Artist Profile - David Bjurstrom - Drawing

Known primarily for his work in graphite pencil, David Bjurstrom is well regarded nationally for his imaginative and highly detailed drawings of a broad range of subjects including landscapes, skies, structures, people and trees. In the past couple of years, he has melded his very detailed, realistic style with a very contemporary way of presenting the work, again putting him out in the forefront of what’s possible with the pencil.

Since first inspired to paint and draw while in high school in Klamath Falls, Oregon, he has spent over thirty years exploring various media including watercolor and oils, but he came to settle on working only in graphite pencil. David’s work is now recognized as among the very best and most innovative in pencil. His drawings have earned him top awards in some of the country’s most prestigious art shows including Portland’s Art in the Pearl, the La Quinta Arts Festival near Palm Springs, and the Phippen Museum Fine Art Show in Prescott, Arizona among others.

Artist Profile - Thomas Rude - Artist

Old growth redwood salvaged from beaches, and beams that held up a now-demolished railroad trestle for 100 years, are some of the materials self-taught artist Thomas Rude seeks out for his carved work. Rude takes his cues from such early American forms as the whirligig, but he’s no historic preservationist: rocket scientists, falling roller-bladers, and other exotics of contemporary culture pop up in his work. Using a minimum of power tools and putting in long hours with mallet and gouge, or fine whittling knives, Rude creates work informed by his early fascination with carved and painted carousel horses, circus wagons, and ship’s figureheads, as well as his current dreams and internal processes.

Rude also creates meticulously detailed linoleum-cut prints of animals and people, often with an affectionate, knowing reference to the human condition. These mostly black and white relief prints are strongly derivative of old-world religious icons but are inhabited by more current subjects.

Rude brings over thirty years of woodcarving experience to his craft, including fifteen years accepting commissions as a custom woodcarver. Although he is not a folk artist in the purist sense, Rude strongly identifies with the self-taught and art for the people aspects of the form. Jean Lipman, one of the pioneer scholars in the field of folk art, wrote: “Activity of the folk artists…was a central contribution to the main stream of American culture in the formative years of our democracy.” Rude makes work that continues to reflect this theme. A mixture of American revolutionary spirit gleaned from writings of our founding fathers, and imagined alternate courses of history imbue many of Rude’s polychromed or collaged woodcarvings.

Artist Profile - Jacquline Hurlbert - Sculpture

Jacquline Hurlbert first discovered the power of clay at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in art with honors in 1976. Starting with a kick wheel and a small ball of clay, she became obsessed with the hypnotic spinning process of throwing. After college, she began her sojourn west. Her first stop was Vail, Colorado, where she worked as a ceramics instructor at Colorado Mountain College. Eventually, she ended up in California, where she returned to college, earning her master’s degree in three-dimensional art/sculpture and ceramics from California State University at Northridge.

Returning to get her master’s degree proved to be a turning point in her history with clay. She started using the thrown form as a canvas for elements of the human form. Suddenly, pots were sprouting faces, torsos, and legs. Gradually, the figure superseded the thrown form until the figure stood on its own as sculpture.

In 1993, she moved to the Pacific Northwest, where she continues to work with sculpting the human form. The figures she creates dramatize the struggle for self acceptance through the continuing exploration of the various aspects of what we call personality.