Artist’s new work reflects happier focus

Artist Brenda Everett grew up in Sequim, Wash., where there was really nothing to do. She created her own entertainment exploring the beach, singing to herself, and making things. She didn’t have a television but she had horses and an antenna that picked up Canadian radio stations. Her father had a Ph.D. in musical performance and her mother was a nurse, teaching her that music and caring for others had value.

Everett went on to college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in social work from Western Washington University in 1994 and one in drawing, painting, and print making from Portland State University in 2001. She worked for many years as a hospital discharge planner in an emergency room while continuing to create art, balancing her roles as nurturer and artist.

In 2001, Everett’s husband found work in Spokane and they moved from Portland to the South Hill. Now Everett nurtures her two young children, plays the piano, and makes art. “In the past, I painted more tragic, emotional, expressionistic pieces because of my personal experiences with work life,” she said, “The constant threat of death and mortality had a deep impact on me. However, in the past 8 or 9 years there’s been a huge shift in my process and subject matter. ‘The sun has come out’ and began to pull me away from all the disease and end of life issues occurring in a hospital. I decided I was done with that, at least for now. I wanted to focus more on the beauty and joys of life rather than the sorrows.”

Her work reflects her desire to capture playful joy and beauty. Her acrylic paintings (she worked in oil before having children) illustrate moments of bliss like a woman reading in the tub with a glass of wine, women at the shore, a woman at a flower shop, two children dancing and spinning. The paintings are representational and impressionistic, fleeting gestures of delight.

Everett also does wood block prints, intricately designed etchings pressed onto paper with ink and finished with watercolor paint. They too show life’s simple pleasures, including people playing music, eating breakfast, a woman sipping tea and another sitting on a pier, a girl smelling a flower, and dogs in the back of a pickup.

Her latest endeavors have been using markers on fabric to eventually turn into art quilts. They are large and small squares of whimsical and dreamy occurrences with the addition of words describing walks through a garden, slumber parties, baking cookies, hopes and dreams.

Everett has shown her work at the Ruby Slipper and the Tinman Gallery, at Spectrum on the South Hill and at a coffee house in Port Angeles, Wash. Her goal is to continue creating and practicing the piano, which she took up in 2001. She hopes to find more venues for her work including art fairs.

What she really wants to do is share the moments in life that embody stopping to smell the roses.

“Part of me hopes to leave some kind of marker on the social commentary of the era I lived in,” she said, “part of me will be saying to future viewers when I’m gone, ‘Look at what I saw, isn’t it lovely? This is what we did with our days. I wanted you to see it.’ ”