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You are here: Home / Travel / Road Trips / LaConner & Whidbey Island Summer Art Finds (Roadtrip!)

LaConner & Whidbey Island Summer Art Finds (Roadtrip!)

July 2, 2017 by Iskra 1 Comment

artis roadtrip in the Skagit by Iskra
Pacific Northwest Pastorale, with Lombardy poplar (that would be a French tree….)

Let’s say you kick back for the 4th and check your social media and once again all your friends are posting vineyard photos of the South of France and the rest of them are gloating about having immigrated to Canada. You could be consumed with a terrible envy, or you could do what we did and make a tiny trip up the road and around the Sound and come back sated with beauty right here in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of waiting three hours in a ferry line we started the weekend art tour by skipping up the road to LaConner by way of Conway. The plain, thrilling ungentrified beauty of the Skagit reminded me there is life outside of Crane City and brooding about the hyperventilated cost of a 175 square foot room with a bed. Did I mention those trees in the photo above are French?

Also, there are cats.

And blue bottles, which may have been French at one time.

And sculpture. I would guess this guy may be in line for a cabinet position for infrastructure.

The little two-block metropolis of Conway in the Skagit Valley is a true find. Less famous than its bigger cousin up the road, it is worth a good hour of scouting. Antiques, friendly people, a bar, and some very fine landscape.

A few miles west, in LaConner, we entered a zone of the divine. The perfect breeze and light, the smell of flowers and salt, bald eagles on the pier, and quite a crowd at the Museum of Northwest Art. We just missed the talk by Whiting Tennis, but spent a long time looking at the exhibit of drawings and sculpture by one of the Pacific Northwest’s most renowned artists. This new collection is beautifully minimalist in its display, and shows the connection in Whiting’s work between drawing, sculpture and painting.

From Whiting’s artist statement (click to enlarge):

At the end of First Street, just where you might think everything ends, is to my mind the coolest new art spot in Puget Sound: Forum Arts. This gallery and artist studio is the brainchild of painter and sculptor Meg Holgate. In a lovely historic building she has created an elegant exhibition space that easily shape-shifts between salon, classroom, private artist studio or first class art gallery. I loved the exhibit, “Integrations,” pairing glass artist Steve Klein with Holgate’s drawings and paintings. I also wanted that steel stairway in the back. Oh, yum.

Meg Holgate at the opening of her new gallery, Forum Arts.

We completed our art tour in Langley, at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island. July is the height of the art season on the island, and the gallery was filled with fans and friends of artists Claudia Pettis and Deloss Webber.

Pettis has for years raised rare and endangered sheep on her land at Mutiny Bay Farm, and her paintings focus on the endearing and monumental character of these animals. Deloss Webber, whose work is more commonly associated with Asian influences has roots in Basque country, and drew on the muse of the shepherd for this new body of work in weaving and stone.

I went to school with Claudia Pettis many years ago, where we (obsessively) studied printmaking at Cornish. It is fascinating to see her move between painting and drawing with a printmaker’s aesthetic. “Every line and smudge on the charcoal pieces is done like a printmaker,” she told me. “It is considered.” Although realized very differently, a similar interplay of impulse and refinement can be seen in Deloss Webber’s work. He balances refined craftsmanship with an understanding of the roughness of natural materials, and responds to surface with the instincts of a painter.

 


 

Back at home now, I will leave you with my favorite photo from the road. I have taken hundreds of pictures from a moving car of the scuffs left on concrete meridians. For a calligrapher and printmaker these marks are pure art. They are “unintentionally intentional.” The driver may not have meant to skid into the concrete, but the car did it with an artist’s undivided focus. These marks are indirect, yet they have authorship: this is almost impossible to do on purpose. This is the first time I caught my muse without a blur, and I got lucky because a truck had come to a perfect moment of truck-stillness behind it.

 

Roadcapture, (which is close to rapture,) (or raptor) of what might be an eagle, formerly a symbol of the grandeur and dignity of the USA. Or, it could just be skidmarks on the highway.

 

Iskra Fine Art Shows Coming Up:

A Popup Show of new industrial work at Seattle Art Source Friday July 14 and Saturday July 15 from 11-6.

Industrial Strength at SAM Gallery opening September 13th.

And . . . . an interview and photo tour of my studio coming soon at Uncommon Union. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram to get the latest on these events and goings on in the studio.

 

Happy summer travels!

Filed Under: Road Trips Tagged With: Claudia Pettis, Deloss Webber, Meg Holgate, museo gallery, Northwest art news, pacific northwest summer, PNW art, RoadTrip, Skagit art tour, Whiting Tennis

Comments

  1. Ann and Gil Graham says

    July 3, 2017 at 11:37 am

    This is definitely added to our list of wonderful things on Whidbey and towns beyond! Thanks Iskra for sharing with us!

    Reply

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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