
allows me to accept this element of my fate - I don't have to get up and slave
for the system anymore. I can bide my time, do what I want, create things,
play, mess around and take long hikes, in nice weather go for bike rides
whenever I like. So, there's some recompense to being older. But believe me,
you younger types - the miles on your body will make themselves known as you get
up in those miles. These days I sort of feel like my body is a
well-taken-care-of Volvo which came from a previous generation - of distinction
to be sure, but just not the latest in all the styles and
gadgets.
So, Happy Birthday to my youngest son on his coming of legal age for anything which is legal in this country. Happy Birthday to you, Adam.
This past several days have been spent mostly indoors, on the computer and doing routine housework kinds of things. This past Saturday, though, was an outing of the sort that I'll be doing again.
Every "first" Thursday, the art galleries of Pioneer Square have their art walk. Every "second" Saturday, the art galleries and artist's spaces of Ballard have their art walk. These are recurring events which occur on the appropriate day of each month. These have been going on for decades and have become a permanent fixture of the local art scene. In fact, they have become a permanent fixture of the Puget Sound art scene since Anacortes, Bremerton, Port Townsend, Bainbridge Island, Whidbey Island, and Edmonds, Tacoma, Gig Harbor and Kirkland all participate on one of the "first" days of the month. Both Art Guide NW <http://www.artguidenw.com/> and Art Access <http://www.artaccess.com/> list hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists for the Seattle and greater Puget Sound area. And, these are just the visual artists (painters, pen-and-ink drawers, sculptures), not counting the musicians, dance troups, theatre troups, writers and poets, and performance artists.
A rich region for the arts, for sure. Adam and I set out Saturday about an hour after dusk (which occurs these days at 4:00 pm) for a one-bus trip from West Seattle to Ballard to explore the Ballard art scene. The art walks generally begin at 6:00 pm and run through either 8:00 pm (Pioneer Square) or 9:00 pm (most of the others, including Ballard). We arrived in downtown Ballard just before 6:00 and got a coffee and sat inside Tully's coffee shop waiting for the magic hour. It was a cold and blustery evening and the warm coffee was good. Just after six we set out to find the Palm Room, a garden and bonsai art shop which was going to feature a retrospective of an artist we knew personally - Jeff Mihalyo <http://www.mihalyo.com/>.
Ballard is one of Seattle's larger neighborhoods, several score thousand live here and its street network is relatively flat (it lies in rolling hills northwest of downtown) and relatively grid-like excepting for the original Ballard settlement which has diagonal streets originating at Salmon Bay and heading northwest from there. The main streets in the area are the linear and north-south 15th Avenue NW, which is the backbone arterial and the main route to the rest of the city and which travels over the constricting Ballard Bridge right adjacent to the Fisherman's Terminal, a huge slip area for the city's hundreds of fishing vessels. Market Street crosses 15th Avenue and runs east-west and is the main "downtown" street for Ballard. Ballard Avenue NW intersects Market at a 45-degree angle from where it begins about eight blocks southwest along the shore of Lake Union (Salmon Bay). To the west, about nine blocks away from 15th Avenue, 24th Avenue NW is another north-south artery which runs from the lakeshore north into the rolling hills of Ballard. Between 15th and 24th and continuing in both directions east and west of those streets is Leary Way, a meandering main artery which follows closely the shoreline of Lake Union as it changes from a ship canal (west of downtown Ballard) to a bay (Salmon Bay just south of downtown Ballard) to being the actual Lake Union near Fremont (east of Ballard).
All these streets and their intersections give Ballard a variety of nodes for both commerce, clubs and restaurants and art galleries and artist spaces. Ballard was and remains an industrial area as well, the streets close to Salmon Bay and the Ship Canal are lined with outfitting shops and dry docks for all the vessels which dock at Fisherman's Terminal. Some of these boats are the hundred-ton displacement floating ship factories which ply the Arctic waters and return with already processed fish in their ice-filled holds. These ships all need service and there are marine diesel shops, electronic navigation shops, and the like. In previous decades there were, of course, more of these kinds of facilities. Presently, there are - littered throughout the industrial area at both ends of Ballard - a large collection of former factories or warehouses which have been converted into art space and studios for visual artists and sound studios for musicians. What this means is that the art scene in Ballard is spread along NW Market Street, Ballard Avenue NW, 24th Avenue NW and then interspersed throughout the industrial area along Shilshoal Avenue, Leary Way and other local streets.
It's huge. There are as many galleries and art spaces in Ballard as there are in Pioneer Square. There are some definite distinctions between the two venues. There are also a plethora of galleries in Belltown, Capitol Hill, and spread along the arteries in Fremont. The Pioneer Square art walk also includes a significant number of galleries in downtown Seattle. If one counted the galleries open during the various art walks, then Pioneer Square-Downtown would come in at the top for sheer number of galleries. Also, when doing the Pioneer Square art walk, there is a fundamental advantage in that the galleries are located adjacent to each other on the four sides of a single block with clumps of additional galleries on the four streets which define that block. Downtown they're spaced out along First, Second, Third and Fourth Avenues. In Ballard, there is a concentration of galleries along the Market Street-Ballard Avenue spines and then again along 24th Avenue and a collection of gallery spaces near Leary Way.
That's one distinction, the concentration of galleries, favoring, first Pioneer Square and then Ballard. Another, perhaps more obvious, distinction is that the galleries in the Pioneer Square-Downtown-Belltown quadrants are what I'd call "premier" galleries. These are spaces where the interior design, lighting, ambience factors and overall "class" are very upscale. Most of the galleries in Pioneer Square and its downtown neighbors are hosting unique artists of some local or international renown and the host-hostess of the gallery (or proprietor) is usually dressed in very stylish digs, often a work of art themselves. The gallery spaces in Ballard are much more home-spun. The proprietors are just as likely to be wearing something stylish as wearing something typically Northwest (jeans, pullover, mono-color). There is a laid-back feel to the Ballard galleries which is not evident in Pioneer Square or elsewhere in downtown. I've been to a few galleries in the U-District, on Capitol Hill and in Fremont and West Seattle and, except for the odd exception of West Seattle, the other gallery venues are much more like Ballard - laid back, relaxed, comfortable. Weirdly enough, the gallery spaces in West Seattle, which are as spread out as any area of the city, are more "upscale" in interior finish and in the dress of the proprietor. Can't explain this except that some West Seattle districts, like Alki, Admiral, and Alaska Junction, were previously towns or "centers" in their own right and there's a fair amount of local money still in West Seattle from the pioneer days over a hundred years ago. That, and perhaps the cachet of being the original settler's spot for the city somehow allows this neighborhood to have a degree of pretense closer to Pioneer Square than its sister-neighborhoods like Ballard or Capitol Hill.
Oddly enough, Queen Anne (both upper and lower) and some of the other high-end neighborhoods like Madison Park and Magnolia don't have much in the way of art galleries - and given the real estate prices - don't have much in the way of artist space either.
There are a couple of large structures, former warehouses, in Ballard which serve as collectives for working artists as well as double as their gallery space. We went to one of these, Building C, at 14th Avenue NW and Leary Way, and spent over 90 minutes on the second floor visual art gallery area. The first floor is devoted to furniture art and contains some working furniture studios. The second floor is relatively "raw," with oak-plank flooring, eight-foot sheetrock walls and simple doors set in simple doorways with no ceiling save the 16-foot warehouse ceiling from which the electrical and HVAC utilities are hung and distributed throughout the somewhat-"H"-shaped structure. Some of the spaces were huge, on the order of forty-by-forty feet square, others were more modest twenty-by-twenty and even others were cubbyholes of ten-feet square. Several of the medium-sized spaces were shared space between two artists with working space in the middle and display space along the walls. The whole atmosphere was reminiscent of a Middle East bizarre in that there were no closed doors (even though there were doors) and there was a different background music and "buzz" coming out of each of the spaces - all mixing in the open space where there would be a ceiling but wasn't one. This lent both a carnival atmosphere and a degree of excitement because there would be shrieks or loud exclamations of wonder or joy coming from someplace just around the corner, all mixed and mingled with a hundred other voices and noises.
Our first stop was a 57-year-old mother of two, Andreé Carter <http://www.andreecarter.com>, who had previously taught art in New Orleans. She has a BA in art from Tulane, an MFA from University of New Orleans, and spent a summer studying in Florence, Italy as part of Tulane's art program. She moved here to Seattle about a dozen years ago, and teaches at both the Art Institute here and at a community school in New Orleans. Obviously, she travels between Seattle and New Orleans a lot. She has two grown sons, about Adam and Leif's age, one on his own and the other still in school, like Adam. Her husband, a doctor, died very early while she was raising her toddler sons so she's been a working artist for a long time. She's represented by two galleries in Pioneer Square (AT31 <http://www.atelier31.com/> and Patricia Cameron Fine Art <http://artresources.com/guide/featured.artistsshown.ihtml?c=47> and by Sylvia Schmidt Gallery in New Orleans <http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/arts/artgalleries.html>. Her work is impressionist in style and quite colorful, using an impasto technique and very often melding pieces of cut paper with the impasto. On many of her works she overcoats the final product with marine epoxy, giving it a depth and sheen which is phenomenal. I've seen quite a few artists here using marine epoxy, it's probably a natural melding of the Seattle art scene and the Seattle fishing scene.
We next stopped in the studio of a thirty-something artist whose name I did not get, alas, but whose work was quite impressive. He paints using very muted colors of the same palette (he had sepias for one series and blues for another). His work is a melding of photo-realism and impressionism with an emphasis on the light of the subject. His sepia series are scenes from in and around Seattle and are all about two-feet by three-feet. His work gives the impression of movement, believable movement. Because it's a meld of impressionism and photo-realism, it's captivating how he uses the one technique in certain areas of a painting to give a "real" feel to the image and the other technique in other areas of the painting to give it movement. His blue series are scenes from his memory as a Peace Corps worker in The Gambia several years earlier. I will return and get this guy's name and more about his art because it was outstanding and of a sort I've not seen much of in the way of technique. There are lots of painters who use Seattle as a subject but this gent's work lent a new feel and air to the ordinary scenes of the city in the same manner that Cezanne's work lent a new look at ordinary city life of his time. And, again I must stress the "lightness" of this guy's work. Dark street scenes with a luminance quality from where the sunlight would be casting shadows at street level. Unusual, interesting, and attractive in a hypnotic manner.
Next we ventured into the studios of Virginia Howlett <http://www.blueskyartist.com/>, a name I probably should have known. We entered her studio and spent about fifteen minutes looking at her watercolor work - all skies. Not skies with landscapes beneath them, or seascapes, just skies. Sections of skies. She paints the skies of the Northwest and Southwest and her skies are not just real, they have some form of intrinsic motion. After looking at her work, we spoke at length with her about her art, her background and vision. I asked her what moved her to paint these skies and she said it was trying to capture the element of change, the motion of the wind with the clouds and the changing light of the sun and sky behind the clouds. Her paintings, watercolor on paper and panels and oils on panels, capture this motion, this dynamic of the sky. It's something which seems hard to actually do as most great skyscapes seem to be snapshots in time and not a series of moving clouds. She said that she tried hard to make her art different from what she called time snapshots. Previously she was an art teacher, she holds an MFA from the University of Chicago, at Hampton University in Virginia and at New Mexico Highlands University, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a gorgeous town in northeast New Mexico high in the Rocky Mountain foothills. She moved first to New Mexico and later Seattle because of personal reasons associated with her husband and two children but likes Seattle just fine. She's Canadian and her extended family is nearby in British Columbia and one of her studios is on Galiano Island north of Vancouver Island in the BC Gulf Islands. Now here's the hidden secret of Virginia Howlett - she was one of the first individuals associated with a human interface and design guidelines for Microsoft Windows. She worked for Microsoft in the early 1990s and was tagged to be the lead behind the Windows 95 interface and is personally responsible for the Verdana typeface <http://dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=6669>. She was working on the interfaces for Cairo and Chicago, Microsoft codenames for upcoming operating systems in the early '90s. Cairo was to be a desktop interface for Windows NT and Chicago became Windows 95. Small world. This was after her move from New Mexico and before branching out on her own as an artist. She is also represented in the Pioneer Square galleries by Patricia Cameron Fine Art <http://artresources.com/guide/featured.artistsshown.ihtml?c=47>.
We chatted some more about skies and the differences between the Northwest, Southwest and other locales. She's also painted some Hawaiian skies.
We then went to the shared gallery space and studios of Jim Stoccardo <http://www.jimstoccardo.com/index.php>. His work is interesting in that it is 3D bas relief and a cross between impressionism and abstract - almost retro-cartoon-like but with miniscule detail in areas which are unexpected. We didn't spend as much time with Jim as we should have because his studio-mate was having what seemed like a moment of personal angst and carrying on with a few visitors a mere ten feet from us. Stoccardo moved here in the early '90s from the East where he'd been raised, gone to school and apprenticed, in Manhattan for a restoration studio and an individual artist. Later, he moved to Savannah, Georgia, to develop his portfolio and then moved to Seattle. He does performance art as well and has had several performances as well as visual art shows in the Los Angeles area and here in Seattle. He was born in Darby, Pennsylvania (a Philadelphia suburb of note) and has had shows in Philadelphia also.
We also stopped in the singular studio of an artist - again about my age but whose name I also didn't get - who uses wood in his paintings and has a new series which we would like to return and see how it developes. This gent's work includes birds, wings, and other elements of flight as well as some scenes involving landscapes which also seem to be in motion. The use of wood is inventive and is applied on the artwork in a manner which suggests even more motion than might be visually apparent from a distance. Next trip we'll get this artist's name and more about him.
When we had shown up at the Palm Room for Jeff Mihalyo's retrospective, we'd spent a lot of time with Jeff (I'd met him through mutual friends at a neighborhood party months earlier) and since this was my first Ballard Art Walk I asked Jeff to recommend some galleries. He recommended Building C on the east side of Ballard and several gallery spaces on the west side by 24th Avenue. I didn't spend nearly as much time as I could have at Building C and will return and still have all the galleries which Jeff recommended to explore on the west side of Ballard.
It would be an understatement to say that the liveliness of the Seattle art scene has energized me. I recently ordered some tumbled glass pieces in a variety of colors with the intention of combining glass and acrylic paint on canvas - based on some of the art which I saw both earlier at Pioneer Square and this past Saturday at Ballard. This is an exciting place for the arts, be they visual, musical, performance, dance, or any of the written arts. I'm having a great time settling into the art scene here and, having recently hung a series of acrylic-on-canvas pieces I'd done nearly twenty years earlier in Houston on the wall spaces in our new second floor, am now more than ever charged again with a desire to paint - in acrylic, oil, watercolor and in impasto, bas relief and other techniques. I've always had a very abstract approach to my art, mostly based on defining forms and shapes and contrasting and complimenting colors.
I'll report more as I delve deeper into the Seattle art scene and as I refresh my own skills and begin a new series of paintings based on my experiences in the Northwest and in this fantastic western city.
As if this weren't enough, I recently upgraded my Photoshop from version 7.0 to the new CS - all for a mere $199. When I registered at the online Adobe site (using my two-decade's old Adobe logon) I was greeted with a page-full of previous Adobe products and registrations. I figure that in the twenty-five years or so that I've been buying Adobe products, I've spent well over five-thousand dollars with them. That's a lot of software and a lot of hard-earned bucks. Art materials are not cheap either and I've already taken some of my earlier work and designated it to the re-gesso pile where I'll wash a new coat of white over the existing - not quite up to my standards - work and have about a dozen canvases of relatively large size to begin playing with. There are a number of artists who have painted or continue to paint using coffee as the medium (including Seattle artist - Edward Kranz who prefers to go by the name of Ezju <http://www.nosuchanimal.net/> and fellow Seattle artist Sabah Al-Dhaher <http://www.aldhaher.net/>) so there's no telling what I may come up with - nothings sacred in the art world.
So, Happy Birthday to my youngest son on his coming of legal age for anything which is legal in this country. Happy Birthday to you, Adam.
This past several days have been spent mostly indoors, on the computer and doing routine housework kinds of things. This past Saturday, though, was an outing of the sort that I'll be doing again.
Every "first" Thursday, the art galleries of Pioneer Square have their art walk. Every "second" Saturday, the art galleries and artist's spaces of Ballard have their art walk. These are recurring events which occur on the appropriate day of each month. These have been going on for decades and have become a permanent fixture of the local art scene. In fact, they have become a permanent fixture of the Puget Sound art scene since Anacortes, Bremerton, Port Townsend, Bainbridge Island, Whidbey Island, and Edmonds, Tacoma, Gig Harbor and Kirkland all participate on one of the "first" days of the month. Both Art Guide NW <http://www.artguidenw.com/> and Art Access <http://www.artaccess.com/> list hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists for the Seattle and greater Puget Sound area. And, these are just the visual artists (painters, pen-and-ink drawers, sculptures), not counting the musicians, dance troups, theatre troups, writers and poets, and performance artists.
A rich region for the arts, for sure. Adam and I set out Saturday about an hour after dusk (which occurs these days at 4:00 pm) for a one-bus trip from West Seattle to Ballard to explore the Ballard art scene. The art walks generally begin at 6:00 pm and run through either 8:00 pm (Pioneer Square) or 9:00 pm (most of the others, including Ballard). We arrived in downtown Ballard just before 6:00 and got a coffee and sat inside Tully's coffee shop waiting for the magic hour. It was a cold and blustery evening and the warm coffee was good. Just after six we set out to find the Palm Room, a garden and bonsai art shop which was going to feature a retrospective of an artist we knew personally - Jeff Mihalyo <http://www.mihalyo.com/>.
Ballard is one of Seattle's larger neighborhoods, several score thousand live here and its street network is relatively flat (it lies in rolling hills northwest of downtown) and relatively grid-like excepting for the original Ballard settlement which has diagonal streets originating at Salmon Bay and heading northwest from there. The main streets in the area are the linear and north-south 15th Avenue NW, which is the backbone arterial and the main route to the rest of the city and which travels over the constricting Ballard Bridge right adjacent to the Fisherman's Terminal, a huge slip area for the city's hundreds of fishing vessels. Market Street crosses 15th Avenue and runs east-west and is the main "downtown" street for Ballard. Ballard Avenue NW intersects Market at a 45-degree angle from where it begins about eight blocks southwest along the shore of Lake Union (Salmon Bay). To the west, about nine blocks away from 15th Avenue, 24th Avenue NW is another north-south artery which runs from the lakeshore north into the rolling hills of Ballard. Between 15th and 24th and continuing in both directions east and west of those streets is Leary Way, a meandering main artery which follows closely the shoreline of Lake Union as it changes from a ship canal (west of downtown Ballard) to a bay (Salmon Bay just south of downtown Ballard) to being the actual Lake Union near Fremont (east of Ballard).
All these streets and their intersections give Ballard a variety of nodes for both commerce, clubs and restaurants and art galleries and artist spaces. Ballard was and remains an industrial area as well, the streets close to Salmon Bay and the Ship Canal are lined with outfitting shops and dry docks for all the vessels which dock at Fisherman's Terminal. Some of these boats are the hundred-ton displacement floating ship factories which ply the Arctic waters and return with already processed fish in their ice-filled holds. These ships all need service and there are marine diesel shops, electronic navigation shops, and the like. In previous decades there were, of course, more of these kinds of facilities. Presently, there are - littered throughout the industrial area at both ends of Ballard - a large collection of former factories or warehouses which have been converted into art space and studios for visual artists and sound studios for musicians. What this means is that the art scene in Ballard is spread along NW Market Street, Ballard Avenue NW, 24th Avenue NW and then interspersed throughout the industrial area along Shilshoal Avenue, Leary Way and other local streets.
It's huge. There are as many galleries and art spaces in Ballard as there are in Pioneer Square. There are some definite distinctions between the two venues. There are also a plethora of galleries in Belltown, Capitol Hill, and spread along the arteries in Fremont. The Pioneer Square art walk also includes a significant number of galleries in downtown Seattle. If one counted the galleries open during the various art walks, then Pioneer Square-Downtown would come in at the top for sheer number of galleries. Also, when doing the Pioneer Square art walk, there is a fundamental advantage in that the galleries are located adjacent to each other on the four sides of a single block with clumps of additional galleries on the four streets which define that block. Downtown they're spaced out along First, Second, Third and Fourth Avenues. In Ballard, there is a concentration of galleries along the Market Street-Ballard Avenue spines and then again along 24th Avenue and a collection of gallery spaces near Leary Way.
That's one distinction, the concentration of galleries, favoring, first Pioneer Square and then Ballard. Another, perhaps more obvious, distinction is that the galleries in the Pioneer Square-Downtown-Belltown quadrants are what I'd call "premier" galleries. These are spaces where the interior design, lighting, ambience factors and overall "class" are very upscale. Most of the galleries in Pioneer Square and its downtown neighbors are hosting unique artists of some local or international renown and the host-hostess of the gallery (or proprietor) is usually dressed in very stylish digs, often a work of art themselves. The gallery spaces in Ballard are much more home-spun. The proprietors are just as likely to be wearing something stylish as wearing something typically Northwest (jeans, pullover, mono-color). There is a laid-back feel to the Ballard galleries which is not evident in Pioneer Square or elsewhere in downtown. I've been to a few galleries in the U-District, on Capitol Hill and in Fremont and West Seattle and, except for the odd exception of West Seattle, the other gallery venues are much more like Ballard - laid back, relaxed, comfortable. Weirdly enough, the gallery spaces in West Seattle, which are as spread out as any area of the city, are more "upscale" in interior finish and in the dress of the proprietor. Can't explain this except that some West Seattle districts, like Alki, Admiral, and Alaska Junction, were previously towns or "centers" in their own right and there's a fair amount of local money still in West Seattle from the pioneer days over a hundred years ago. That, and perhaps the cachet of being the original settler's spot for the city somehow allows this neighborhood to have a degree of pretense closer to Pioneer Square than its sister-neighborhoods like Ballard or Capitol Hill.
Oddly enough, Queen Anne (both upper and lower) and some of the other high-end neighborhoods like Madison Park and Magnolia don't have much in the way of art galleries - and given the real estate prices - don't have much in the way of artist space either.
There are a couple of large structures, former warehouses, in Ballard which serve as collectives for working artists as well as double as their gallery space. We went to one of these, Building C, at 14th Avenue NW and Leary Way, and spent over 90 minutes on the second floor visual art gallery area. The first floor is devoted to furniture art and contains some working furniture studios. The second floor is relatively "raw," with oak-plank flooring, eight-foot sheetrock walls and simple doors set in simple doorways with no ceiling save the 16-foot warehouse ceiling from which the electrical and HVAC utilities are hung and distributed throughout the somewhat-"H"-shaped structure. Some of the spaces were huge, on the order of forty-by-forty feet square, others were more modest twenty-by-twenty and even others were cubbyholes of ten-feet square. Several of the medium-sized spaces were shared space between two artists with working space in the middle and display space along the walls. The whole atmosphere was reminiscent of a Middle East bizarre in that there were no closed doors (even though there were doors) and there was a different background music and "buzz" coming out of each of the spaces - all mixing in the open space where there would be a ceiling but wasn't one. This lent both a carnival atmosphere and a degree of excitement because there would be shrieks or loud exclamations of wonder or joy coming from someplace just around the corner, all mixed and mingled with a hundred other voices and noises.
Our first stop was a 57-year-old mother of two, Andreé Carter <http://www.andreecarter.com>, who had previously taught art in New Orleans. She has a BA in art from Tulane, an MFA from University of New Orleans, and spent a summer studying in Florence, Italy as part of Tulane's art program. She moved here to Seattle about a dozen years ago, and teaches at both the Art Institute here and at a community school in New Orleans. Obviously, she travels between Seattle and New Orleans a lot. She has two grown sons, about Adam and Leif's age, one on his own and the other still in school, like Adam. Her husband, a doctor, died very early while she was raising her toddler sons so she's been a working artist for a long time. She's represented by two galleries in Pioneer Square (AT31 <http://www.atelier31.com/> and Patricia Cameron Fine Art <http://artresources.com/guide/featured.artistsshown.ihtml?c=47> and by Sylvia Schmidt Gallery in New Orleans <http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/arts/artgalleries.html>. Her work is impressionist in style and quite colorful, using an impasto technique and very often melding pieces of cut paper with the impasto. On many of her works she overcoats the final product with marine epoxy, giving it a depth and sheen which is phenomenal. I've seen quite a few artists here using marine epoxy, it's probably a natural melding of the Seattle art scene and the Seattle fishing scene.
We next stopped in the studio of a thirty-something artist whose name I did not get, alas, but whose work was quite impressive. He paints using very muted colors of the same palette (he had sepias for one series and blues for another). His work is a melding of photo-realism and impressionism with an emphasis on the light of the subject. His sepia series are scenes from in and around Seattle and are all about two-feet by three-feet. His work gives the impression of movement, believable movement. Because it's a meld of impressionism and photo-realism, it's captivating how he uses the one technique in certain areas of a painting to give a "real" feel to the image and the other technique in other areas of the painting to give it movement. His blue series are scenes from his memory as a Peace Corps worker in The Gambia several years earlier. I will return and get this guy's name and more about his art because it was outstanding and of a sort I've not seen much of in the way of technique. There are lots of painters who use Seattle as a subject but this gent's work lent a new feel and air to the ordinary scenes of the city in the same manner that Cezanne's work lent a new look at ordinary city life of his time. And, again I must stress the "lightness" of this guy's work. Dark street scenes with a luminance quality from where the sunlight would be casting shadows at street level. Unusual, interesting, and attractive in a hypnotic manner.
Next we ventured into the studios of Virginia Howlett <http://www.blueskyartist.com/>, a name I probably should have known. We entered her studio and spent about fifteen minutes looking at her watercolor work - all skies. Not skies with landscapes beneath them, or seascapes, just skies. Sections of skies. She paints the skies of the Northwest and Southwest and her skies are not just real, they have some form of intrinsic motion. After looking at her work, we spoke at length with her about her art, her background and vision. I asked her what moved her to paint these skies and she said it was trying to capture the element of change, the motion of the wind with the clouds and the changing light of the sun and sky behind the clouds. Her paintings, watercolor on paper and panels and oils on panels, capture this motion, this dynamic of the sky. It's something which seems hard to actually do as most great skyscapes seem to be snapshots in time and not a series of moving clouds. She said that she tried hard to make her art different from what she called time snapshots. Previously she was an art teacher, she holds an MFA from the University of Chicago, at Hampton University in Virginia and at New Mexico Highlands University, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a gorgeous town in northeast New Mexico high in the Rocky Mountain foothills. She moved first to New Mexico and later Seattle because of personal reasons associated with her husband and two children but likes Seattle just fine. She's Canadian and her extended family is nearby in British Columbia and one of her studios is on Galiano Island north of Vancouver Island in the BC Gulf Islands. Now here's the hidden secret of Virginia Howlett - she was one of the first individuals associated with a human interface and design guidelines for Microsoft Windows. She worked for Microsoft in the early 1990s and was tagged to be the lead behind the Windows 95 interface and is personally responsible for the Verdana typeface <http://dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=6669>. She was working on the interfaces for Cairo and Chicago, Microsoft codenames for upcoming operating systems in the early '90s. Cairo was to be a desktop interface for Windows NT and Chicago became Windows 95. Small world. This was after her move from New Mexico and before branching out on her own as an artist. She is also represented in the Pioneer Square galleries by Patricia Cameron Fine Art <http://artresources.com/guide/featured.artistsshown.ihtml?c=47>.
We chatted some more about skies and the differences between the Northwest, Southwest and other locales. She's also painted some Hawaiian skies.
We then went to the shared gallery space and studios of Jim Stoccardo <http://www.jimstoccardo.com/index.php>. His work is interesting in that it is 3D bas relief and a cross between impressionism and abstract - almost retro-cartoon-like but with miniscule detail in areas which are unexpected. We didn't spend as much time with Jim as we should have because his studio-mate was having what seemed like a moment of personal angst and carrying on with a few visitors a mere ten feet from us. Stoccardo moved here in the early '90s from the East where he'd been raised, gone to school and apprenticed, in Manhattan for a restoration studio and an individual artist. Later, he moved to Savannah, Georgia, to develop his portfolio and then moved to Seattle. He does performance art as well and has had several performances as well as visual art shows in the Los Angeles area and here in Seattle. He was born in Darby, Pennsylvania (a Philadelphia suburb of note) and has had shows in Philadelphia also.
We also stopped in the singular studio of an artist - again about my age but whose name I also didn't get - who uses wood in his paintings and has a new series which we would like to return and see how it developes. This gent's work includes birds, wings, and other elements of flight as well as some scenes involving landscapes which also seem to be in motion. The use of wood is inventive and is applied on the artwork in a manner which suggests even more motion than might be visually apparent from a distance. Next trip we'll get this artist's name and more about him.
When we had shown up at the Palm Room for Jeff Mihalyo's retrospective, we'd spent a lot of time with Jeff (I'd met him through mutual friends at a neighborhood party months earlier) and since this was my first Ballard Art Walk I asked Jeff to recommend some galleries. He recommended Building C on the east side of Ballard and several gallery spaces on the west side by 24th Avenue. I didn't spend nearly as much time as I could have at Building C and will return and still have all the galleries which Jeff recommended to explore on the west side of Ballard.
It would be an understatement to say that the liveliness of the Seattle art scene has energized me. I recently ordered some tumbled glass pieces in a variety of colors with the intention of combining glass and acrylic paint on canvas - based on some of the art which I saw both earlier at Pioneer Square and this past Saturday at Ballard. This is an exciting place for the arts, be they visual, musical, performance, dance, or any of the written arts. I'm having a great time settling into the art scene here and, having recently hung a series of acrylic-on-canvas pieces I'd done nearly twenty years earlier in Houston on the wall spaces in our new second floor, am now more than ever charged again with a desire to paint - in acrylic, oil, watercolor and in impasto, bas relief and other techniques. I've always had a very abstract approach to my art, mostly based on defining forms and shapes and contrasting and complimenting colors.
I'll report more as I delve deeper into the Seattle art scene and as I refresh my own skills and begin a new series of paintings based on my experiences in the Northwest and in this fantastic western city.
As if this weren't enough, I recently upgraded my Photoshop from version 7.0 to the new CS - all for a mere $199. When I registered at the online Adobe site (using my two-decade's old Adobe logon) I was greeted with a page-full of previous Adobe products and registrations. I figure that in the twenty-five years or so that I've been buying Adobe products, I've spent well over five-thousand dollars with them. That's a lot of software and a lot of hard-earned bucks. Art materials are not cheap either and I've already taken some of my earlier work and designated it to the re-gesso pile where I'll wash a new coat of white over the existing - not quite up to my standards - work and have about a dozen canvases of relatively large size to begin playing with. There are a number of artists who have painted or continue to paint using coffee as the medium (including Seattle artist - Edward Kranz who prefers to go by the name of Ezju <http://www.nosuchanimal.net/> and fellow Seattle artist Sabah Al-Dhaher <http://www.aldhaher.net/>) so there's no telling what I may come up with - nothings sacred in the art world.
Posted: Tue - December 14, 2004 at 09:51 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM