General Meetings are free and Open to the Public September through May on the first Thursday of the month. Join us for our guest artist demonstrators.
10 – 11:30 AM – Board Meeting
11:30 -1 PM – Members Meeting, Announcements and Guest Artist Demonstration
Meetings are held in person at the Mercer Island Community and Event Center.
Join our mailing list and receive information about our artist demonstrations and many other programs!
Presentation by Rebecca Albiani
November 7th, 12 – 2 PM
Mary Cassatt: Color on Copper
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Rebecca Albiani, will be speaking on Mary Cassatt’s little known but extensive print making. Most art lovers know that Mary Cassatt was the only American to participate in the original Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s, but few recognize that she was one of the most innovative printmakers of the late 19th century. After visiting an enormous exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris in 1890, Cassatt threw herself into creating color prints. She approached her characteristic subjects of motherhood and women’s everyday experience with experimental panache, creating complex, multi-technique etchings of great verve.
Yulia Chubotin
October 10th 5, 12 – 2 PM
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Yulia Chubotin holds an MFA in painting from The National Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine, the city where she was born and raised. She moved to Seattle in 1993, and has began teaching art soon after in 1996. Yulia is an experienced teacher and artist and is skilled in most drawing, printmaking and painting techniques. Her art work is included in private collections around the world.
September 5, 12 – 2 PM
Demonstration of WAX Transfers by UW PCE Instructor and Photographer Ray Pfortner at the MIVAL Meeting.
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Jeffrey Olson – April 4, 2024
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Demystifying Oil Paint
The perception of oil painting as an intricate chemistry fit only for the advanced artist, has created a sense of mystery surrounding the medium. It is true that the practice of oil painting requires some basic understandings of the materials involved, but it is by no means out of reach to anyone with a willingness to learn its secrets. Join Jeff Olson, the Art Education Director for Royal Talens North America for an informative and revealing look into the history of oil painting, its composition, and the working properties of the medium. All participants will receive free samples, and there will be a giveaway drawing for a full set of oil paint for one lucky winner.
About Olson
Jeff holds a BA and MFA in painting and drawing and has been a working artist exhibiting for more than thirty years. He has more than a decade of college and university teaching experience in studio art and more than twenty-five years in the art material industry with product expertise in a variety of mediums. Olson’s lectures deliver meaningful insights into the histor y, development and application of artists’ materials. www.jeffolsonart.com
Royal Talens
The mission of Royal Talens, founded in 1899, is to facilitate and stimulate creative expression in painting and drawing. We market inspiring and innovative top-quality products including Rembrandt Oils. Talens’ Art Education mission is to provide “resources for artists and instructors that engage, inform and inspire artistic experimentation and expression.” www.royaltalens.com
Carol Gouthro – March 7, 2024
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
In this presentation for MIVAL, Carol Gouthro will demonstrate various surface design techniques that she uses in both her sculptural and functional work.
Color, pattern and texture are very important elements in her work and her approach to surface design involves dealing with the clay surface at every stage from wet through leather hard, bone dry and bisque.
Some of the techniques she will share are. layering and painting colors with underglaze,
scrafitto ,erosion ,wax resist, wax inlay, ,accentuating surface texture with stains, and mono printing on clay
http://www.carolgouthro.com/
Patrick Connelly & Abbie Birmingham – February 1, 2024
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
For our General Meeting, we welcome printmakers Patrick Connelly and Abbie Birmingham who will give a demonstration of printing techniques along with a hands on activity of print block making.
Patrick is a Printmaker working at Pra”, and is a Gallery Member at Columbia City Gallery. He creates beautiful linocut prints of old movie subjects.
You will get a chance to prepare a small block for printing. As organizer of the current Sea”le Print Arts show at the Community Center, along with MIVAL member Abbie Birmingham, he will also answer questions about the prints on display. We hope to see you all on Feb 1st at 11:30 AM at the Mercer Island Community and Events Center.
Steven Reddy – January 4, 2024
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Steven Reddy has spent 45 years compulsively illustrating his life in hundreds of sketchbook diaries. A teacher with Seattle Public Schools since 1998, Reddy
has published seven richly-illustrated memoirs. His latest books include “Everyday Sketching and Drawing – Five Steps to a Unique and Personal Sketchbook Habit”, and “Walks With Willa – A Love Story”.
Barbara Noonan – Pastel Artist October 5th
Mercer Island Community Center – Join us at 11:30 AM
Sometimes you enter a gallery and are drawn to color and bold shapes. This describes Barbara Noonan’s soft pastel paintings and her interpretation of nature and everyday objects. Years of painting en plein aire and photography inform her compositional elements and play with light.
Working on microfiber paper, she frequently applies a watercolor wash then defines shapes with pastel. “The immediacy of this dry pigment is especially rewarding and permits bold mark making”.
Barbara has curated and juried exhibitions around the Northwest as well as provided demos for local art societies. Her award-winning paintings are found in books, magazines and were included in the Art’s Alive LaConner, WA invitational. Her work has been collected internationally and she is locally represented by Matzke Fine Art Gallery on Camano Island and at Live Oak Gallery in Apalachicola, FL. You may recognize her name as the juror for the Edmonds Art Festival in 2023.
She is a Signature Member of the Northwest Pastel Society and the Pastel Society of the West Coast, as well as a member of the Camano Art Association and Women Painters of Washington. Though retired from teaching art, she continues to attend self-directed art residencies annually to expand her skills.
You can subscribe to her newsletter or visit her website at www.MorninNoonanNight.com.
Ryan James – April 6, 2023
Presenter Ryan James will be in person on April 6th at Noon. Please join us at 11:30 AM for potluck lunch and socializing before the meeting. Ryan James will discuss his gallery in Kirkland, working with artists and how to prepare your art for showing in a gallery. Please bring your questions for Ryan.
Ryan James is Gallery Director and Art Advisor at Ryan
James Fine Arts, founded in 2011 by James, who was
joined by business partner Jessica Kravtiz in 2014.
Located in Kirkland, Ryan James Fine Arts showcases both known and emerging artists specializing in abstract, modern and conceptual arts. A champion for arts on the Eastside and beyond, Ryan serves on the Bellevue Arts Museum Board of Trustees, is the former Kirkland Cultural Arts Commission Chair and serves as President on the Greater Kirkland Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.
This award-winning art advocate and curator has been widely acknowledged for his excellence in the field, with his gallery earning Best Art Gallery from 425 Magazine for six consecutive years (2018 – 2023). Also known for his extensive volunteerism including and beyond the world of art, Ryan was awarded Best Community Volunteer in 2020 from the Kirkland Reporter and is running for a Kirkland City Council position seat in the upcoming November 2023 election.
ALICE LARSON – March 2, 2023
I am an origami artist who cannot stop folding. I date my beginnings to 1992 when, in my professional life as a social service researcher, I was forced to listen to lawyers on the phone arguing for hours. I measured the pain by the number of cranes I folded, thus realizing that origami is my therapy. This combined with the knowledge that my primary material, paper, is everywhere has led me to creations both large and small. My work has been displayed in venues throughout the Northwest, and I owned my own origami gallery on Vashon Island for seven years which allowed me to publicly demonstrate that my colorful and unusual creations make people smile while they come to appreciate origami principles found in nature and used today in medicine, science, and even space travel.
I am a self-taught artist who pairs folded paper with monofilament line, wire, beads, and other objects to create a variety of work including realistic looking flowers, blossom branches composed of small clusters on madrone wood, bonsai trees whose leaves are tiny cranes, as well as jewelry, mobiles, wall hangings and other pieces. I use a variety of paper types, as well as experiment with other materials like screening which I fold into large outdoor hanging cranes. I am known for my works made from multiples, such as crane curtains where 1000 hanging pieces form a design or a picture.
I also use origami to create large-scale art statements; for example, “Forest of Lost Souls,” a commemorative hanging consisting of one folded crane for each person who has died of Covid 19 in King County Washington (on display at the Jean Bosch Voice of Vashon radio studios on Vashon Island); and “Migration is Beautiful” – 1000 flying paper butterflies (hanging at the UHeights Center in Seattle).
It is truly my honor to continue to introduce people to this ancient traditional Japanese art form.
Valerie Collymore – February 3, 2023
Valerie Collymore is a modern French Impressionist painter
My artwork aims to make memories shareable and permanent. As a Modern French Impressionist, I place great emphasis on capturing the light of a scene during a fleeting moment in time, expressing my sensations through the use of color, and bringing a sense of movement to the works by using texture, exciting edges and dynamic brushstrokes and palette knife markings. There is an unspoken subtext of healing in all of my work, representing a satisfying merger of my past career as a physician with the final life career choice as an artist.
Rebecca Albiani – October 6, 2022
Whistler and Sargent: American Artists in Venice –
Presentation by Rebecca Albiani
Venice was vital for these two expatriate American painters. Whistler visited only once – after the humiliating Ruskin trial – but his Venetian works revitalized his career, while Sargent considered Venice a refuge from society portraiture and captured the city in oils and watercolors over three decades.
Rebecca received her BA in art history and Italian from UC Berkeley and her MA in art history from Stanford. She spent her junior year abroad and, as a graduate student, was a Fulbright Scholar in Venice and a Graduate Lecturing Fellow at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Since moving to Seattle in 1996, she has become a popular lecturer at the Frye Art Museum, where her monthly series of art history talks is currently virtual due to the pandemic.
Perri Howard – Sept. 8, 2022
Perri Lynch Howard is an artist dedicated to forging new narratives from the front lines of climate change. Working in the context of extreme environments is an essential aspect of Ms. Howard’s practice, driving her curiosity to seek a deeper sense of place, beyond the dichotomy of near and far. Her artwork is a charting or mapping of sites and situations expressed through painting, drawing, sculpture and sound. “is is manifested in her latest series of paintings, “Frequencies,” inspired by studies in the field of coustic ecology and visualizing the shape of sound.
Originally from Marblehead, Massachuse%s, Perri received her BA from “e Evergreen State College, BFA from the University of Washington, and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is represented by the Sea%le Art Museum Gallery. Honors include an Artist Trust Fellowship, McMillen Fellowship, Sea%le City Artist Grant, and multiple 4Culture Special Project Grants. Perri’s art has a global reach through projects completed in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, and in South India as a Fulbright Scholar.
Whistler and Sargent: American Artists in Venice –
Presentation by Rebecca Albiani
Venice was vital for these two expatriate American painters. Whistler visited only once – after the humiliating Ruskin trial – but his Venetian works revitalized his career, while Sargent considered Venice a refuge from society portraiture and captured the city in oils and watercolors over three decades.
Rebecca received her BA in art history and Italian from UC Berkeley and her MA in art history from Stanford. She spent her junior year abroad and, as a graduate student, was a Fulbright Scholar in Venice and a Graduate Lecturing Fellow at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Since moving to Seattle in 1996, she has become a popular lecturer at the Frye Art Museum, where her monthly series of art history talks is currently virtual due to the pandemic.
Ellen Garvens – March 2022
Ellen Garvens is a Professor of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been mixed media, combining photography with drawing, as well as hand tools, sculpture and silver gelatin contact prints. Between 2003 and 2010 she did a research project visiting Prosthetics clinics in the US and SE Asia. These projects have influenced her current work.
Ellen Garvens is a Professor of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been mixed media, combining photography with drawing, as well as hand tools, sculpture and silver gelatin contact prints. Between 2003 and 2010 she did a research project visiting Prosthetics clinics in the US and SE Asia. These projects have influenced her current work.
In recent work she creates a stage to enact unnatural alignments and feats of balance to visually surprise and confront our logic and curiosity. The space created is confusing and the images speak to a process of renewal, of constant questioning and problem solving. They are not answers, they suggest only a sense of movement, seek a balance of chaos and order, and communicate in broad metaphors, i.e., the absence implied by pure black fabric, plants as living but also cut, displaced and out of context, domestic objects and furniture as stand-ins for the mundane, and the string and tape of altering, marking and holding together the delicate and unstable.
Molly Murrah – February 2022
Molly Murrah is an experienced watercolor artist and freelance graphic designer, who has lived and worked in the Seattle area since 1982. She started painting in earnest in 2001 and has studied with nationally known watercolor instructors over the years. Molly has taught classes and workshops at Daniel Smith Artists’ Materials in the Seattle area and at several local galleries and art associations. Presently, she teaches most of her classes online. A Signature Member of the Northwest Watercolor Society, Molly served as President in 2013-2014 and is currently serving a second term from 2020-2022. Molly’s strengths as an artist lie in composition, color harmonies and the representation of light. These skills were greatly influenced by her many years as a professional graphic designer. Now concentrating on her fine art career, Molly still incorporates her design experience in her painting and teaching. Her favorite subject to paint and to teach is portraits.
Chris Witkowski – January 2022
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Chris Witkowski now lives in Port Townsend, Wa. Her pastels, oils and watercolors have been shown in galleries up and down the West Coast for over 40 years and reside in collections throughout the United States. She has created many memorable illustrations in pastel featuring local farming, food and wine for regional and national businesses and organizations.
Chris teaches private and studio classes emphasizing proper use of materials and technique. At the same time she guides each student, no matter what their level of experience, to move towards developing their own individual expression.
She has a BA in Art from the University of Detroit. www.chriswitkowski.com.
Chris’ presentation will be on pastels including the history of pastels.
Presentation by Rebecca Albiani – November 2021
Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) is receiving a much-deserved retrospective beginning November 18 at SAM. Raised in Seattle, Cunningham caused a scandal by exhibiting male nudes early in her career. She developed a clean modernist style in still lifes such as the famous magnolias she exhibited with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston in Group f/64. But she was first and foremost a photographer of human beings. Her final portrait project, made in her 90s, was of people over 90. In her long career she explored a range of subjects and viewpoints, often making stunning images out of everyday circumstances.
Brief bio: Rebecca received her BA in art history and Italian from UC Berkeley and her MA in art history from Stanford. She spent her junior year abroad and as a graduate student was a Fulbright Scholar in Venice and a Graduate Lecturing Fellow at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Since moving to Seattle in 1996, she has become a popular lecturer at the Frye Art Museum, where her monthly series of art history talks is currently virtual due to the pandemic.
Demonstration by Lois Yoshida – April 2021
Lois Yoshida – Sumi-e Artist
Using brush and ink with varying tones Lois explores the flow of energy as well as spirit. She uses simple shapes with minimal expressive brush strokes to convey the essence of her subjects.
See Lois’s website: http://new.loisyoshida.com
Demonstration by Anita H. Lehmann – March 2021
Anita H. Lehman is an artist, architect and teacher. Anita will present the concepts she uses in design in a fresh and exciting way, not as a set of rules but as an elegant language.
We will explore rhythm, emphasis, repetition and equilibrium. Repetition – as a visual motif that can repeat, and change size, or orientation. Rhythm – similar to a beat of music as distinct shapes in a dance. Discover the power of emphasis, as you invite the viewer in and land them into an area of your page. Equilibrium – works to ground the viewer with gravity of sorts. Everywhere there is a mark is a place that can influence the rest of the canvas.
The rule of thirds plays a key part in the process of clarity and coherence. Use the rule of thirds to invite the viewer into the work, clarifying where they enter the art and perhaps where they will linger. As the artist, you can determine the focal point, landing point and anchor.
See Anita’s website: ahldraws.com
Demonstration by Anne Kimble – February 2021
Anne is a mixed media and textile artist. She graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in 2010 with a BFA in painting and printmaking. She also taught sewing, embroidery, and digitizing classes in Seattle before moving to Mercer Island in 2019. She will demonstrate how she combines machine embroidery and free motion sewing techniques with hand stitching and mixed media to create her most recent series of thread paintings.
Be sure to check out Anne’s demonstration on Feb. 4th at 11:30 AM. If you are a member, find the Zoom link in the Dates to Remember section on the first page of the newsletter.
Class will be online via Zoom. The public is invited.
Zentangle
with Anne Hritzay
January 7th, 2021
Class will be online.
Watercolors
with Willow Heath
December 3rd, 2020
Demonstration will be online
Our classes at the gallery have been postponed until further notice. We have monthly meetings with artist demonstrations via Zoom.