Wide-Open West Sculptor One Of Many Artists Featured At Annual Show

You can always tell the late winter in Spokane.

The sun reappears.

The river flows hugely.

And come February the streets begin to fill with art lovers. Western art lovers, to be exact.

Yes, beginning Friday, the 26th Spokane Western Art Show will begin its three-day run at the Ridpath Hotel.

Some 108 artists will display their works in media ranging from dollmaking to stonecarving, landscape painting to bronze sculpturing. And Saturday night beginning at 7:15, the annual auction will take place.

Don Walsdorf, owner of Walsdorf Gallery, has organized the event for the past nine years. And, as usual, he is excited both about the artists whose work he is bringing in and the number of buyers he expects will flock around their Western-oriented creations.

“If the crick don’t rise,” Walsdorf says with a laugh, “we hope to draw a goodly number of people.”

One of the artists whom Walsdorf is most enthusiastic about is James Goss, a stonecarver from the Okanogan Valley. Goss, a former radiation field and penetrations foreman at Hanford, lives on a 50-acre piece of land located some six miles southwest of Malott (off state Highway 97).

“It’s five miles of dirt road to the nearest paved road,” Goss says over the phone.

A professional artist for eight years, the 39-year-old Goss began learning his craft at age 19 “from an elderly gentleman who was a soapstone carver. He was sitting in the little town of Winthrop carving soapstone figures, and it just interested me no end.”

Goss has been coming to Walsdorf’s show for seven years now, and each time he’s enjoyed good success. The first time out, he brought 16 pieces and sold 11.

Last year, he brought 21 and sold nine. Still, he says, “The show in Spokane usually does me right well, and last year was my best ever.”

His success last year was particularly heartening, he says, because his style has been evolving from reality-based models to pure abstract forms.

“I’ve done great big pink marble or dolomite salmons and the like, and those type of things have to be controlled,” he says. “In my abstract work, I can basically deal with the rock … and still come out with something that seems to be quite beautiful.”

Goss, who says his recent works resemble “potato chips,” buys most of his marble in Central and Eastern Washington - from his Okanogan neighborhood, from Chewelah and Valley, Wash. The rock he uses to make what he terms his “monumental” pieces (those weighing more than 2,000 pounds) comes from Colorado.

The 25 or so pieces he’ll be bringing to this year’s show will be exclusively abstract. And he hopes they attract buyers, just as a company purchasing stone carvings for Microsoft chairman Bill Gates recently was. Two of Goss’ works now sit on Gates’ Seattle-area estate.

“This show in February is when I make my spring and summer money,” Goss says. “The galleries kick in around June, but right now, from Christmas until May or so, it’s pretty much eat at the neighbors when you can.”

If artists such as Goss depend on Spokane’s show, then the show in return depends on Goss and his fellow artists - some 40 of whom this year are women.

In fact, Walsdorf takes special care to publicize the many women artists who contribute so much to the event’s annual success. Artists such as bronze-horse specialist Gabe Gabel of Sagle, Idaho; dollmaker Kate Hiddleston of Bend, Ore.; painter Shirley Arrants-Cooper of Selah, Wash.

“The Western Art Show isn’t all cowboys,” Walsdorf stresses. “A lot of the women artists don’t get the press the way the fellows do. They’re raising kids and aren’t always full-time artists, but that doesn’t detract from their talent.”

With such talent on hand, the only thing Walsdorf needs now is a little rainy weather.

“Last year our crowd was down, and we estimated it at 30,000,” he says. “The year before that it had been up to 40,000.”

Rain, he says, “is just ideal for what we do. It draws folks out of the yard and off the golf course.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ART SHOW The Spokane Western Art Show and Auction will be held from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Ridpath Hotel, 515 W. Sprague. Auction will be at 7:15 p.m. Saturday. Free admission.