Becky Fletcher brings big show to the Schack

EVERETT — Becky Fletcher loves the big walls in the Schack Art Center gallery.

The Skagit County painter’s large oil canvases are the subject of the Schack’s big spring show, “Essential Gestures,” through April 11. This isn’t the first time that Fletcher has been featured here.

From Schack’s front door looking in, some people will perceive Fletcher’s bold, sweeping landscapes as huge photographs. Get up close, however, and one can see the broad brush strokes.

“The reason I love painting large is because every subject looms so large in my experience, so that to render the wonder and surprise on a small canvas is to reduce the possibility of their startling power,” Fletcher said.

“I wish I could paint them even larger, so that by size alone I could be sure that whoever looks at them might have the same breathtaking moment I try to extend over the whole experience of painting them,” she said. “I never forget how blessed I am to be able to spend all my time on such a feast of form and color.”

More than anything, Fletcher says she is having “way too much fun.”

Fun is essential to the artist.

Now 61, Fletcher grew up in New England and graduated from the Art Institute of Boston with the hope of becoming a children’s books illustrator. At first she made greeting cards for Rust Craft in New England. Then Hallmark recruited her and she moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to make wrapping paper.

“It was a blast, learning how to make a drawing repeat on the same paper,” she said. “I became known as the cute animal artist. After three months, though, I decided to become a freelance graphic designer and move to Northern California.”

That’s where Fletcher started painting glass.

In the late 1970s, she painted the stained glass for a restaurant in the Jacoby Storehouse historical building in Arcata, California, and eventually ended up designing and painting kiln-fired enamel portraits, intricate Tiffany style landscapes and “kitschy” carnival scenes for the internationally known glass company, Savoy Studios, first in Eureka and later in Portland. Her work can be found in fancy restaurants and private homes throughout the country.

Among her jobs with Savoy was an Alaskan wildlife scene on 31 feet of windows installed in 1990 in the visitor center at Denali National Park in Alaska.

Based in Sedro-Woolley for the past 30 years, Fletcher took a class in oils by well-known Bellingham artist Thomas Wood about 10 years ago and the direction of her work changed dramatically.

“He taught me to not be afraid of oil paint,” she said. “After I got started, I thought, ‘How do I get to do this?’ It was too much fun. It’s nice to celebrate this decade devoted to oils with the show at the Schack.”

Collections of wasp nests, wings from birds killed on the highway and many of her photos of landscapes fill her studio, all to inform her paintings.

Dragging huge canvases into the wilderness is not an option.

“I have to capture the moment, the experience and then bring it home to share.”

That is the essential gesture to which her show’s title refers.

Fletcher strives to be true to the light, space and contour captured in that moment by her eye and her camera.

“From the smallest fragment found at my feet to the whole sweep of land and sky I discover the same compelling lines, shapes and forms, the same turbulence caught in stillness,” said Fletcher in her artist statement. “It is through the stark reality of light and space that I blunder, stumbling with astonishment onto splendor.”

One summer Fletcher was the artist in residence at the Newhalem visitor center of the North Cascades National Park.

In the fall of 2008, she installed her dynamic “Cascade Pass” triptych over the door in the visitor center lobby. National park officials called it a fitting “portal to the wilderness.”

“I love the Northwest,” she said. “Living here has been so much fun.”

Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @galefiege.

If you go

See oil paintings by Becky Fletcher through April 11 at the Schack Art Center, 2921 Hoyt Ave., Everett. Admission is free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays.