Arts Tour Includes Paintings, Much More

Visual Arts Tour

Feb. 3, 5-9 p.m.

If Hallmark can start Halloween in August and introduce Easter bunnies in January, I can tell you today about a few stops on next week’s Visual Arts Tour, right?

Nineteen galleries and art spaces are participating for the year’s first romp on Feb. 3, and most will be open between 5 and 9 p.m. to welcome you. I cruised three of them this week - and just like prowling an hors d’oeuvres table, I was happy with the snack, but really was hungry for more. See you on the tour a week from tonight.

At Corbin Art Center the featured artists are Marilyn McIntyre of Kootenai, Idaho, and Christina Davis from Garden City, N.Y. McIntyre paints animals in watercolor, among them a family of geese, a cutthroat trout splashing in water, a red fox and a fluffy cat. A small flock of individually framed birds works well with McIntyre’s tight style, each painted sans background. She explores her medium’s more fluid aspects in one painting of a blue heron. The bird theme continues with a selection of them painted onto goose eggs propped on little stands, and a promising Fuji block print of a wood duck.

In another parlor, Davis presents a numbered series of botanical monoprints, which are not as stuffy as that sounds. She inks up leaves and stems and vines, and presses them onto half-sheet sized paper for pleasantly random and layered images that verge on abstraction, but don’t quite let go of their natural source. Ghosts of nasturtium and fan-shaped ginkgo leaves mingle with long blades of bent grass in one piece, and another gets some rich, murky depth working with tonal values behind and through a skeletal tangle of roots.

Downtown at Colburn’s Gallery, beads, bangles and baubles shimmer and shine against the red brick of the small loft gallery space where the Spokane Bead Society exhibits “Jewels in January,” held over for the February tour. The Spokane Watercolor Society also will have work for the tour, but it wasn’t up yet when I visited.

If your only attempt at beadwork was at Camp Mo-Tik-A-Tak 40 years ago, you really need to see what these professionals can do. Just about everything here is really in the “wearable art” category, all of it is finished nicely, and many of the pieces feature exotic bits of materials from all over the world - embossed Thai and China silver, deep-blue lapis and antique cobalt, carnivalcolored Venetian millefiori, carnelian, leopard jasper, and even amber nuts from an Indonesian Pochuk tree. Can you tell these people love handling beautiful things?

The variety of work includes beaded and silver earrings, long necklaces - some with little beaded pockets, pendants hung from silken cords, bracelets and pins, and small purses for some enchanted evening. Techniques range from simply stringing beads, to weaving them with metal wire threads, or using them as accent embellishments to rich embroidery, as in Virginia White’s elegant neck pieces made with dense clusters of bullion stitches that glint with small beads of rose quartz and amethyst.

The third show I want to tell you about is work made by an artist I’ve admired for many years, who also happens to illustrate the jackets of books by a favorite author or mine, Tom Robbins. Les LePere’s drawing first caught my eye on the cover of Robbins’ “Still Life with Woodpecker,” and that illustration is among the work exhibited in “There Is Art in Earth” at the art gallery of Spokane Falls Community College.

Unfortunately, the department secretary had just locked the gallery when I arrived, but I peered between the mini-blind slats into the dusk and could make out that camel from “Still Life,” a couple of posters LePere drew for Inland Craft Warnings events, and a plexiglass box crammed full of something on a pedestal.

So, I called gallery director Patty Haag at home to tell me a little about the show that I could relay to you. “I think the imagery is the main factor in his work. His show is kind of like ‘more is better,”’ said Haag. “Les has this uncanny ability to fill his paintings with thousands of little tiny objects - the detail is almost overwhelming to me, and every time I look at them I see more and more in them.

“He uses everyday objects, and sometimes incongruously placed. One of the pieces in the show is actually a case full of small objects from his house - so I think a lot of times the objects he draws he’s not just plucking from his mind, but from his environment.”

And did you know LePere designs labels and pasta for Buckeye Beans?

Yep, those little baseballs and bicycles you enjoyed en vinaigrette began on LePere’s drawing board, and there are some examples in the gallery.

Haag mentioned that the exhibition also includes a few of the earliest pieces LePere made with his long-time collaborator and friend, jeweler Ken Cory, who died last year.

Les LePere will be on hand in the gallery for the duration of the Visual Arts Tour to meet you and informally discuss his work.

Enjoy the tour next Friday, and say hello if you see me. I’ll be wearing my Fourth of July Hallmark lapel pin.