“Nara”

Ann Fleming spent most of her adult life making things with a very clear function. As a professional potter with a Bachelor’s degree from Portland State University and a Master’s from Lewis and Clark College, she crafted colorful functional ware for collectors across the country for more than 25 years. After a quarter century of the physically demanding work, she was considering a switch to bronze sculpture but had one hesitation.

The artist had spent so much time making functional objects—tiles, lighting and the like—that it seemed strange to be creating art for art’s sake. She soon realized that her new sculptural work did have a function: it told stories.

“Haven”

Ann lives in White Salmon, Washington, but she started her career as a sculptor and raised her son Casey in Oregon. She sculpted her first figurative piece in clay in 2004 and had her first five pieces cast in bronze two years later. In 2012, she designed a helped build a house in White Salmon, where she draws inspiration from the dramatic landscape of the Columbia River Gorge and the animals that live in the forest surrounding her.

“On the Brink”

Almost all of Ann’s sculptures tell stories of humans interacting with nature. “Nara” shelters a deer in her long cloak, a woman gently cradles two birds in “Holding Innocence” and “Perfect Balance” shows a joyful lady gulping down grapes. The women live in a utopia where all beings coexist peacefully and where guardian angels are always there to watch over them.

When Ann started sculpting, she learned that stories could possess powerful utility. Her hopeful tales spread a message of peace.

You can see more work by Ann Fleming here, and get updates on the artist on our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest profiles.

“Nutmeg”

In Chris Deverill‘s opinion, if your art is inspired by animals it’s important live with one foot in the wild. That’s why he resides with his wife and dogs on the edge of a wildlife habitat in Tucson, Arizona.

“I am pleased to have a family of javelina visit daily, along with deer, quail, a seemingly endless parade of bunnies, lizards and chipmunks, and the occasional bobcat,” Chris says of his life in the Sonoran Desert. “One can spend many happy hours lost in their innate beauty, interesting interactions and honest personalities.” For Chris, these quiet moments of observation are so joyful that he feels helplessly compelled to immortalize them in bronze.

Chris grew up in Hawaii and lived in Alaska and Colorado for years, experiences that gave him a deep appreciation for nature. In Alaska he became an accomplished nature photographer and led a team of 15 canines in the 1982 Iditarod Sled Dog Race.

It was only later that Chris tried his hand at sculpting, though he’d always had an interest in it. “It always seemed to me that the timeless, enduring beauty of bronze touches the soul in ways that other mediums cannot,” he says.

“Stretch”

The aspiring sculptor started by searching out the best artists in the country, studying under Ed Hlavka and Joshua Spendlove in St. George, Utah and attending seminars with acclaimed sculptors like Ken Rowe, Jason Scull and Sandy Scott.

Chris quickly found that he loved the process of sculpting as much as its final products. Nowadays he’ll take a table, tools and clay into the wild and sculpt animals from life, watching as they roam around him and capturing their mannerisms in the abstracted lines of his sculptures.

In “Nutmeg”, a jackrabbit is reduced to a highly textured arc of bronze with enormous ears. “Stretch” captures the lanky stride of a mare through a pair of gracefully elongated legs. Many of Chris’ works show interactions between animals: in the whimsical sculpture “The Encounter” a little dog cranes its neck to engage in a staring contest with a gargantuan horse.

“The Encounter”

“My greatest joy is to produce work that sparks in the observer a laugh or a warmth or a recognized familiarity which beckons,” Chris says. “It is that edge or sense of emotion that I hope to impart that draws one in.”

Next time you visit Waxlander, let Chris Deverill draw you straight into his animals’ worlds. Come explore the edge of the wild.

You can learn more about Chris Deverill here, and get updates on his work through our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest profiles.

“Abandon 8″

When Lina Vandal decided to become a painter in 1999, she swiftly left her successful career in advertising and picked up a brush. After that first leap of faith it wasn’t hard to decide what she would put on her canvases. Her subject matter was literally staring her in the face.

Employing acrylics, charcoal crayons, pigments and pastels, Lina paints human eyes, faces and figures immersed in abstract fields of texture and color. She might be relatively new to her career as a professional artist, but Lina’s myriad materials and her masterful blend of figurative and abstract genres attest to a life lived with an irrepressibly creative spirit.

Lina was born in Montreal in 1952. She attended the Montreal School of Fine Arts throughout her childhood and went to art exhibitions with her father, who was an architect. At school she experimented with many forms of expression, from drawing and painting to weaving, sculpture, dance, theatre and circus arts. Years later when she decided to become an artist, Lina enrolled at the Saydie Bronfman School of Fine Arts and studied with some of Montreal’s top contemporary artists.

“Sans Titre”

The artist approaches her canvases as she did her education: as an explorer. She uses brushes and palette knives, but isn’t afraid to pick up sponges and other tools to capture different textures. Though she’s a classically trained painter, she sometimes incorporates photographs and sketches into her work.

Lina’s ethereal figures and faces tie it all together. Some of them stare straight at the viewer, while others drift through the artist’s abstract landscapes as though propelled by the ether of dreams. The figures themselves are strikingly realistic (they’re modeled after people she knows, including her daughter) but it’s their emotional investigations of the color fields surrounding them that interest Lina. These figures are stoic explorers of ever-unfolding universes, kind of like the artist herself.

Click here to learn more about Lina and follow our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts to see her latest work. Also, stay tuned for blogs on our other new artists Chris Deverill and Ann Fleming.

“Paired Cats”

Georgia Gerber went on her first date with her husband near the end of her graduate work at the University of Washington. “That night I told him I dreamed of having my own studio and foundry in a quiet rural area where I could raise a family and create sculpture,” she says. It’s been 21 years since her dream became a reality, and now Georgia spends her days creating whimsical bronze beings with a very special casting process.

 Georgia was raised in Chester County, Pennsylvania and studied sculpture and bronze casting at Bucknell University. It was there that she and her professor William Lazansky invented a new process for producing sculpture that eliminates the need for expensive rubber molds.

 The sculptor starts by shaping a figure from water-based clay, which is then split into castable-sized pieces that are used to create negative plaster imprints. The plaster segments are then covered in wax and cast in bronze. Finally, the metal pieces are wielded together, tooled to produce a seamless bronze sculpture and coated with colorful patinas.

 As far as Georgia knows this procedure is unique to her foundry on Whidbey Island, WA, which she runs with the assistance of two women artisans and her husband. She produces all of her works there, from small bronze creatures to life-size public sculptures of people and animals.

 You can see the tender touch of the artist’s hand in the broad planes and flowing lines of her subjects’ abstracted bodies. She often groups her animals in pairs or trios, emphasizing the way their bodies curve to embrace each other. It’s hard not to reach out and touch their cool, smooth skin, something that Georgia always encourages.

“Snow Bears”

“I like my sculpture to invite an interaction with its audience,” she says. “This is often meant to be a direct physical interaction, but I always strive to engage the viewer’s imagination.” Her public art pieces, which dot the globe from Seattle to Japan, are often placed in the middle of sidewalks where passersby will feel compelled to play with them.

As for Georgia’s smaller works like the ones that populate Waxlander, encountering them is just as much of an imaginative exercise. “I tend to present an incomplete visual narrative,” Georgia explains. “A story is suggested, a feeling evoked, and the viewers find themselves providing details.” For an artist who dreamed up her own foundry, it’s the perfect task.

Come interact with Georgia Gerber’s sculptures at Waxlander Gallery & Sculpture Garden, or browse them online here. You can learn more about the sculptor on our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

“The Proposal”

“You could say I’ve been an artist all my life,” says Laurel Peterson Gregory. It’s true, though she might not have called herself that for a while. She was a mechanic, a master electrician and a building official before becoming a sculptor. For Laurel, one art lead to another.

 Laurel attended Humboldt State University in Northern California for Industrial Arts and worked for years in that field before taking an interest in art in 1993. She started studying classical figurative sculpture and experimenting with different mediums and styles, and by 1994 was showing her work professionally.

The sculptor’s first works were varied in medium and subject matter. She experimented with figurative bronze reliefs, raku-fired ceramic wall fountains, mixed media works in ceramic and copper, and abstract ceramic-and-steel sculptures. The common thread was their impeccable quality, a result of the skills she’d gained from her past jobs.

“Poodle Twist”

Nowadays, the artist has turned most of her focus on a rather adorable subject: animals. From her home in the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range, she sculpts abstracted bronze creatures that dance on their hind legs. Bears bump, poodles twist and bulls engage in a “Wall Street Waltz”.

“I minimalize reality, stripping away non-essentials to reach the essence of whatever it is I’m sculpting,” Laurel says. “Although my form is now highly stylized, I still rely on the fundamentals.”

Laurel’s process is classical in its devotion to the idealized figure. She approaches each piece as an engineer would, creating hundreds of photographs and sketches of the animals before casting them into dynamic motion. These creatures might be performing impossible feats, but their bodies look elegant and their dances effortless.

It’s a task that could only be accomplished by an artist of all trades.

You can see more work by Laurel Peterson Gregory here, and learn more about her on our Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest pages.