First Friday: "Flora & Fauna"

First Friday, September 7 brings "Flora & Fauna", a mixed media show. I am delighted to have two innovative and talented artists, Julia Gardner and Katie Evans as my guest artists and am very pleased to be showing with them. I hope you can join us September 7 from 6-9 for an unusual and exciting show.

Julia Gardner

Julia was born in Hamburg, Germany, and spent her childhood in Portland OR. She studied art and the history of art in the US, France, Germany, and Italy, earning degrees from Mount Holyoke College, L'Ecole duLouvre in Paris, and Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. In 1996, Julia was recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to Italy. Regionally her work has been shown at CoCa (Center on Contemporary Art) and the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, the Kittredge Gallery museum at UPS (University of Puget Sound), and CenterSpace Gallery and the Eastbank Commerce Center in Portland. Following four years in Seattle, Julia recently returned to Portland where she works out of Troy Studios, creating mixed media artwork with resin. Her work may be seen in galleries and boutiques throughout Seattle and Portland.

Julia creates mixed media pieces with resin. She works on wood panels or canvas often with cut-out "windows" in which she layers images and multiple layers of resin. Each piece is created with precise temperature and humidity conditions that produce an almost glass-like appearance in the final artwork. The work Gardner has created for this exhibition represents a preservation of memory of things beautiful around us every day in both nature and the city environment. Starting with her photography, oil pastels, found objects and other media Gardner layers images of birds, insects, flora & fauna as well as buildings, utility poles and wires within layers of resin (usually 1-4 layers), producing a layer of a story of urban life and nature within each layer of resin.

Katie J. Evans

Katie has lived in Portland, Oregon for 30 years. She has shown work in CenterSpace Gallery and coordinated events by Freegeek, SCRAP, and Tazo Tea Company. She utilizes her penchant for words to implement form for the persuasion of content.

As a child, she:

Collected seashells and insects

Every night, she:

Falls asleep to disintegration

As she walks, she:

Scans the pavement for treasures

She sees things:

For what they become.

Serena Barton
Art was my first love. As a young child, I pored over my grandmother’s books filled with art prints. My early exposure to the work of the old masters and the Impressionists taught me to see. At age four, I won a prize in the local children’s parade for my tricycle float, which was decorated with my drawings. In elementary school, teachers praised the “personality” they saw in my work.

Visual art eventually took a back seat to acting and addictive reading. In adulthood, I became a psychotherapist and mother of two children. I explored a variety of crafts but felt that I had not yet found my medium.

In 1990 I started decorative surface design. By 1994 the pillow covers I was making began to look suspiciously like paintings. After a life-changing trip to Italy the following year, I switched to oil and canvas. Since that time, I have devoted as much time as possible to making art. I have immersed myself in studying art history, and often portray artists of the past in my work.

I continue to experiment with new media. For "Flora & Fauna" I was inspired by some water-damaged art tissue paper I found at a discount supply house. Where the paper had gotten wet, rings of glorious rust, blue, and gold had emerged from the brown paper. I used this paper along with gold tissue, black ink, and other papers to create a series of floral images.