For nearly 40 years, the annual Art’s Alive! show at Maple Hall in La Conner has attracted crowds to see the finest work by Pacific Northwest artists. Each of the artists in the main floor invitational exhibit offers a number of significant works for sale, and on the second floor, you’ll find a large selection of juried works.
This year, the La Conner Arts Foundation’s honoree is longtime Anacortes artist Alfred Currier. Trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Currier is a master of the straightforward, traditional landscape and figurative discipline of American Realist painting.
Currier amplifies the intensity and luminosity of his subjects to be “more vivid than life,” even as they are peaceful and serene. His compositions of tulips and daffodils frequently include the migrant workers who cultivate and harvest them, whom he supports with his time and contributions. Several of his 9-by-12-inch canvases were completed in the field, but he is best known for larger compositions, such as “My Rainer” or “Shadows.” These are accomplished with the palette knife alone, taking many days to complete, the contrasting colors of thick layers of impasto creating great depth and luminosity.
Ria Harboe’s experience in the stark landscape of Antarctica has colored her art, bringing an otherworldly quality to her work — which includes “Sea of Clouds,” “Shining Through” and “Secret Inlet.” (Image courtesy of Ria Harboe)
La Conner resident Maggie Wilder was nurtured in the atmosphere of the Northwest “Mystic” painters and is a master of many styles. Her contributions to the Maple Hall show are monochromatic and dreamlike meditations on land and water. “Two Stones Singing” (oil on canvas) imagines a dark rock facing across a heave of water toward a fellow presence. “Pilgrims at Bowman Bay” (also oil on canvas) at first glance seems to be an abstraction in sepia, but a horizon line and a tiny boat holding two figures suggests a story.
Ria Harboe’s experience in the lonely and stark landscape of Antarctica has colored her art, bringing an otherworldly quality to her work. Her small acrylic “Shining Through” evokes the mystery of a moonlit road under tree limbs resembling menacing arms; the slightly larger “Secret Inlet” marries bare trees to a swirling sky.
A painter in the medium of soft pastel is Janice Wall, whose “Steelhead Falls” is a dynamic portrait of falling water. Barbara Noonan is also a master in this medium. She continually teaches and studies, formerly in metro Seattle, now on Camano Island. Noonan is comfortable taking her landscapes into the splendid dreamworld of pastel abstraction. Her “Nocturnal Hues” gives us a stark masterpiece of a dark tree on a moonlit field against an indigo sky.
“Border Crossing” is one of photographer Nancy Crowell’s contributions to Art’s Alive! In addition to large landscape images, her work also fetures brilliant close-up portraits of hummingbirds feasting on wildflowers. (Photo courtesy of Nancy K. Crowell)
I feel that same sense of mystery in Nancy Crowell’s superb photography. “Gathering Gold” depicts a farm shed on a prairie accompanied by three perfectly graduated trees, the faraway mountains wreathed by haze. “The Silence and the Light” records a vast distance from wheat fields to glowing, snow-capped peaks. In contrast are her brilliant close-up portraits of hummingbirds feasting on wildflowers.
Lynn Zimmerman’s oil on canvas “Mist in the Meadows” is an arresting composition for the tension created between the tightly bunched trees under a towering, open sky with loosely drifting clouds.
Anne Schreivogl’s work is invariably whimsical, imaginative and delightful. Her compositions enjoyed a solo show in the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2018. Not long ago, I encountered the adventurous artist high up on a scissor lift in Bellingham’s Fairhaven district, brightening an alley with life-sized cartoons of bakers, birds and cats.
Janie Olsen’s “bestiaries” delve deeply into woodland “magick” with portraits of crows, rabbits, weasels, foxes, hogs, chipmunks, squirrels and other creatures, each surrounded by mushrooms, fritillaries, ferns, oak leaves and polished stone. This piece, “Radiesthesia,” can be seen on the first floor of Maple Hall during Art’s Alive! (Image courtesy of Janie Olsen)
A fitting companion to Schreivogl’s works are Janie Olsen’s “bestiaries.” Olsen delves deeply into woodland “magick” with her portraits of a rabbit, a weasel, foxes, a hog, chipmunks, squirrels, a fawn and an owl, each surrounded by mushrooms, fritillaries, ferns, oak leaves and polished stones, in a place where hummingbirds have haloes and arrows divine the future.
I’ve heard visitors in past years come away from Art’s Alive! without having ventured upstairs to see the juried exhibits. Don’t miss them! There are 52 selections by that many artists and these caught my eye: “Downtown La Conner” by Brooke Borcherding; “August on the Flats” by Kris Ekstrand; “Fir Island Morning” by Kent Nordby; “Once Was a Barn” by Cynthia Richardson; the stunning, retro-style abstraction, “Fifth Street Studio” by Jane Francis Lloyd; a delightful oil, “Seattle in Cubism” by Alec Kargopoltsev; and an unforgettable photograph of snow geese, “The Blizzard,” by Sarah Walls. Make your way upstairs, and discover your own favorites.
See the 37th annual Art’s Alive! exhibits, “Good Deeds through the Arts” and “Peace & Solidarity,” from 1–8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 12–13; and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14 in La Conner at Maple Hall, 104 Commercial St. An artist meet-and-greet takes place from 5–8 p.m. Nov. 11. Info: artsalivelaconner.com.
