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Camano Arts Association (CAA) represents many talented artists from the vibrant arts community in Camano Island and Stanwood. We hope this newsletter will provide an interesting source of information about our artists and what they are doing and about art events in our area and beyond.
Enjoy exploring the art links in this newsletter and discovering a bit more about our wonderful community of artists.
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Our featured artist this
month is new member
Amy Martin.
She describes her approach this way: "I paint plein-air, oil on canvas, and strive to convey the experience of feeling the heat and rain and hearing the river current through expressive brushstrokes and sometimes muted, sometimes vivid emotive colors. I love to put a clean edge on a dusky background and pull color from an underpainting to the foreground. I like the process of my painting to peek though. My work strives to bring the natural world into our homes and to inspire us to seek out the beauty in the world all around us." Here is her story.
"In a quiet town in the snow belt, a bit south of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, I grew up playing baseball, building forts in the woods, playing Atari, and riding my bike to the community pool. When I was fourteen, I bought a Terry Gambit road bike and spent the summer riding miles into the countryside where I hid my bike between corn rows and hiked through fields with a back pack filled with paints and an easel. I spent my days painting landscapes, then strapped the wet oil painting to my backpack to ride home for dinner. I read Dear Theo that summer, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother; the descriptions of his paintings filled most every page and influenced my vision of the natural world and the ways I painted it. I began to focus on using color to depict how I felt about the world around me rather than just what I saw.
My love of reading, writing, and painting has always been fused. I graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Creative Writing and a minor in Painting in 1995. My oil paintings are of the natural world and are often created plein air as they were when I was younger. I most enjoy taking old canvases of my "failed" paintings and painting over them while leaving pieces of the original work in view. A lake might become a cup of tea resting on a picnic blanket, a red clay desert floor flipped might become a new sky.
After college, I worked as a house painter for Ehler's Construction in Eugene, OR, putting my skills with paint and brush to work to pay the rent after moving cross country. I worked alongside and learned painting techniques from their head painter who was also an accomplished artist painter. I found a housemate from an ad in the Eugene library who just so happened by chance to be a student painter at the University, and we covered our living room in brown butcher paper to protect the carpet and spent our evenings easel-to-easel painting together. We have been lifelong friends made through art.
I also worked as a cook in Montana, Utah, and in remote sport-fishing camps in Alaska to experience new adventures to write about and to find new landscapes. It was in Alaska, flying low in bush planes over iridescent landscapes that I often sketched out the world for later paintings. I kept copious journals filled with writings and sketches of fish and water. It was also there that I gained an affinity for flying. I obtained a scholarship from
Women in Aviation and Cessna and earned my Private Pilot Fixed Wing Rating in 2000. At the time, I was paying the bills by performing Anti-Piracy Work for Microsoft and decided I was tired of a desk job. After being accepted into the Army Warrant Officer Flight Program in 2002, I became a UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter Pilot. I flew air assault and V.I.P. missions in South Korea and served as a Medevac pilot in Fairbanks, AK where we also supported emergency agencies flying missions to save civilians. I gained an Asian influence in my art from living in Korea for two years and often painted both the Seoul cityscape as well as their patchwork farm fields. In Alaska, I loved to fly low and gaze at the vibrant mixture of colors of the world and never grew tired of the tangled rivers that unfolded below me.
My partner Steve, who was a fellow pilot in Korea, and I had our rambunctious daughter Margo while I served out my last year stationed at Ft. Lewis, WA. Margo and I are now painting comrades and often work alongside one another. When my Army commitment was complete, I took employment with Boeing in a project management role on the Tanker program and later, the 777X. We currently live on Juniper Beach high bank and are finishing up an exhaustive hands-on five year full-gutting renovation of our home which is flanked by ever-changing tidelands and nesting eagles. I'm leaving Boeing in June of 2016 with plans to attend graduate school to earn an MFA in Creative Writing and to devote my full-time employment efforts to my writing and painting. My experiences flying and living and working outdoors in the natural world have been great influences in my both my writing and painting. I seek to bring those perspectives to my art."
You can access Amy Martin's website here: Amy Martin.
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The CAA Scholarship Committee is happy to announce that we have been selected to participate in Giving Tuesday being sponsored by the Stanwood Camano Area Foundation and Windermere Real Estate.
The CAA's goal is to raise $6,000 on Giving Tuesday, November 29, 2016. The funds raised will be used for our annual scholarship awards given to graduating seniors from Stanwood High School pursuing their interests in the art fields. CAA has awarded over $26,000 in scholarships since the inception of their scholarship program in 2002. Most recently CAA has awarded $2,000 to $3,000 per year. We plan to award $4,000 in 2017.
Giving Tuesday is a global event that kicks off the charitable season when many focus on their holiday and end of the year giving. The local Giving Tuesday project is a 24-hour online giving event to fund important local projects that provide basic needs and enhance the quality of life within the Stanwood-Camano community. In 2015 the Stanwood Camano Area Foundation ran a pilot program before joining the global effort for 2016.
Last year during the global Giving Tuesday, 700,000 people raised $116,000,000 on-line in over 70 countries.
More details will be available as the Giving Tuesday approaches. Please watch for more information and consider donating to CAA on November 29, 2016! Donations prior to Giving Tuesday may be made out to the CAA Scholarship Fund and mailed to CAA P.O. 2530 Stanwood, WA 98292.
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Susan Cohen Thompson's illustrations are going worldwide!
The book "Speaking with Nature, Awakening to the Deep Wisdom of the Earth", that Susan illustrated last year has gone international. It is now being printed in French and German and sold world wide on Amazon. The book won the 2015 Nautilus Gold Award. Each of the 30 chapters begins with one of Susan's interpretive ink drawing of the nature spirits in that chapter - such as Snowy Owl, Snake, Blackberry, Mushroom, and Glacial Silt, exploring the role of each in bringing balance to the planet.
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These two mixed media paintings are from a new series
Dotti Burton began in August using oil paint mixed with cold wax medium over an acrylic underpainting.
Three of Dotti's paintings were juried into the Fine Art Section of the Washington State Fair, and she won an award for the nonrepresentational painting,
Reaching.
Dotti was invited by The Guilded Gallery to teach a series of acrylic painting classes. The classes called "Contemporary Acrylic Painting, Thinking outside the Box" will include 5 Wednesday sessions beginning September 28th. Painting using your feelings, imagination and creativity in a modern contemporary style will be studied along with color mixing, composition, fun "warm ups" and individual critiques. To Register: Guild Gallery Phone 360-629-2787.
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A new documentary by Kyle Porter titled "In Their Memory" about the Stanwood Memorial Barn had a special screening on September 11. It will be available to view latter this year on YouTube.
The film features many of the still photographs of CAA and SCAG member Diana Yakowitz, photographer and mixed media artist, who photographed the barn over many years and incarnations.
Some of the images in the film can be seen on her website
here and also
here.
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In preparation for Sunnyshore Studio "Beaches of Camano" Grand Opening (December 3, 10, & 17), Jason Dorsey is doing a series of interviews of people who have lived on and loved Camano Beaches. These interviews will eventually be woven into a Coffee Table Book titled "Beaches of Camano" which will celebrate Camano's beautiful beaches and guide newcomers to our Island to enjoy them. This book will feature over 30 original artworks of those beaches by Dorsey family members.
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John Ebner's painting
Calm Between Storms was chosen for the
Stormy Weather Festival poster in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The festival is November 6,7,8.
The posters will be sold and proceeds go to the Chamber of Commerce. For more information, visit the
Cannon Beach site
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Jack Gunter's whimsical interpretation of life in the Skagit Valley 30,000 years ago will fill Everett Community Collage's Russell Day Gallery from September 19 to October 14, 2016.
If you haven't experienced the multi media exhibition of artifacts from an early hominid civilization that seems to predate the Clovis Culture migration of 11,000 BCE, this is your chance. If you have visited it before and want to explore it more closely, come on back.
The entire discovery, complete with a documentary film featuring Russell Johnson-the "Professor" from Gilligan's Island, and a 140 page full color catalog will be on display at the Russell Day Gallery, Everett Community College from September 19th till October 14th.
A Bumbershoot 2000 feedback video is on YouTube here.
The short documentary video (62 min) is on YouTube here.
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READ JACK GUNTER'S NEWEST BOOK HERE
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Some artists are famous for their self portraits. Artist - Author Jack Gunter creates his with words as well as paint in a new book about his creative journey.
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Sunnyshore Studio
Three day workshop in acrylic painting.
Nov 3-5
(See previous newsletter for more detail)
Dotti Burton
5 Wed sessions beginning Sept 28th.
(See article above for more and sign up info)
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Matzke 7th Annual Art Auction
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Auction for the Artists and the Gallery
Saturday, October 1st, 5pm, Party 4pm
Ninety pieces of fine art (all mediums)
will be auctioned
$25 fee per person at the door
Auctioneer: Al Mangold
MCs: Jack Gunter and Karla Matzke
Party and food starts at 4pm
Sandwiches, Hors d'Oeuvres,Yummy desserts,
Wine and a great time !
Auction starts promptly at 5pm
2345 Blanche Way, Camano Island
open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11 to 5 and
weekdays by appointment
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The Oct. 5th CAA program will be presented by Michele Rushworth. This is the second of her series of three presentations on marketing.
"Rushworth will be talking about art marketing, specifically how to use your most valuable marketing asset: your mailing list, to do regular electronic newsletters."
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