The public is invited to the ninth annual ARTfusion Art Show and Sale at The Cutting Garden Art Center, 303 Dahlia Llama Lane in Sequim. The show, which will be open Labor Day weekend, from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Sept. 1-3, features new work by five of this area’s award-winning professional artists.
Demonstrations by the artists will be held each day. For a preview of the new artwork, more about the artists, a schedule of the demonstrations and a map to the Cutting Garden Art Center, visit www.artfusionsequim.com.
• Jinx Bryant, showing for the first time at ARTfusion, is a visual artist working in both watercolor and soft pastels. Her subject matter in watercolor is very different from her pastel work; her watercolors are expressionistic, where as her pastels are abstract. Her watercolor pieces reject a traditional color palette, instead painting a high key response to landscapes and objects.
The medium of pastel enables her to render the tension, the turmoil of the geologic processes and the forces that exist deep within the Earth. Her work is created to carry the viewer beyond first impressions with a subtleness discovered in the details.
• Clark Mundy is a self-taught copper sculptor specializing in wild salmon and Northwest marine life. A lifelong resident of the Olympic Peninsula, he’s known for his public installations in downtown Port Angeles which celebrate the restoration of the Elwha River and its nearshore, and for his work with peninsula tribes.
Mundy’s hand-hammered copper work includes both wall-hung and 3-D sculptures, and may incorporate hand-carved cedar, abalone or stone. His signature salmon of different species may inhabit weathervanes, fountains, signs or large wall compositions. Other favorites are raven, kelp, rockfish, crab, herring, octopus, frog, sun, moon and Coast Salish inspired masks. Each piece is hammered freehand without molds, finished with a torched or oxidized patina and sealed with automotive lacquer to allow for outside placement.
• In November 2016, Catherine Mix and her husband Tom traveled to Zion National Park, Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. She took well over 1,000 photographs to use as painting references in her studio.
This summer, in addition to completing red rock paintings from her travels, Mix has joined friends around the peninsula to paint its gorgeous landscapes including local barns, hay fields and bold mountains.
• This spring Tuttie Peetz and her husband Richard made a trip to Sisters, Ore., to search for new and interesting wood, bringing back a load of twisted juniper, which is a very unique wood, growing mostly in the high desert of Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. Peetz is very excited to sculpt this wood, as it has blond tones and grows in wonderful patterns.
This year Peetz has pledged to donate one-half of her sales to the building expansion fund for the Dungeness River Audubon Center.
• Paulette Hill loves and is inspired by beautiful precious and semi-precious stones and metals. Artistically wrapping precious metals around the stones in creative, fluid ways gives her energy and at the same time soothes her. She’s been experimenting with adding additional wire in selective segments of her work for a unique, more complex expression.
She recently discovered a source for small semi-precious stones cut in mirror images suited for wire-wrapped earrings. She enjoys the challenge of finding just the right stone focal for the pendant and then wrapping the full set so it is cohesively exciting.
Hill also loves to pull out needle and beading thread and design bracelets, necklaces and earrings, using all kinds of shapes and colors of beads.
