Art Access Articles

Keith & Mike

Debbi Lester — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:11:22 GMT

"The way I see it," Keith says, "if you have a wedding to plan, you shouldn't have to do any other work for months!"

I've seen Keith in action. He's a professional choreographer. I'm pretty sure he'll compose his wedding much like he would a dance. He's not going to measure the stage, he's not going spend big on costuming, he's not going to mark the lines of sight with stage tape. He's going to choose the most amazing music and believe!

"And you know how Mike is." (Mike is Keith's partner of twenty years.) I nod.

Mike is a lot like my husband. Can't remember a thing. My three ways of asking him to do something are voice, triple emails, followed by threats.

"I can't leave any of the details up to Mike other than he better find a pair of acceptable earrings. Preferably, two 14 karet balls." Keith winks.

Again I nod, a little more eagerly this time because I, too, married a fourth-generation WASP. Always the writer, I think of our coupling like so: I am the exclamation point, Larry is the comma. Unless a tragedy occurs, then, for whatever reason, we switch. But normally, you should not expect too much emotion from a comma. (Oh, the words I've used over the years to distinguish between us. Does the whole world, gay or straight, fall in love with their opposite?)

Keith and Mike are off to their home state of New York to wed.

Keith and Mike, two men that are part of something much larger than themselves, making history through acceptance, moving on, refusing to conceal their love. Maybe it's because I've watched them work it out for so many years that their marriage feels more like the great BIG check mark for our country that it is.

"Why does it even feel so important to say the two silly words: I do?" Keith asks. "Because if you've been together long as we have, everyone knows it’s more like I do NOT. Especially when it comes to yard work." We clink glasses.

When Keith is finished telling me all about the wedding, I hold his two hands safely in my own and kiss him on the cheek. He kisses me back and gives me another wink. "Bella." Every time he calls me this, I fill with the most satisfying sense of well-being and I'm grateful this kind of intimacy is easy between us, part of our whole splendid package.

After two decades together, Keith and Mike still hold hands.

Even at the grocery.

Keith and Mike. They don't have a lot of money. Love is the thing they have, and they have plenty.

Everyone else, in fact, should be so lucky.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. Check out Sanelli's website http://www.marylousanelli.com for upcoming spring appearances by the author.

National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts 46th Annual Conference

Debbi Lester — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:36:17 GMT

Jini Dellaccio: Rock & Roll in the Northwest

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:52:24 GMT

The Way Things Are

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:23:47 GMT

“A lot of the work in this show is very loosely a reaction to the whole BP oil spill. It brought up feelings of helplessness and ‘what’s going to happen’? So many ambivalent feelings undefined not necessarily stuff I haven’t thought about before, but it just kind of brought those feelings and concerns to the surface,” says John Feodorov.

We laugh at his unintentional pun.

A painting 72 by 72 inch entitled “Emergence #3” depicts three heads rising from pipes and fish that in turn emerge from a black slick of oil. The heads have their mouths open much like that guy in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” These folks could well be BP executives making up excuses as to why their Deepwater Horizon off shore drilling rig failed.

When I ask about his wide use of mediums he replies, “It just depends on the best media for the idea. Sometimes I do video. I also do music so it really kind of depends on the best format. Right now what I’m thinking and doing seems to come out better as paintings.”

In a large acrylic and photo collage on unstretched canvas entitled “The Way Things Are,” getting ideas across appears more important than getting all fussy with paint. This honest quality adds urgency, as if a consciousness is trying to warn us about ourselves pronto. The painting could be saying with images that every living thing across this land is only a target for ego-driven, greedy brains undefined a truth many of us keep our selves too ‘busy’ to do much about.

Part Native American, Feodorov grew up in a California suburb and spent summers at his grandparent’s homestead in the Navajo Nation of New Mexico. What a mind-bender to have traveled between two such disparate worlds that our country, even after a few hundred years, has yet to mingle.

Feodorov was featured in the famous “Art21: Art for the Twenty-First Century” series on PBS in the Spirituality episode. Although his art in the documentary comments directly on Native traditions, the artist resists being pigeonholed.

“I don’t really think of it as Native American work. . .it’s certainly part of me and part of who I am and my experience and my world view. I am coming to that world view not so much as an adherent of those traditional values because the cat’s kind of out of the bag in terms of assimilation and all that. I was raised in the suburbs of California not on the reservation so my sense of the world is pretty much shaped by Gilligan’s Island.”

We compare our favorite Gilligan’s Island episodes. Mine is the one where radiated vegetable seeds wash up in the lagoon and are planted and eaten to extreme effect, whereas Feodorov’s favorite is when Gilligan as Hamlet sings “To be or not to be” to Carmen’s Habenera.

Feodorov would dig a television show that deals with Shakespeare, an artist who created his own mythology.

“A lot of my work for so many years,” says Feodorov, “has been about what sort of mythology the contemporary world requires if there is going to be any mythology at all? I mean do we just count on the same old nostalgic kind of classical examples? And in many ways I am not proposing a mythology so much as showing how trying to do that just kind of fails. I don’t know the answer to my own question and so everything I do is sort of pre-determined to fail (laughs).”

Speaking of the new paintings and lithographs in the exhibit, curator Jean Benhke says, “I respond to [John’s] inventive process, using what is at hand, both in terms of material and iconography, finding origins in his own personal history. John’s work makes no apologies and in a refreshing way gets in the face of the viewer and asks real questions about ‘the way things are’.”

With so many people out of work, doesn’t right now seem like the ideal time for a multi-medium revolution?

Saylor Jones

Saylor Jones is an illustrator and writer living in the Northwest.

“The Way Things Are” is on view October 7 through November 19 at Anchor Art Space which is located at 216 Commerical Avenue in Anacortes, Washington. A Reception for the Artist is being held on Friday, October 7, from 6 to 9 P.M. Feodorov is presenting an an Artist’s Talk on Saturday, November 5, call for details. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. and by appointment. For more information please call (206) 919-3893, email info@anchorartspace.org, or visit the website www.anchorartspace.org.

View Feodorov’s artwork at his website:

www.johnfeodorov.com

Listen to his music:

www.myspace.com/johnfeodorov#!/johnfeodorov

Watch the Art21 episode he is in:

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/feodorov/clip1.html

Blackberry Picking

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:23:23 GMT

Late August came with wet skin, rain, and heavy sun.

This being the last times of many firsts for us,

We plucked the glossy berry from the stem.

You told me not to eat the first one, savor it for later’s pie.

We envied the berries color, like the thickness of wine,

Leaving stains on our own skin, tongues: the lust of picking.

Our mother’s good bowls ran with juice and using our skirts as baskets,

We searched and gathered even when the tins were full.

While picking we talked about boys.

The rain ran down our skin, August showers forgave us.

The thorns of lovers, past, present, or distance, peppered

Our skin as we plucked the darkest of the fruit.

The nectar was sticky sweet, our conversation never turned sour.

Unturned berries in the bowls; red, green, hard ones, left behind.

The lust in these berries is jealous of you. The fullness of your hips.

Purple blooms across our hands and lips as we gather.

Beautiful, rich fruit, with August’s sun divided between you too.

Summer’s blood. Soaked into our flesh.

Roseanne McAleese

Roseanne McAleese is a celebrated poet, spoken-word artist, actress and filmmaker whose first and upcoming book is called, Strong. Female. Character.

The Strange Alliance between Art and Science

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:50:29 GMT

Some time around the turn of the 20th century, Art and Physics began having a race to see which one was more bizarre. Up until then, those two never ran in the same neighborhood, much less on the same track. Weirder still is the fact that for the past few decades, they have been running neck and neck. Lucy Pullen, happily, is playing for both teams.

As any Weird Science and Art Project should do, Pullen’s show at the Henry Art Gallery takes place in two places at once, like a pair of parallel universes singing to each other across separate floors of the museum. The first one, "Spark Chamber," is just inside the front entrance in the small space on the right of the front desk. The other, "Cloud Chamber and Related Works," lives two floors below.

Cosmic rays are not simply Pullen's primary subject matter, they’re her collaborators as well. Just like ideas, cosmic rays are invisible. And they also have a tendency to go off in their own random directions, wherever they please, refusing to acknowledge what we consider impassable boundaries. But just as ideas reveal themselves in the works of art they inspire, the cosmic rays that visit Pullen’s cloud chamber reveal themselves in spectacular little contrails that appear out of nowhere and spiral off out of control, like tiny spaceships, unpiloted and perhaps disabled after an epic star battle. Or maybe they're just joyriding.

I vividly remember the first time I saw a cloud chamber, in a scratchy black and white movie in my fifth-grade science class. After first learning that the subatomic world was infinitely tiny and invisible I was delighted to discover that their movements could be detected in the contrails they made in the enclosed and frozen mists of a cloud chamber. That delight and euphoria returned in a great rush as I gazed down into her beautiful but slightly forbidding aluminum, steel, and glass polyhedron chamber, past the six-sided rings of eerily blue UFO-style lights into the bottomless and infinite darkness where the cosmic rays came to play. Wow. Like all consciousness-altering experiences, this one is really hard to quit. I’m not sure how long I stayed there lost in space, but in relative terms, it was a kind of eon.

When I finally did tear myself away, I spent some time in the so-called real world, looking at "Architecture of the Atmosphere," a series of prints done with non-reprographic blue pigment, that encircles the "Cloud Chamber." These many versions of the view outside Pullen's apartment are no less mysterious and strange than "Cloud Chamber," especially in the way they break down trees, sea, sky, clouds, rain, and the distant landscape into their component parts, revealing what was once invisible. I even spotted the Loch Ness monster, an invisible object that's exists somewhat more on the macro side of things. Go look yourself if you don’t believe me, but go look at it all in any case. Pullen's work is revealing and breathtaking on every level.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based writer and bibliophile who follows art and routinely defies gravity.

"The Cloud Chamber and Related Works" by Lucy Pullen is on view through June 26 at the Henry Art Gallery, located at 15th Avenue NE & NE 41st Street in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit the website www.henryart.org or call (206) 543-2280.

619 Building

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:44:12 GMT

We're All in There Somewhere

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:02:47 GMT

Thanks to Nick Cave, from now until June 5th, you can stroll into the Seattle Art Museum and ask the people at the front desk "How do I get to the Center of the Earth," and they will smile and tell direct you to the fourth floor. Who knew it was so easy? Really, you should try it.

Nick Cave is an artist, a dancer, a black American, a recycler of abandoned, overlooked and temporarily invisible objects, and an incredibly gifted and exacting craftsman. Working with small army of dedicated cohorts, he has revealed, by creating it, the world that exists at the center of not just the earth but everything that matters, or should matter, to human beings. In spite of the fact that this is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, he seems to have pulled it off with this impressive body of work. And then put it on again.

Listening to people's reactions to this exhibit is almost as much fun as looking at it all. And there's a lot to look at. In the space of just ten minutes spent hanging around the entrance to the exhibit, I heard two different people say "Holy cow!" Since one of the things that Cave wants us to think about is the connection between the human and animal worlds, that’s a pretty wonderful comment. But he also wants us to think about the power and freedom that disguise and anonymity offers to people who were born on the wrong side of the color, gender, and identity divides.

A growing awareness of the ravages of identity politics does inevitably start to sneak up on you the longer you look around. But after a while, the sheer joy you feel with prolonged exposure to the extraordinary depth and breadth of Cave’s inventiveness creates a tidal wave of euphoria that washes over you and tends to overwhelm the more sinister content. And then one more walk around the "Sound Suits" made of twigs or some time spent with the photographs of Cave wearing the pieces that don’t hide his identity or another look at the contrast between the suits made of homemade bits of kitsch where the buttons are attached by those creepy plastic doohickeys that keep the price tags on the clothes at discount stores and the couture-style costumes over in their own private and privileged gallery with their carefully hand-sewn embellishments will bring your feet right back to the ground. And speaking of feet, check out all those fabulous socks. I have a thing about socks and that part of the show took me completely by surprise

There’s so much to see that everyone will have a different list of favorites. The big bear upholstered with cast-off sweaters includes a working zipper down the left leg that I really could have used when I had surgery for a broken leg two years ago. There’s a beaded and spangled space-princess suit complete with a fabulous headpiece/shield/carapace that Cave wears in one of the little gallery of photographs. I named one of the pieces that was made of crocheted headgear "The Bad Hat" because it reminded me of the Madeleine book of the same name. But hey, go find your own.

The only thing I found disappointing was that I couldn’t actually get into and walk around in one of the "Sound Suits" made of twigs. Cave's description of how surprised he was when he first tried it on and discovered the noises it made was so compelling that I really, really wanted to try it myself. Yes, I understand that allowing anyone - and there would be plenty of us - to climb inside one is impractical but I’m still feeling deprived.

Still, there is much satisfaction and some kinetic consolation in watching the film loops that are playing on the walls at the very back of the exhibit. One of them is a never-ending parade of Cave-clad dancers striding, floating, flailing, leaping, billowing, and shape-shifting through a white seamless world that seems to have no up, down, or gravity. And the best one shows Cave engaged in a frenzied wrestling match with a suit that looks like a big piece of black-and-white knitted coral. The sped-up action combined with Cave's brilliant choreography is comical and frightening at the same time.

If you know any fellow humans, young or old, hip or square, sentient or clueless, who have always thought (sometimes with good reason) that there is nothing in an art museum that might engage, delight, or amaze them, you should invite them to "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." It's a show for doubters, refuseniks, and outsiders who will recognize themselves looking back out from the center of at least one and probably several of these little worlds that Nick Cave has imagined and built from scratch and inspiration.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based writer and bibliophile who follows art, collects buttons, and has a sock fetish.

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" by Nick Cave is on view through June 5 at the Seattle Art Musuem, located at 1300 First Avenue in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit the website www.seattleartmuseum.org or call (206) 654-3100.

Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle

Debbi Lester — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:20:40 GMT

If you’d like to treat your hearts and minds to a new body of work by an internationally renowned artist in an almost ideal setting, don’t miss this new show of Ginny Ruffner’s latest work at the Bellevue Art Museum. Artistic Director Stefano Catalani and his staff have done a masterful job of re-staging and designing this exhibit that was originally developed by the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner where it was first shown in 2008.

Like all great art, this show is difficult to describe but it’s an exuberant and wildly imaginative exploration of what would happen if entities that possess neither genes nor the ability to reproduce (at least as far as we know) were able to cross-pollinate, exchange DNA and merge into each other. Among other things, you see “The Gene for the Grace of Falling Leaves,” “Floral Splashing,” “The Force That Shapes Seashells,” and what happens “When Lightning Blooms.” You’ve been warned; be sure to arrive with your mind wide open.

In case the title of this show doesn’t make it completely clear, you should know that although Ginny Ruffner is an artist, deep down inside, she’s really a geek. It all started in high school when she was president of the Science Club and it has been seeping into her art ever since. Her current circle of friends and regular correspondents includes an impressive assortment of distinguished scientists and mathematicians. She is fascinated by all the cool sciences and she finds them no less mystical, mutable, and mysterious than the so-called arts. In other words, Ginny has never believed in sorting things into separate piles of what does or does not constitute the realm of artistic endeavor; no matter what kind of information her muse sends, she uses it.

Although Ruffner’s titles and concepts are fantastical and outrageous, her work is more intellectual than emotional. Inspired by rigorous and challenging ideas -- evolution, the expression of DNA, the origin and nature of consciousness -- she applies her own personal torque and tension to them. The result is a kind of corkscrew logic that merges the solid and the uncanny and makes you suspect that these strange genetic connections have always existed but we never realized that they were there until she showed them to us. When asked where these ideas come from, she shrugs and demurs: “Who knows? I’m just an output device for these messages from the cosmos.”

Captured in mid-contortion, Ruffner’s creations look like they’re trying to do the Fibonacci, to swing and sway or twist and turn into something entirely new and improbable. Although they are beautiful, warm, and ethereal, they also harbor a shimmering undercurrent of darkness, mystery and secret intentions They sometimes seem as curious about you as you are about them, ready to stretch out a tentative tendril (or is that a tentacle) and pull you closer for a little friendly mind meld.

My favorite piece, full of magnificence and menace, is the towering double helix called, “Tall Artistic Creativity Gene.” Elegantly suspended from the high ceiling of the BAM lobby and trailing a bower of glass flowers at its feet, this delicate but imposing structure of metal and glass seems as if it might suddenly break free and begin spinning and spiraling toward you, bent on gently rearranging your polypeptide chains. It’s a fitting introduction to an exhibition that gradually unveils the unbridled spookiness and audacity of this artist’s imagination.

While she was still working on the pieces in this show, Ruffner asked her friend and Nobel laureate, the biochemist Kary Mullis, if he thought it was arrogant of her to create her own model of the DNA molecule. He wrote back: “None of the existing images can even come close to capturing this snapping, glowing, sizzling, writhing, freaking King of Molecules. There are no humanly conceivable images. It’s up to you to look at these things and imagine something yourself.” Which is exactly what she’s done.

So leave your slide rule at home, forget everything you know about the boundaries between art and science, and go catch a glimpse of what the world might look like if evolution began making stuff just for the fun of it. Or maybe, with a little nudge from Ruffner, it already has.

And if you’re interested in learning more about the life and work of this remarkable artist, check out the new documentary, “Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life,” directed by Karen Stanton and produced and released this year by the Seattle-based film company, ShadowCatcher Entertainment. It won the Golden Space Needle award at the Seattle International Film Festival this summer and is being screened at several other film features around the country. You can find out more about it online at www.ginnyruffnerthemovie.com.

Kathleen Cain
Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based freelance writer and bibliophile who follows art and is a big fan of the double helix.

Ginny Ruffner’s exhibit, “The Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle,” is on view through Febraury 6 at the Bellevue Arts Museum which is located at 510 Bellevue Way NE in Bellevue, Washington. For more information please call (425) 519-0770 or visit the website www.bellevuearts.org.

Letter to Rose

Debbi Lester — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:14:31 GMT

Rose, your email came at just the right time!

Because here it is, a new year. And I’ve been at a loss. What can I possibly write that captures its essence? Everything “new year” has been written before. I have my doubts as to whether I can find a fresh angle to any of it. When you become a writer, you’ll understand this dilemma, I promise.

Your saying you read my work is the finest compliment, believe me. Sure, your mom and I know each other. Still, knowing her, knowing you, I infer no female in your home is deciding what the other female reads, period.

What I need to tell you, readers, is that Rose wants to be a writer. When she shared this information with her guidance counselor, she didn’t get quite the reaction she’d hoped for. In Rose’s words, “My counselor thinks I need a back up plan. But I really want to be a writer.”

Rose, trying to do the jigsaw of maturing is no easy feat. But, trust me, if you have already found work that makes you happy, a huge piece of you will not go missing. I will go so far as to say your passion for writing may turn out to be your truest friend in life. This might not be an easy thing to hear in your BGF world, but no friend, especially no boyfriend (doubly hard to hear, sorry), will be able to fill that place inside you that longs for so much. Only you can fill it. And writing will help.

I was thrown into a tizzy with all the remembering that came gushing up. See, in the seventh grade, I once called my Home-Ec teacher by my English teacher’s name and, humiliating me in front of my classmates, she yelled, “PAY ATTENTION, Mary Lou!”

I was mortified. I know how important names are. I’m just so bad at remembering them. But ask me anything, anything at all about what she was wearing, the ever-changing color of her hair, and I knew. I knew.

Even then, I could enumerate, interpret, elaborate. But retrieve someone’s name, I go blank. I soak up the visual but I’m resistant to names the way some people are to colds. In this area, I have what my mother would call “a strong constitution.” Until I get to know someone, I’m porous to their name. It leaves me.

Just think how much time I could have saved if my guidance counselor had picked up on my wordy, descriptive babbles (I had quite the reputation for them) and leaned me toward writing instead of laying the secretary/nurse option on pretty thick. Vulnerable me might have left high school with hey, I’m going to be a writer! Instead of a vague I have no clue how to fit in.

I look back at the two of us sitting face to face in her office trying to come up with what I should do, who I should be, with fifteen minutes for her to study my file, and all that she was able to help me with was…absolutely nothing, that’s what.

Here’s what she said to me: You can make more money as a secretary. But if you go to nursing school the benefits for your family are better.

Benefits? Family? Death to a seventeen year old.

She certainly said nothing that helped me perceive my peculiarities as the very traits a writer needs. Gradually, through the years, I learned this on my own. There are amazing guidance counselors, I’m sure of it. Just as I’m sure the word “guidance” affixes the word “counselor” for a good reason. But I knew, even then, that the woman before me was going to be of no help to me whatsoever.

High school, for me, bristles with so many of these memories.

Luckily, in time, all the lost little parts of me came together, together enough anyway (there are still plenty of holes), to make me see how I really had no choice about what I was meant to do in this world because I was already doing it.

Just as you are, Rose. And it’s terrific, isn’t it?

So keep following the swerving stretch of road onto the next page. And more than anything, insist on passion.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. She is a featured speaker at the 2011 Northwest Flower and Garden Show. For more information, visit Mary Lou Sanelli’s website at www.marylousanelli.com

INS becomes INSCAPE

Debbi Lester — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:37:37 GMT

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Federal Building located at 815 Airport Way South in Seattle, Washington, becomes Inscape Art Studios. Opening events are to be held on Saturday and Sunday, October 16 to 17 and include bands, art, and more! For information, please go to www.inscapearts.org.

Hands

Debbi Lester — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:39:04 GMT

I’ve been around the neighborhood long enough to bore people with my “used to be” stories: the art gallery that used to be a hardware store, the New Age Bookshop that used to be a video store, the video store that used to sell gourmet food.

Honestly, if not one new “it used to be” ever popped into mind again, I could write the past tense, happily forever, just by reliving the basics: the kitsch shop that used to sell flowers, the leaf-blowers that used to be rakes.

There’s a subtext here, of course, and I’m at the mercy of it: I found a photograph of my husband. Or, Larry how he “used to be.”

I thought about shoving the photo back into the book it fell out of. I don’t want too much history backing up on me, which will surely happen if I stare at Larry too long. After all, I fell in love with him when I was twenty. Larry—so self-directed, so handsome.

I wind up focusing on the photo until my thoughts find their way into the deepest, most stunning places, kindling the most tender feelings I’ve felt in a long time. From my ears to my knees, a thunderbolt of nostalgia. One memory after another. I see love in the photo as clearly as I see my own hand holding it.

I stash it. Unlike most of my friends, I don’t have dozens of framed photographs adorning the shelves of my home. I will one day again, surely. But right now, my work requires I be a tad nomadic, and too many photos sort of short circuits my flow.

I remember when I tried letting all the photos on my hard drive revolve as my screen saver. One by one, my entire past came at me in two second intervals. It drove me bonkers. I’m quite proud of my achievements, the lives I’ve lived. But, I swear, every time I passed my monitor, I had a little heart attack. All that emotion really slowed me down.

Anyway, I’ll forget half of what I saw in the photo if I don’t get on with it: Larry. His hands, specifically. How swollen his knuckles were from building the boat we were to live in. A dory. Our first home. His fingers were the color of wood. New skin grew right over the dirt. His callouses were so thick they added a good half-inch to his palms. If he nicked them, they drew no blood.

And look at that mess of curly hair! No wonder my dad said he looked like Charles Manson.

About a year before the photo was taken, Larry picked me up hitchhiking to the Olympic Hot Springs. I moved in with him a week later. We lived in an old barn in Sequim. It was the eighties.

My most vivid memory of his hands then, in total-lust stage, was how he couldn’t let his hands rub my legs covered in nylon tights without making a crackling sound, or lay in the dark with me on a double sleeping bag, unzipped and opened flat, with hands that prowled easily, without catching on each lofty seam.

That’s how Larry’s hands used to be. I study such things.

Which brings me to Larry’s hands now: Smooth, nick-less as a slab of marble. Around the age of forty, like many the boatbuilder before him, he left the “sail around the world” dream to find work that 1) paid, and 2) let him use his mind as much as his hands.

Larry’s hands are so clean now I call them white-collar-pink.

Either way, in boat building or business, then or now, Larry never wavered from being the kind of man who would never, ever drive a bent nail deeper into the grain of wood just to get the job done.

Rare, huh?

And why, I believe, there is more at work in our marriage than two people trying their best.

Hands. I know you know what I mean.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends.
www.marylousanelli.com

Meditation on Solitude

Debbi Lester — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:35:12 GMT

Here, the night is yours.

No one lurking in its dark folds.

Marvel in the journey.

Rest your head against a tree bole,

slide onto a dilapidated bench,

or march into Green Lake.

No one will ask where you’ve been.

Enter night’s quietude, pull it inside you.

You are beholden to the Milky Way,

the maples, and stones tripping feet.

You don’t grow more balanced,

but find ease with being unbalanced.

Even in solitude, you aren’t.

The crows, the caterpillars,

the squirrels in their dreys.

The ground you traverse

will not mislead you.

It will hold you up.

Janée J. Baugher
Seattle, Washington

Janée J. Baugher, originally from Renton, is the author of the collection of poems, Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). She teaches Creative Writing at Richard Hugo House. Visit: http://JaneeJBaugher.wordpress.com

Art Access & Scene In Seattle Press Announcement

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:24:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Art Access publisher, Debbi Lester, shared some news with you about an exciting new collaboration that Art Access has developed with Scene in Seattle. We hope you’ve had time to take a look at this new Art Access website. We officially launch it to the world on First Thursday in April.  

The new website includes many of the features you’ve come to trust from Art Access, plus a whole lot more. We’ve designed it to be a comprehensive source for Northwest art information that includes exhibition listings, artist images, maps, searchable data bases, live news feeds and promotional videos. The result is a fantastic site that positions Art Access and Scene in Seattle as the clear leaders for information about the Northwest art scene.  

We’re incredibly excited about what we’ve done; click here to check out our official announcement, or paste the following link into your web browser http://www.youtube.com/scaredofgenre#p/u/0/8Gd0QwPUDGk.  

The team at Scene in Seattle will be

stopping by soon to assist with updat

ing your Gallery Profiles. Look for Lanae, Rebeqa and Emma to help you maximize your presence on this great new tool. If you wish to schedule an appointment, please do so at:

sales@sceneinseattle.org.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Scared of Genre videographer Brad Strain, our trusted

resource for video footage of the

Seattle art scene. You can schedule a First Thursday video shoot

or a gallery venue shoot by contacting Brad at:

video@sceneinseattle.org

As we’ve fine tuned the details of this exciting new venture, even more

opportunities have come up that I’d like to share with you.  

Art Monaco 

We have the chance to promote Art Access to the global art community at Art Monaco ’10 Special Edition in April. La Familia Gallery will be one of the exhibitors at Art Monaco, and they look forward to promoting the new Art Access website as the premier portal for information about the Seattle art community.  

Teatro ZinZanni and SIFF

In an effort to expand the reach of our message and present art to a larger audience, Art Access is also collaborating with Teatro ZinZanni and Seattle International Film Festival. The first event is coming up soon--please join Caffe Umbria and Art Access as Teatro ZinZanni presents "A Feast of Fools" on Thursday, April 1, 6:30-8:30 P.M. at Caffe Umbria, 320 Occidental Avenue South in Seattle. Celebrate a souffle of songs, silliness, sumptuous coffee, and the launch of the new Art Access website.

All of this activity - new collaborations, new website, new video features, marketing at Art Monaco - reflects Art Access and Scene in Seattle’s shared passion for increasing Seattle’s presence in the regional, national and international art scene, and our desire to make Seattle a “destination spot” for great art. We hope you enjoy.

Endless Flirting on Paper, Review of Alden Mason's Show by Molly Norris

Debbi Lester — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:18:51 GMT

At 90 Alden Mason still makes it to his Ballard studio three to four times a week. But for a few canvases from the 1990s, Mason’s current show at Foster/White Gallery consists of 20 recently made works on paper all sized at 26 by 35 inches.

In these latest works, lines of oil stick create a resist for watercolor and India ink. Gaze long enough and you can see Mason’s delicate pencil lines beneath, outlines whose makings calm hands that otherwise shake.

In “Untitled: White Writing Square Heads,” cartoon-like figures bounce in an active field. Watercolor clouds of emerald green that match the color of gems made from Mt. St. Helens’ ash balloon across oil stick ‘writings’ to envelop ultramarine blue globs of watercolor paint that one could re-moisten and dip a brush in. Crisp rims of bare, white paper left where watercolor approaches oil gives the illusion of shapes having been cut out and pasted on. You could call this work “organically optical”.

One could pitch these works as “Sam Francis meets Jean Dubuffet,” because everybody meets somebody.

If the world were more attuned to University of Washington’s David Shields who believes we ought to be able to use other’s quotes and passages without having to credit them, rather like a DJ sampling songs, I could simply run together all the fabulous lines from past reviews of Mason’s work.

In a Seattle Times article from September of 2004, critic Matthew Kangas wrote that Mason has a “…talent that is split down the middle between total non-objective abstraction and exuberantly figurative works.”

On the local online site Artdish back in 2007, Reiko Sundahl described Mason’s work as, “…like watching Looney Tunes through a glass of Alka Seltzer.” Description doesn’t get much better.

In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer back in March of 2008, Regina Hackett quoted Mason talking about a childhood spent growing up in the Skagit Valley, shooting muskrats to sell for painting supplies. She quotes the artist as saying that as a child “…I loved cartoons, with figures jumping, hopping, and smooching. They were having more fun than I was. They lived in a brighter world.”

This emotion has fueled Mason’s work for over eight decades. Tulip images from when he and his mother visited those fields are still showing up in paintings along with spirit birds, cows, and totems fashioned of chickens, dogs, and salmon.

Mason distinguishes himself in his paintings as the guy wearing the hat. It’s the same thing with local artists James Martin and Gaylen Hansen; what is it with all these graybeards painting dark whimsy and showing up in their paintings wearing hats? Mason started wearing his when young to keep hay from going down the back of his shirt.

In life Mason is in a wheelchair. In his paintings he skips ropes with friends. How lucky to live so long and collect friendships like a rolling snowball. Having taught at the University of Washington for 40 years – and received his BFA and MFA there! – allows for a lot of friends and fans. A few of his ex-students have also exhibited at Foster White, including Allison Collins and Chuck Close.

Gayle Clemans wrote in the Seattle Times in 2009 that Mason believes that his work is all about improvisation. He calls his hand a smart ass for what it draws when he closes his eyes. He calls Arshile Gorky a “kindred spirit” what with that duality of playfulness with calamity. In the same article he says that he learned while in Papua New Guinea that a blackbird is a messenger between the living and the dead.

Art is a messenger, and Alden Mason still uses it like it was yesterday.

Molly Norris

Molly Norris is an artist and writer living in Seattle, Washington. She is currently working on a documentary about the Webster’s Woods sculpture park located at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center.

Alden Mason’s exhibit, “Endless Flirting on Paper,” is on view through April 27, at the Foster/White Gallery located at 220 Third Avenue in Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. There is a special event, “Tea with Alden Mason,” Saturday, April 17, 2 PM, please RSVP to the gallery by phone (206) 622-2833 or email seattle@fosterwhite.com. For further information, please visit www.fosterwhite.com. Also upcoming is an Alden Mason exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum from November 6, 2010 through August 21, 2011.

Clouds, Begin Here by Susan Rich

Debbi Lester — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:11:36 GMT

It is so hard to say what the dead really want.

In the lost fires of the notebook, words stumble

down the columns of green and white paper.

In the notebook of the unknown index, blank

description, we lose our blue hours. Begin with forget

shore line, heart line, forgive me serum.

If we’re lucky, the mind sits up straight

in our interior garden, our house of sky

the remodeled one car garage. Open the suitcase

of ink and erasures; let language spill out

in mid-air. Between ferryboat and bicycle,

between daybreak and meteor shower

we create something holy:

apples and crackers and quiet.

Susan Rich
Seattle, Washington

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry including
The Alchemist’s Kitchen just published by White Pine Press.
Recent poems appear in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review,
and The Southern Review. Visit her at www.susanrich.net.

Show of Hands by Molly Norris

Debbi Lester — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:57:31 GMT

Opens April 24 at the Whatcom Museum's Lightcatcher Building located at 250 Flora Street in Bellingham, Washington. For more information, please call (360) 778-8930 or visit the website, www.whatcommuseum.org. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 P.M. The admission is $10 general, $8 student/senior/military, and $4.50 children under 5.

Write of Way: The Process by Mary Lou Sanelli

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:35:53 GMT

Calvin Calls Me Sunshine

Hey, Sunshine, how ya doin’ this morning?” asks Calvin, his smile radiating like a child’s, a stack of Real Change newspapers in the crook of his arm, “Do ya want to help me out today?”

I say yes I do.

I like Calvin. I get his need to smile even when the weather scowls. He gets mine. Today we smile together, a duet. We nod. We joke. For a man living on the street, Calvin has a remarkable ability to give us a positive sense of our neighborhood, of us living in it. Of our belonging here.

And, sure, he likely calls every woman on the block the same sunny nickname. Still, I blush, a sucker for compliments.

I’ve bought Calvin’s Real Change newspaper for months now, ever since the first time he called me Sunshine. Even as a hard wind blew grit into his eyes and a Whole Foods bag blew past his feet, he smiled. A smile that split his face in two. From that point on, we began to cross a familiarity line, shifting from an awkward exchange of a dollar to matters of the heart.

That’s the thing about the homeless: they are there. On any given day, if you walk from the Space Needle to Pioneer Square (or the same distance in the core of your city, large or small), you will see how homelessness has spread alarmingly in all directions. It is a living thing, begging and competing, involving not only joblessness, but mental illness and all matters of despair in between.

These days, I’ve come to view these folks as less of an “other” than as acquaintances. There really is no other choice, other than completely ignoring them, which, I admit I do sometimes, not because I’m a cruel, cold person, but there are days when I’m just trying to hold it together myself, unraveling like a ball of yarn, and I can’t cross the distance, emotionally. So I go about my day, letting in only my life, the one in front of me, the one I need to keep afloat. I admit, on these more-fragile days, I fall back on passivity. I insulate, seal off, so I can move about without caving. Because it’s not only likely that I am going to get hit up for spare change, for receptivity that will break my conscience wide open, it can be depended upon. Until, by the time I reach my destination I’m thinking I need this like a hole in the head.

To me, though, the Real Change vendors offer a fair exchange — a buck for a well-written paper and the seller’s time to pitch it. Still, as I’m discovering a little more clearly every day, I can’t give money to all the needy vendors I pass in a Seattle downtown day, surely. So I picked Calvin.

Calvin stands out: his genuine smile, certainly, but it’s more than that. It’s his careful attention paid to his neighbors, his quality of good nature, his intelligent eyes and narrow — but not hauntingly-thin — body. The word that comes to mind about his personality is an old-fashioned one: winning. Even when he asks “How ya doin’?” the question isn’t momentary and without care, disconnected from any real interest. He looks you straight in the eyes and listens to your reply. Ladies! How many men do you know who do the same? Once his kindness caused me to forget my troubles completely and utter what I knew to be a stinking lie: “I’m great!” A better man in need — where is he?

I assume some of you already know the history of the Real Change News. If not, I’ll give you a short summary: www.realchangenews.org says: Real Change is a hand up, not a handout.

And it can work wonders.

One day back in October, Calvin was on Fourth & Virginia dressed in what appeared to be a brand new suit jacket. “Calvin, you look dashing,” I said. “You’ve found your style.”

About a month later Calvin told me he had a full-time job at the Goodwill Store in Ballard, “but I gotta keep selling my papers, comin’ back to my roots in Belltown.”

Now? Calvin works in sales at Macy’s. “They seem to like me just fine,” he said recently. “I just hope I can keep at it, keep myself up.”

I hope you can too Calvin. I can’t write any more just now. You inspire me beyond words.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. Does your organization need a wonderful new fundraiser? Check out The Immigrant’s Table at www.marylousanelli.com

Speak for the Trees by Kathleen Cain

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:20:10 GMT

We human beings have a complicated relationship with trees. We get food from them, we once lived in them and occasionally still do, we admire their beauty, and some of us have even been known to hug them. We also cut them down, burn them, poison them, and use them to build houses, toilet paper, sawdust, and toothpicks.

All of these ideas are explored in words and images in “Speak for the Trees,” an exhibition and its companion book, both of which are showcased at Freisen Gallery from now until May 29. The book contains images of all 76 works that were submitted by painters, sculptors, photographers, glass artists, and conceptual artists from all over the world; many of them were created exclusively for this project. More than 50 of these are in the exhibition and that selection includes pieces created David Hockney, Yoko Ono, Mark Ryden, and the Starn brothers. The Northwest artists featured in this show are Julie Speidel, Spike Mafford, Michael Brophy, Martin Blank, Catherine Eaton Skinner, Laura Sharp Wilson, Steve Jensen, Janis Miltenberger, and 2009 Neddy Award Nominee Lynda Lowe.

It’s pretty easy to get a little sentimental when it comes to trees, and some of these artists do. But that’s understandable. Trees are, after all, are the original performance artists. They live with their feet in the ground and their heads in the sky. They drop their clothes and go naked in the winter, then put them back on in the summer. Trees neither spin nor toil, unless you count that essential little product called oxygen. And they are such flagrant poets, flapping their leaves in collaboration with the wind in a million different ways to expand its vocabulary from gentle gossip to howling complaint. Think back to your earliest memories and see if they don’t include the shifting colors and mysterious sounds made by the wind playing in the trees.

But all of their art-for-its-own-sake tendencies tend to divert us from the fact that trees are much more than vegetable poets or hapless victims of our neglect and stupidity. They’re our caretakers. We don’t own them; they own us. Sit up and take notice because without them, we die.

The more you look at this book and exhibition the more you understand that we’re the ones who are going to be destroyed if we don’t stop destroying trees. The trees portrayed, observed, and sometimes flagrantly worshipped in this book and exhibition, possess dignity, power, wisdom, mystery, and most especially, a fine disregard for human presence. Some of the them are a bit sinister, it’s true, but even the most benign and whimsical ones don’t seem as if they will miss us when we’re gone. These trees may be temporarily vulnerable to our stupidity but if we don’t start paying attention to their survival, we will simply disappear. They will go on ruling the earth just as they have been doing since long before we showed up. And they will be here long after our dust has settled. After all, it wasn’t the missing people who miraculously rose up out of the ashes of Mt. Saint Helens. It was the plants and trees.

There are plenty of pieces I like in this show but I have room to mention just a few. Lin Rabin’s “Minuum #8,” a simultaneously nano and macro point of view, leaves you wondering whether you’re looking at trees from far, far away, or deep inside a chlorophyll molecule. Tom Zetterstrom’s romantic yet respectful portrait of an American Elm makes it clear that this is a tree you would never presume to hug without a formal introduction. Jennifer Bolandis spookily manipulates images from old postcards to remind you that it’s probably not wise to venture into an Irish forest at the close of the day. Catherine Eaton Skinner’s elegant encaustic panels of trees flanking one of her signature 108 grids won’t be in the show, but the piece that replaces them is every bit as fascinating and intricate. And Louis Reiner’s painting, “On Via Fagina #4,” reminded me of how a tree looks to a child: lofty, mysterious and grand but also nurturing and very much alive.

The trees that inspired these artists are neither fragile nor helpless. They don’t need us in order to survive; in fact they don’t need anything from us. It’s the other way around. Whatever we do to trees, we do to ourselves, only faster and more efficiently. So when we speak for trees, we’re really speaking for ourselves.

The message of this exhibit is that the seed has always been mightier than the sword. So go take a look. And even if you’re not a tree-hugger, you will probably start thinking about what trees have to do with our own survival.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based free-lance writer and bibliophile who follows art, admires trees, and refuses to sleep in the woods at night.

“Speak for the Trees” exhibit is on view from April 1 through May 29 at Friesen Gallery which is located at 1210 Second Avenue in Seattle, Washington. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., Saturday from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. The reception with many showcased artists in attendance is to be held on Thursday, April 1, from 6 to 8 P.M. For more information, please call (206) 628-9501, email friesen@friesengallery.com, or visit the website www.friesengallery.com.

Decent for a Change by Paul Hunter

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:17:34 GMT

Even buying a loaf of bread
you don’t know where you stand
till you get the wrapper off
and sniff and taste it with
some of the expensive spread

you got in the habit
of smearing on cardboard
to kill the taste of it
once you lost your innocence
and started to wolf everything.

Of course you assume
you’re squeezing the genuine article
and you kind of see through the wrapper
but not down between all the slices
or past the curve of each heel

though on the outside as required
by law it says in tiny letters
everything that went in
the dough including preservatives
as well as what to watch out for

but then you bite on it anyhow,
laying it out like a broken paperback
you glue and slap together
to make a quick sandwich
without your reading glasses.

We all know good bread doesn’t last
and the bad you stuff yourself with
in a fit of depression
hangs around forever in the way
when you’re in your right mind

musty green under plastic
blooming with envy
as you keep reaching around it
to get at a little something
decent for a change.

Paul Hunter
Seattle, Washington

Featured on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works for the past 15 years. His farming collection, Breaking Ground, reviewed in the New York Times, won the 2004 Washington State Book Award. Companion volumes include Ripening, 2007, and Come the Harvest, 2008. His new book of prose, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, just appeared from The Small Farmer’s Journal. He is reading at the University Book Store on April 13, 7 P.M., and at Elliott Bay Books in its new store on May 2, 2 P.M. Visit the website www.woodworkspress.com for more information.