It takes painter Rene Flynn-Federspiel no time to explain why the country of Italy, a place she’s visited 13 times, is her muse.
“We slept on the train and woke up to the best cappuccino and wonderful sweet rolls, and I saw this Italian man working in his vineyards in Venice, and it was my first view of Italy, and he had pulled his swimming trunks down to get the sun on his butt and I thought, ‘These look like my people,’” she recalled.
Ironically, though Flynn-Federspiel loves the Italian people, she leaves them out of her paintings, preferring instead to focus on the stunning architecture and that particular golden light that spreads across the buildings as if they were dipped in honey.
“The golden light of Italy is so compelling,” Flynn-Fedespiel said. “The shadows here are blue or gray and purpleish. There, there is gold in the shadow, in the sunlit surfaces as well.”
Flynn-Federspiel’s fetching oils are among the offerings at this year’s Holiday Show, presented by the Arts Council of Snohomish County. The show is free at the council’s gallery inside the Monte Cristo Hotel in Everett.
The group show features more than three dozen local artists and includes paintings, photographs, glass and ceramics.
Flynn-Federspiel has four pieces in the show, the smallest a 24-by-24 view of the Amalfi Coast as if looking through a window at the water and the sky and “maybe into the future,” the artist said.
Another artist in the show is potter Marguerite Goff, whose raku, or clay-fired, pots are heavily inspired by icons of the Puget Sound area, particularly salmon.
But Goff also has blended the area’s natural elements with a Japanese influence, submitting her kimono collection in which the clay salmon or forest images are fused onto a kimono shape that is hung on a wall.
Goff came to do lots of salmon in her work after producing a mural eight years ago for a school in British Columbia, and has since been commissioned to do large pieces with salmon in them, such as the mural she did last year for Top Foods in Snohomish. She also did the mural outside the city hall plaza in Arlington.
“Without intending to, I’ve become more known for salmon than I have planned,” said Goff, of Stanwood.
“Salmon is a beautiful strong animal, a wonderful animal to work with,” Goff said. “All the metaphors are things that I’m thinking of when I’m working with them … to feeding us, coming back to spawn, the caring for the next generation, the health of our environment.”
Another artist in the show is Snohomish artist Els VandenEnde, who has worked with glass since she began in stained glass in 1983. One particular piece in the Holiday Show is a black glass bowl edged in a rainbow of colors arranged to mimic the traditional fabric of Ghana.
Other pieces in the show include wonderfully colorful platters that stand on small rounded glass feet. VandenEnde has labeled these sushi plates.
“The big thing for me is the colors. I have one of every color of the bowls I make, which is a lot,” said VandenEnde, 49. “My speciality, my talent is putting colors together.”
Painter Flynn-Federspiel certainly would agree that color is key in her paintings of Italy. And those colors and images of villages she has visited ignite people’s imaginations and memories, and that’s why, she said, they are drawn to her work.
“It brings something back to them, they’ve either dreamt or wished to experience,” said Flynn-Federspiel, 59. “People have also appreciated the fact that I don’t put other people in my work, which leaves more room for people to go in (with their imagination) or it reminds them of a trip they took, and it’s very meaningful to bring that memory back.”
Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.
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