Peaceful.
It’s the feeling you get when you walk into glass artist Mary Simmons’ home.
It’s the sense that comes over you when you glance at a watercolor by Karan Bush.
“I’m all about peace,” said Simmons and it shows in the artwork of both these women.
These two artists have joined their collections at Simmon’s Searose Art Glass studio and are among the new artists participating in the 10th annual Camano Island Studio Tour, which starts today and runs through Mother’s Day weekend.
Simmons is about peace but also all about functional art. A preview of her collection and mini tour of her home studio revealed Simmons’ success at combining form and function to produce wall sconces, lamps, cheese plates and dish sets with soothing color schemes that evoke natural settings.
There’s a dragonfly set where the creature looks like it’s flying through a marsh. There’s the spring flower series whose brightly colored palette evokes the image of tulip fields. There’s the Tuscan leaf collection that combines mellow earth tones and crushed glass.
Simmons held up a smoky-colored cheese plate and talked about the delicate process of cooking fused glass.
“Getting the smokiness on the glass is the difference between holding at temperature for three minutes versus five minutes,” Simmons said of her labor-intensive artwork. “I wanted the color to pop out.”
And Simmons’ way of producing art is made to order for the Camano Studio Tour: She has a variety of pieces to fit in a price range of $30 to $1,000 and she’s ready to take orders. Service for six? No problem.
For peace of mind, Simmons, 51, keeps a detailed matrix of her work because fused glass pieces are cooked at a different temperature for different periods of time.
“It’s all fused glass and I use a lot of enamels and paint and some pieces take 120 hours to get all the pieces fused together,” Simmons said.
Karan Bush’s realistic watercolors are also labor-intensive and she can take up to two months to finish one painting. As a result of her meticulous care, Bush’s soothing floral and garden portraits contain lots of depth, texture and brilliant color.
Her 23 paintings on display during the tour, ranging in price from $450 to $800, include rhododendrons, orchids and garden scenes, including a piece called “Garden Angel,” of a statue Bush saw at Molbak’s nursery.
“I find my subjects all over the place and in my own garden as well,” said Bush, 54, an avid gardener and plant collector who boasts of having one of everything.
Bush plans on doing demos of her technique during the tour. Simmons hopes to have a work station for visitors who might want to make magnets out of fused glass.
Visitors on this year’s studio tour also can see these other highlighted artists: Debbi Rhodes, who continues to weld roadside recyclables into whimsical garden art; watercolorist John Ebner, who has recently changed his style; sculptor Kevin Pettelle, who immortalized clown J.P. Patches and who is in Karla Matzke’s new gallery, and Tom Jensen, whose works appear at Gallery by the Bay and who was recently featured in a big spread in International Artist magazine.
Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com
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