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Saturday July 6th, 4 - 6 pm

 

Please join us for a very special artists reception for ELIZABETH SANDVIG and JUDY TALLEY  in our July exhibition celebrating farm life and the Skagit Valley.

the renowned MOTHER PLUCKERS will be providing music.

 

ARTISTS TALK : JULY 20TH, SATURDAY, 4 PM

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Elizabeth Sandvig, one of the Pacific Northwest's most respected artists, has on and off for decades painted a version of the Peaceable Kingdom. Her paintings have the vitality of stroke and fearless color of a Franz Marc or Wassily Kandinsky. Unbound by any one medium or form she had traveled the 60s and 70s with an interest in industrial materials and sculptural thinking. Her cut outs and monotypes merge with her fantastical paintings in riotous colors and the beginnings of her animal forms in landscape in the 80s and 90s. Several years ago Sandvig began working in ceramics in a group setting - less of a class and more of a band of artist who gather to play with clay together. Out of that class began her exploration of animals in 3D form. They loosed themselves from that flat canvas and began to populate her home. It was in this context that I enjoyed a visit to her home in Seattle and we selected a group from the farm animals to exhibit. As Regina Hackett said in her wonderful 2007  book  I Surprise Myself: The Art of Elizabeth Sandvig she "returns to the Peaceable Kingdom theme the way horses head for the barn."

 

Judy Talley came to the printmaking world through her design background. She has exhibited widely throughout the Northwest since 2002. I was excited to discover the beauty in these  wood block prints so evocative of our setting in the Skagit when visiting Talley's home. Here is what Talley had to say about this body of work:

"The strong earthbound structures appealed to me, no less than the surrounding plowedearth that celebrated their honest purpose. The utilitarian forms, open and blanked off windows and doors spoke to me of their many functions here abandoned, there relocated, but in all appealing to my sense of honest purpose and enduring design.
The Skagit Valley affords further inquiry into these grand structures…some well preserved with a future still, others not so and soon to become part of the earth they served. The graphic simplicity of a barn’s exterior, reduced to its most fundamental form defines my interpretation of them.  My image starts with a wood block, then a base color, after which other colors or stencils are added.  Other details are painted with gouache or acrylic paint.  A simple process appropriate to the subject."

Both artists are members of the Mother Pluckers - a 12 piece ukulele band


images  Judy Talley, "Slowing Down", woodblock with gouache, 10 x 10 " , 2018   Elizabeth Sandvig,"Sun Bathing Cat", clay and acrylic paint, 14 x 7 x 6 in, 2016