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Does the glory of the tulip fields make you want to dance? For those who feel like jumping for joy at the sight of the brilliant colors, this year’s Tulip Festival poster immortalizes that feeling. Camano Island artist Jack Gunter painted the 2022 Tulip Festival Poster to represent the enthusiasm and sheer pleasure of the Tulip Festival resuming after two years of COVID-19 pandemic slowdowns. There is a formula for a successful tulip poster that sell copies by the hundreds or thousands. The m...
Three months after stepping into leadership of the Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA), Executive Director Stefano Catalani has his eye on how the museum can best reflect the complexity of artists’ voices, cultures and artistic mediums in the Northwest. As someone who has transited continents and careers, he is focused on the expansiveness of the art world today. That focus centers on the Northwest in the present, and historically. With that said, he’s quick to point out that the first phase for a di...
If Skagit Valley’s community of artists could be considered a family, and if the family had a mother figure, she would be Lavone Newell-Reim. From 1987 to 2003 she annually hosted and supported this large, familial group at an event that brought the arts to the public in a reunion, celebration and sale. Newell-Reim, an abstract painter, together with fellow artist John Simon, hosted the annual Barn Show. In fact much of what kept the art scene moving forward over the past four-plus decades h...
Inside a nondescript tractor storage building in La Conner farmland, glass artist Steve Klein has been testing the nature of glass. Klein has been renowned for his work with colored, kiln-formed glass for several decades and may be better known in the international glass world than he is right here at home. The creative work is taking place in his studio, facing out over the fields where he marvels over the palette of changing skies but also practices his craft of glass firing in various kilns....
This year the art is back on the walls. The Museum of Northwest Art is holding its 29th auction next week, celebrating regional art, the museum’s 40th birthday and the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic. The physical experience will be integrated with the virtual one. Art enthusiasts can go to MoNA and browse through the art until the “First Forty | Next Forty Art Auction” opens for bidding June 10. Since the museum’s first auction in 1992, it has been a premier regional art event, organiz...
Some Northwest artists have recently learned fairly new techniques to express the changing forms in nature. That means sculptors were painting, painters were sculpting and other new techniques were at work to express Earth’s ancient patterns. The results are on display at the latest art show at Edison’s i.e. Gallery through April 25. Allen Moe, Michael Clough and James Brems have all taken on a new – or relatively new – medium for their latest work. Sculptor Moe is displaying a ser...
There are signs of hope in the Skagit Valley – even as COVID-19 drags into another year -- in the daffodil fields, in the partial reopening of restaurants and businesses, and at the Museum of Northwest Art. There, a Max Benjamin exhibit (“A Road Well Travelled”) transports visitors from the grays of winter with bold, colorful work spanning five decades. The iconic painter from Guemes Island rarely exhibits his work. In fact he stopped exhibiting in 2002 except for a show at La Con...
As an alternative to the canceled Seattle Art Fair this year, the Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair, 2020 (SDAF) brings art to the public in a blend of online and physical art displays. Margy Lavelle and Ries Niemi, from the Skagit Valley, are two of the 47 artists participating as Northwest artists and galleries team up. Lavelle will provide her work online and display it in the windows of her Edison gallery, i.e., while Niemi’s work will be on display at his outdoor site on a date not yet determined. The show serves as an alternative to Paul A...
La Conner artist Barbara Silverman Summers is extending the Northwest’s mystical art tradition this month with a solo show aptly named “Remixing Mysticism.” The exhibit opening takes place at Cassera Gallery in Stanwood on March 5 from 6-9 p.m., and remains on display through March 27. The show represents four years of exploration of movement and texture, Silverman Summers says. She has been employing a technique with both brush and palette knife, painting layers of color and then cutting excav...
Every community relies on organizers, supporters and patrons, and Betty Black was just that for the Skagit Valley during the more than five decades she lived here. She and her husband Ian Black were fixtures locally, supporting organizations, causes and artists. As a result, the Blacks had an art collection in their Mount Vernon home that represented the work of local artists as well as those around the world. The Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA) is exhibiting that collection in its first floor gallery through March 15. Betty was more than a coll...
There was a lot of speculation at the Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA) Saturday night over how artist William Cumming’s mural ended up folded on a shelf in a Breckenridge family barn. Farmers, donors and art-enthusiasts exchanged stories at a celebration of the $500,000 valued mural that is now on exhibit in the museum. Those who knew Cumming – a renowned Seattle painter – could agree that the artist himself would be pleased. In fact, his old friend and former MoNA board member B...
As you are reading this article, someone in the valley is painting. Skagit Valley has been fostering the arts for decades and this month FORUM Arts is acknowledging that work, both current and historic. The ‘Locally Grown’ show features a half dozen of those who are painting or have painted in the Valley. The exhibit includes three who have died – Guy Anderson, Jeffrey Thostenson and Clyde Sanborn – while three artists are still painting: Christian Carlson, Margy Lavelle and Dedy Ward. “In putting together the exhibition ‘Loca...
Almost one year after collecting weapons from the public – aiming to transform guns into art, a group of local artist has crafted an emotionally powerful exhibit dedicated to gun violence. Their memorial stones, piled into a cairn, is now on its first public display at the Anacortes Arts Festival. The Memorial Cairn installation is part of the Anacortes Regeneration Project and includes the work of several dozen Skagit Valley artists. La Conner’s Tracy Powell is among those artists, as wel...
Kitty Pippen once said she was first drawn to textile arts as a girl in China, watching the local women mend and design their clothes. She lived a life as a creative artists, but didn’t begin her quilting career in Japanese fabrics until the age of 70. In her last 25 years she gained legendary status as a textile artist, taught, and was author of several books. She spent her final years living at the La Conner Retirement Inn. This month Pippen’s work is being exhibited in the “Remembering Kitty” show at the La Conner’s Pacific Northwest...
Art is an ageless pursuit. La Conner artist Dee Doyle is not only painting, in what she calls her encore career, she’s teaching Skagit Valley locals from ages 50 to 100 to do the same. The Maryland transplant describes her painting – still lifes, abstracts and landscapes – as her fourth career, following many years dedicated to downtown revitalization, economic develop-ment and then real estate sales. She came to the Pacific Northwest in 2005. As a high school student she had hoped t...
Entering a Shinto shrine is a practice of honoring what’s sacred in all things –the spirit that’s alive in trees, rocks and water. La Connerites can experience that practice themselves through art in April. FORUM Arts will be bringing a Shintoist perspective to its First Street space, exhibiting the works of Skagit Valley artist Todd Horton. “In the Middle of Now” runs April 5 to May 5, with an opening reception 5-7:30 p.m. April 13. Horton’s exhibit was conceived in a shrine on Mount Pilc...
Edison artist Margy Lavelle paints with conviction. In fact she pours so much energy into the process of moving paint across canvas she’s been known to knock her piece down or punch a hole in it. She then makes that action another part of the piece. That recently happened as part of her series The Flight of Gabriel, and she coarsely patched that hole, and painted over it. The result is a piece that is at once rough, energetic and poignant – and that has its own story to tell. Lavelle is n...
Gary Giovane is both an artist and scientist at his core. As a student of science he came to the Skagit Valley as part of an archeological dig in the 1970s. He returned after decades of teaching science and math, to dedicate himself to art. This past year he has exhibited his work at Hadrian Stone Design & Gallery, Matzke Gallery and the Schack Art Center’s Holiday Art Show. Giovane was a Penn State University student participating in Washington State University’s archeological dig along the...
Research merged with imagination as scientists and artists gathered for a final time to consider the effects of their expressions about climate change as shown in their MoNA exhibits displayed during the past quarter. A panel of artists and scientists reflected on their collaborative work Saturday, during the last of three discussions about the Surge 2018 exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art that was open since October. The goal of this Surge program, hosted by MoNA and the Skagit Climate...
When locals visit the Museum of Northwest Art gift shop, they’re likely to notice some changes in store merchandise, and maybe find some old friends as well. The shop reopened in November with a new look, local artwork and a personal approach, along with some familiar faces. The reimaging of the museum’s gift shop project was a cooperative effort between the museum’s board of trustees and staff, donors and executive director Joanna Sikes. Catherine Wyman, a member of MoNA’s board, and treasur...
When Meg Holgate and Bruce Bradburn bought the red brick building that watches over First Street and Douglas, they envisioned a studio for Meg where she could invite other artists to share their work, discuss and collaborate. As part of that process, they opened Forum Arts in its street-level floor. The idea was more serendipity than strategy, Holgate recalls now. In fact, the couple had already made their move when they learned that famed, mystic painter Guy Anderson had lived and painted...
