Artists

The Gardens for Life, Sustainable Living
By Marcy Stamper
copyright Methow Valley News - June 4, 2008

The show includes work from the following artists:

Patsy Thola Chamberlain, a ceramic artist based in Sedro-Woolley, created what she calls bird shrines and spirit dwellings. The charming, colorful habitats for birds come in rich pastels with incised filigree decorations.

Linda and Larry McWhirter, who team up as Mountain Style Mosaics, reclaim materials from the earth and from abandoned barns to create earth-hued stone mosaics with garden themes.

Tori Karpenko painted two surreally beautiful landscapes where terraced hills morph into pebbled ponds and vegetation frames brick-lined irrigation canals, while a lone women walks in a park flanked by a dramatically green coastal scene in the other.

Photographer Ken Smith has produced a new series entitled "On My Mind," in which he explores his "Kinship with the sense of the blur," and the "mystery of ambiguity" through soft-focus photos of flowers.

Chalene Monger painted oil miniatures of wooded groves and flowering shrubs.

Patty Yates pairs flowers and birds in her watercolor paintings of poppies and delphiniums.

Sculptor Jim Bauer used disk blades with cut-out bamboo sections to create a sort of garden gong.

Robert M. Pleas from Puyallup used his metal artistry to create an ornamental bench with a seat woven from strips of metal and delicately curling back.

A zanier wall sculpture is "I Sign with the Garden Electric," created by Vblast and Joanne Marracci, a totem-like figure with metal leaves for hair, raffia, bones, heavy twine and a shiny metal backbone.

Jim Neupert crafted ceramic sunflowers in iridescent raku.

Steve Love created a cutout birdbath with swooping swallows cut from steel.