At age 51, Conway resident Lavone Newell, a popular art teacher at Sedro-Woolley’s Cascade Middle School, was well known as a distance runner. With friends from a running club, she ascended Mount Baker in July 1983. In 1985, she rode in the Seattle to Portland bicycle race.
In 1998, Newell looked back to pen a memoir about her dramatic life as a “transplanted 10-year-old Kansan” migrating to Washington with six brothers and sisters, a dad and a mom in an old pickup truck, to a remote woodland on the wrong side of the Skagit River — reached only by a “hand-wound cable ferry.” Seven years later, days after high school graduation, she would marry a farmer and begin a life of “milking cows, raising hay and children.”
But Newell nourished a burning desire to get an education and to create art. At her husband’s demand that she pay for it, she waitressed at the Lyman Cafe mornings, then headed to Skagit Valley College in the afternoons. Later she attended Western Washington University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She became a single mother at age 34 and she “loved it; really enjoyed it.” Next came 23 years teaching art as she experimented with stained glass, jewelry, photography and ceramics, ultimately finding that painting was her “true passion.”
Newell stepped into art history when she hosted the “Barn Shows” (annually, from 1987 to 2003) in her renovated, historic barn on Fir Island. She hung her own work alongside that of nationally known artists, including Guy Anderson, Phil McCracken and Bill Slater.
Her paintings have been collected in the Northwest, New York, Arizona, Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and Sweden. Memorably, she joined a show with her teacher, Peggy Zehring, in New York City.
Newell passed away in 2021, and the Skagit County Historical Museum in La Conner is now hosting a retrospective of her life. “A Life Well Lived” includes many of her paintings, lent by her third husband, Dick Reim. Sadly, few of these are dated. “Sauk Mountain #2 Without Snow” (acrylic) may be one of her earliest. It’s a splendid realist study, the sky especially beautiful — and includes a patch of snow.
“Rebirth Within #2” is among the many abstract paintings by Lavone Newell in the exhibit. Many of the works are not dated. (Photo by Stephen Hunter) “Yellow Poppies” might be a transitional work, before she launched into full-on abstraction.
“Night Dancers” echoes her poppy painting, with silhouettes beneath red blossoms against a mottled grey suggestion of a mountain. “Rising Sun” is a happy abstraction on unprimed canvas, with a network of black lines embracing swatches of light yellow, bright red, true blue and green. “Interpretations of Music VI” follows this approach; black drip lines provide structure to a rose background rising to light orange. “Rebirth Within #1” echoes this style, while boldly introducing sweeps of azure against deep blue and red-orange.
“Untitled #2” (2014), by contrast, is somewhat garish: a red “hat” sits upon an orange circle. Green and yellow-green streamers stretch upward. It’s a restless, jarring composition.
The largest painting in the show is the masterful “Rebirth” in which Newell combines Japanese paper and dried leaves from her garden, painted over and dripped upon with orange-red. This dramatic canvas suggests a cavalcade sweeping left, overseen by a menacing, horned figure.
“Contemplating Taliban Burkas” evokes what appears to be a light-orange diploma set off by pure blue margins with a curling red ribbon below; the effect is lovely and harmonious. I wonder whether Newell was comparing her life experience to that of the unfortunate women in Afghanistan.
“Lavone Newell-Reim, A Life Well Lived” can be seen from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through Oct. 2 at the Skagit County Historical Museum at 501 S. 4th Street in La Conner. Use your GPS if you haven’t been there before. (The view across the fields from the parking lot is spectacular.) Info: skagitcounty.net/museum.
