She’s done cut-out art and murals, created pigs for Seattle’s Pike Place Market and fashioned furniture.
But the closest Jules Anslow has come to painting any garden art was making those big flowers with the holes in the middle that you stick your face into.
Still, Anslow’s whimsy in her painting called “Bloom” won over Everett’s Cultural Arts Commission, which selected Anslow as this year’s Sorticulture poster artist.
Sorticulture is Everett’s summer art and garden festival that celebrates outdoor living.
Anslow rose to the top out of a field of more than 15 artists.
“This is the first kind of foray for me to be stepping into the garden,” Anslow said.
Anslow was the 2010 Snohomish County Artist of the Year and is president and co-founder of Lowell Arts Works, a gallery in Everett’s Lowell neighborhood that opened in 2006 and has since created a fearless reputation for putting art out there with such shows as “The Breasts of the Northwest” and the science-fiction-inspired “It Came From Outer-Lowell!”
Anslow’s pop-cartoon style can’t be missed either at Lowell Art Works, where one of her giant cut-out signs is adhered to the outside of the building, or in her recent piece “Bloom,” where mod, “flower-power” flowers spring from black-and-white roots shooting from tubes of paint.
Anslow said she wanted flowers at their funkiest and wanted to convey the message: Art is her garden.
“I was thinking if art was growing in the garden, if you planted a garden with paint, what would come out of it,” Anslow said.
Those big flowers with the holes in the middle that Anslow painted way-back-when inspired her while she was painting “Bloom.” But inspiration also came from the earth.
Anslow lives in Lowell with boyfriend and artist Brian Seldt, who has quite the green thumb.
Anslow said she has never grown anything before and talked about how inspired she was when Seldt grew pumpkins from seeds and then made pies from them.
“That totally opens a whole new world for me,” said Anslow, 46. “So I definitely see myself doing more garden art.”
Anslow’s “Bloom” will be used for Sorticulture posters and printed by mid-April. Those posters are displayed in businesses throughout the area and are given away for free at Sorticulture if there are any left over, said Everett’s cultural arts manager Carol Thomas.
Besides adding more garden art to her palette, Anslow said she is going to start silversmithing and perhaps do more standard paintings, as opposed to cut outs, returning to oils as her medium.
As Anslow said, “That’s what art is about to me; exponential possibilities.”
Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424; goffredo@heraldnet.com.
Sorticulture
In its 14th year, Sorticulture celebrates outdoor living and features garden art, rare plants from specialty nurseries, display gardens and family friendly art and garden projects from June 10 to 12 at Legion Memorial Park, 145 Alverson Blvd., Everett.
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