This month, the Gallery at the Park features a showcase of work from the Northwest Designer Craftsmen, an organization dedicated to promoting excellent design and craftsmanship.

The Northwest Designer Craftsmen is made up of professional artists from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. These artists work with clay, wood, glass, metal, fiber and mixed media. The group also has members who support the craft as educators, managers of art organizations or buyers of art.

Nine Seattle artisans joined together to form the Northwest Designer Craftsman in 1954 as a way of fostering high standards of design, promoting public interest in crafts and fostering sound business methods among designers in the Northwest. 

Today, the organization has over 150 members working in a variety of mediums, including weaving, quilting and basketry, as well as jewelry and metal arts and other mixed media. Many Northwest Designer Craftsmen artists even use a variety of techniques and materials to create unique works of art that blur the line between fine art and craft.

Members all hold a high regard for professional craftsmanship and a respect for the materials and process, regardless of whether they work in metal, wood, clay, textiles or anything else. They create quality work that exemplifies how the tradition of craft can be merged with contemporary artistic expression.

The Northwest Designer Craftsmen’s gallery show features over 100 works from 44 different artists. The works are distinct and varied, ranging from porcelain, clay and glass to quilts and handwoven tapestries to sterling silver and beaded jewelry. The only way to understand the full scope of what the Northwest Designer Craftsmen can do is to come see for yourself!

The exhibit will be on display at the Gallery at the Park until Sept. 27, and the reception will be held on Sept. 6.

This summer, be sure you make some time to visit the Gallery at the Park in Richland and see the annual Juried Show, which begins July 2.

The 2019 Juried Show features works by artists from around the Pacific Northwest. Some of the featured artists will even win monetary prizes, with more than $2,500 being awarded altogether.

This year’s juror is Gina Freuen, an artist and educator with a ceramics and mixed media studio in Spokane. From 1996 through 2016, she was on the teaching faculty in the art department at Gonzaga University, and in 2013 she joined the Trackside Studio Ceramic Art Gallery as an exhibiting partner in its monthly exhibits. Now, she volunteers as a drawing teacher for high-school students at Riverpoint Academy.

Over a 40-year career, Freuen has created a unique collection of multimedia art and complex porcelain and stoneware vessels.

To learn more about Freuen’s work, check out her website at ginafreuen.com.

Art in the Park

This year marks the Allied Arts Association’s 69th annual Art in the Park celebration. The open-air festival, which is free to attend, attracts visitors to browse and purchase works from more than 200 artists. Stop by to see artwork from painters, jewelers, photographers, woodworkers and more.

Along with a wide array of arts and crafts, Art in the Park also features entertainment and food provided by local nonprofit organizations.

Art in the Park is a two-day event that is fun, family-friendly and has something for everyone! It takes place at Howard Amon Park on Friday, July 26, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday, July 27, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

This month, the Gallery at the Park in Richland is celebrating a diverse array of media with three unique and disparate artists — Paul Lewing, Loren Lukens and Adam Sims. With these artists, the gallery exhibit features landscape painting, pottery and photography.

Painting

Paul Lewing began his career as a clay artist after studying with Rudy Autio, one of America’s best-known clay artists and muralists, and earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a master’s from the University of Montana. For more than 20 years, Lewing made his living as a potter, first making functional pottery before working exclusively on ceramic tile starting in 1986. But he was always a painter at heart.

Several years ago, Lewing’s wife bought him water-soluble colored pencils for proposal drawings of tile commissions. Doing this reminded him of the joy of making finished two-dimensional artwork, and he began drawing landscapes and animals in pencil and in tile. He has recently started using acrylic paint for his paintings because he enjoys “trying to make acrylic paint do things it doesn’t really want to do.”

“It’s hard to describe the pure visceral joy of making marks,” Lewing says. “But part of it is the joy of returning to exactly what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old.”

Lewing is also the author of China Paint & Overglaze, published by the American Ceramic Society in 2007, and articles of his have appeared in numerous magazines and textbooks. In 2018, the University of Montana honored him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Pottery

Loren Lukens creates pottery for everyday use, combining form and function to construct beautiful works of art that also serve a purpose. He discovered the beauty of clay in the early 1970s as an undergraduate art student at a small, midwestern liberal arts college, and he has loved pottery ever since.

Lukens describes his work as “extensions of traditional pottery with contemporary variations.” He enjoys making strong, sleek sculptures with bold surfaces and rich glaze treatments. His pieces are dynamic from a distance and have an intensity of detail up close. He describes painting as an “increasingly important” facet of his work, and he enjoys the challenge of painting in three dimensions while maintaining the form of the piece.

Lukens’ studio and showroom is Brace Point Pottery in Arbor Heights, a beautiful neighborhood in downtown Seattle. The showroom is filled with a variety of pots and is always changing.

Learn more by visiting Lukens’ website at lorenlukenspottery.com.

Photography

Adam Sims first became interested in photography in the spring of 2007, when he attempted to photograph lightning during the occasional thunderstorm. He had purchased his first digital SLR camera by the end of that summer, and he spent the next four years practicing and perfecting his photography skills. In March 2012, he had his first public showing at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.

Sims appreciates the difficulties that arise when photographing scenery and nature. Aside from having to figure out how to compose his shots, he says, “I am at the mercy of things that I cannot control,” meaning the weather, tides, location of subjects in the night sky and other unpredictabilities of nature. He will often revisit the same place or subject multiples times and stand in the same spot for hours at a time to try to capture that perfect shot.

But, according to Sims, “It’s these challenges that make this craft so exciting for me.”

The exhibit for Paul Lewing, Loren Lukens and Adam Sims will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from June 4 through June 27. The reception will be held on June 14 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Each May, the Gallery at the Park in Richland celebrates students with an exhibition featuring the recipients of the Allied Arts Association’s student scholarships. To help support visual arts in the community, Allied Arts awards annual scholarships to Columbia Basin College students and students working toward a master’s degree in fine arts.

This year, scholarships went to Li Wang, a student attending CBC, and Todd McKinney, a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Li Wang

Li Wang grew up in Jiangxi, a small city in southern China known for its rivers and lakes, and has lived in the United States for seven years. Before moving to the U.S., she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology. She became interested in medical illustration when one of her classmates mentioned some difficulties he’d run into while writing a paper: He could not find a professional medical illustrator to draw an accurate, polished diagram.

This was the first Wang had ever heard of medical illustration, since Chinese universities do not offer this degree. After doing some research, she decided this career would be a perfect fit for her due to her biological background and love of drawing. Now she is studying at CBC to improve her art skills with the goal of eventually applying to a graduate program in medical illustration.

Todd McKinney

Todd McKinney, the other scholarship student, is from the Bay Area in California. His father was an industrial painter who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps — but McKinney went into the fine arts instead.

As an undergraduate, he fell ill with pseudo-tumor cerebri, a rare degenerative disease of the brain, which changed the course of his life. He writes on his website, “As my ability to function deteriorated I began to question the nature of existence. I began my investigation of chaos, which led me to this road.”

Though McKinney has learned many forms of art, painting is his passion. Currently, he uses random drips, tape, mops and brooms for his paintings, which results in experimental, abstract works of art. Because he can never fully control the outcome of paint drips, his paintings organically evolve on their own. He continually adds layers until the painting is complete, demonstrating his idea that “chaos eventually blossoms into a pattern.”

For more information or to view McKinney’s work, visit his website at toddraymondmckinney.com.

The student scholarship show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from May 7 through May 31. The artist reception will be on May 11 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the gallery.

The Gallery at the Park’s April exhibit features beautiful works of art from the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society.

The Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society is an organized group of artists that formed in 2015 with the purpose of encouraging watercolor in the Mid-Columbia region and promoting their members’ work. The group meets on the second Tuesday of every month at Yellow Dog Studio, located at 214-B Torbett Street in Richland.

Watercolor refers to a method of painting in which the paint is made of pigments in a water-based solution. Using water rather than oil gives the colors a more translucent look, resulting in a gorgeous palette of pale colors.

Membership for the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society costs $20 a year, and paying members are given the opportunity to showcase their work at Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society exhibitions. To learn more, or to view some of their amazing work, visit facebook.com/groups/mcwcs.

The show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from April 2 through April 26. The reception will be held on Friday, April 5 from 6 to 8 p.m.