Camano artist shows eclectic range

Driftwood speaks to John Muhler.

The Camano Island painter is a good listener. Back in Sonoma County, Calif., where he taught middle-school art for 16 years, he collaborated on an ambitious portrait project with his immigrant teenage subjects.

First he listened to their life stories. Then Muhler asked how they would him to portray them. A Mexican boy who nearly died, for instance, chose to include the Virgin of Guadalupe because he believes his father’s pilgrimage to her shrine saved him. Muhler then compressed their stories to fit sheets of paper to hang alongside the portraits.

Muhler listens to music, too. Classical music helped shape his early representational landscape paintings. The native music that students brought him to nourish his creativity during the portrait project loosened up his painting.

The pace picked up when Muhler embarked on a bold series of pointillist-like depictions of lush Pacific Coast forests. The process requires that he poke at the canvas like a woodpecker drilling a tree, but he must retreat to make sense of the image. Then he’ll dart back, peppering the canvas with more dots of paint that look like hallucinogenic oatmeal until he runs back again.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “the whole world looks blurry.”

His new “driftwood portraits” reflect the Pacific Northwest’s influence since Muhler and wife Wendy moved here in a pioneering spirit four years ago. He will show them this weekend at the 12th annual Art by the Bay Festival sponsored by the Stanwood Camano Arts Guild.

Muhler’s driftwood almost seems alive. Its lines take sinuous shapes, like fantastic beasts. Gnarled roots coil like tensed muscles; bleached branches resemble the languorous contours of a reclining figure.

Besides these animist qualities, a spiritual quality infuses the shapes that transcends a clump of dead wood. “It’s very important to let the soul of these objects speak to you,” he said. “You’re not just creating a pretty picture.”

Muhler, a study in muted blue in jeans and polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, works in the center of a living room rich in natural textures, shapes and rhythms at an easel surrounded by brushes in all sizes and squeezed tubes of the acrylic paint that is the one constant in his work.

Besides himself, Mother Nature is the featured artist in the Muhlers’ home set among cedars on a steep bluff. Six hundred square feet of glass – single pane, he winces – showcase jaw-dropping views east to the Cascade Range. Granite boulders from Mount Baker form a hearth that climbs to the top of the cathedral ceiling.

Outside, a big bowed branch makes a portal to the front garden. Clumps of gray driftwood rest in a corner of the lush yard patrolled by two cats. A chorus line of natural objects – knotted roots, barnacled rocks, striated sea shells – pose on the windowsill.

Some days, when he steps outside, Muhler thinks the natural splendor is all the art anyone needs. The thought doesn’t last long.

He works on several paintings at a time, all in different styles, a practice that both perplexes and delights his fans. He explained: “Finding yourself to me is not about pigeonholing yourself. It’s about allowing every day to affect you.”

A persistent quality in his work is a broad range of light and dark color; another is a fascination with natural shapes and how they connect with one another.

His latest muse is Celtic music, inspiring more motion in semi-abstract coastal landscapes that are pulling back from the intimate views of driftwood. A painting still on his easel contrasts alder branches against a rough sea and swirling clouds. The rhythmic interplay between the elements sparks energy on the canvas.

Muhler’s affinity for rhythm extends beyond painting. He plays drums, rattles, Chinese temple blocks, a washboard, a bodhran – and paintbrushes -with the old-timey South End String Band. It will perform at the festival from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday.

The rest of the weekend, Muhler will man his art booth. As always, he’ll display an eclectic array of work.