Artist displaying a visual dialogue

Willow Rosales learned early about creativity and thinking outside of the box.

She grew up in Rice, Washington, where she had an encouraging and progressive art teacher. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Western Washington University to focus on art, but a difficult professor had her rethinking her choice.

“I was going to change my major but then I took a printmaking class with a professor who encouraged and challenged me,” she said.

In 2005, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree. She designed her major, Printmaking: a Visual Dialogue to Society, through Western’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

With art-related jobs few and far between, she got a veterinary assistant certificate to support her creative habits with a day job and, by night, she frequented art shows, eventually joining an art collective in Bellingham called Jinx. She also led print-making workshops and exhibited her work.

“Things change rapidly,” she said. She got married and then moved back to Rice to care for her grandmother.

Rosales started participating in art festivals including Artfest, Bazaar, and Terrain in Spokane. Now, she lives in Spokane, works as a veterinarian assistant, and makes art in a converted bedroom. She carves images into zinc, linoleum and wood, and then rolls ink across the surface before using a printing press or hand pressing the images.

Her intricately carved images include women deep in thought, a figure beckoning the sun, a child on a parent’s back, the intense gaze of an animal, and food being harvested and preserved. Her work is influenced by the seasons, nature, people, animals, and the inner workings of her own emotional and spiritual self; a form of visual self-discovery.

Art is “my vessel for communicating about my internal reactions to the outside world, and it’s in the moments of creating where I am completely alive and I understand who I am,” she said.

Rosales recently set up a display of her work at Sandpoint’s art festival. On Saturday she will be sharing her work at the third annual Art, Music, and Beer Festival in the parking lot of Hopped Up Brewing Co., 10421 E. Sprague Ave. On Sept. 4 Rosales will join the group La Resistance in an exhibit at Jones Radiator, 120 E. Sprague Ave.

“When I’m creating, nothing else really matters; time becomes irrelevant,” Rosales said.