Get your applications in.

Only one month left to get your applications in for the 2012 Art In The Pearl Fine Arts and Crafts Festival on Labor Day Weekend. Our deadline is February 15th at Midnight Pacific Standard Time.

2012 Jurors Announced

Announcing our Jurors for the 2012 show:
John Benn / Ceramic
Carla Fox / Metalsmith, Jeweler
Donna Guardino / Gallery Owner - Guardino Gallery
Lisa Telling Kattenbraker / Fiber, Batik
Mary Lou Zeek / Gallery Owner - Mary Lou Zeek Gallery

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.

Artist Profile - Grayson Malone - 3D Mixed Media

With a background in the arts, architecture, building, landscape, and furniture design, Grayson Malone leans towards geometric and simple forms. Her cast stone and concrete mixed media pieces are infused with atomized metals, found objects, up-cycled and re-cycled materials. She first became interested in concrete as a material because of its ability to mate with and absorb many other materials. In particular, metals. She wanted to see what would happen if she integrated very finely ground particulates of bronze, copper, iron or steel, directly into dry cement. After a few years of experimentation she refined the mixture into a hybrid of metal and concrete creating an interesting visual and physical marriage of the two materials. The appearance of her metal -infused concrete forms can best be described as bronzed metallic stone, as the atomized (finely powdered) metals co-combine with cement to form a completely separate, distinct medium. The result is a much harder compound able to be polished to a fine satiny gloss or honed to an eggshell matte finish.

Artist Profile - Jim Engelhardt - 3D Mixed Media

Jim Engelhardt creates unique and individual one of a kind tables, wine cabinets, display cases, and pedestals. Each piece is crafted from architectural elements he salvages from antique stores, flea markets and salvage yards.

The design of each creation is usually dictated by the architectural element he chooses, but may change as the work progresses. Sometimes he has a design in mind, then chooses the element that will most enhance the piece. Each of his creations is glued, nailed, and biscuit jointed for strength. He takes great care to ensure that no rust, weathered paint, moss, or weathered portions of wood are disturbed.