Painting Her World With Expression

FROM IN LIFE p. D4(Thursday, July 13, 2000) Correction Last week in this space the hours for the Lorinda Knight Gallery were listed as Thursday through Saturday. The correct days are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

For those who haven’t gone to the lake this week, there are several gallery openings and opportunities to meet the artists.

Veradale painter Christine Kimball, known for her large, colorful abstract landscapes and intriguingly feminine still lifes of cupboards, is the featured artist this month at the Cheney Cowles Museum’s Art at Work Gallery.

“I’m very expressive with the way I handle my paint,” says Kimball. “I’m in love with color and layers and layers of gestural brush strokes.”

Kimball says she strives to project beauty in all her paintings: “I want the viewer to be able to look at a painting over and over again and feel good about it.”

Trained in a formal, classic tradition, Kimball began pushing her style into abstraction while attending the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the late ‘80s.

“That experience allowed me to free up and start changing,” she says.

She further investigated her approach to painting in 1994 during a three-month art fellowship in France, where she was again freed from distractions and could focus on a series of formal garden abstracts.

“I like working in a series, to really explore a subject and take it as far as it can go,” says Kimball.

Kimball will discuss her current series, “Orchards and Meadows,” during the First Friday Salon on Friday at the gallery from 7 to 8 p.m. She also plans to talk about some of the practical business aspects of being an artist in the Inland Northwest.

Art at Work Gallery is located at 123 N. Post; regular gallery hours are Monday-Thursday and Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. For the salon, gallery hours are extended on the first Friday of each month until 8:30 p.m.

Lorinda Knight Gallery

Much of Gail Grinnell’s mixed media collage work, opening Friday at the Lorinda Knight Gallery, is heavily influenced by her “domesticity,” says the Richland native.

With her studio in her home and an 18-year age span between her oldest and youngest children, Grinnell finds her artistic rhythms mimic domestic work. She combines how she lives with what she knows about painting and printmaking to create delicate fabric and paper hangings.

“For me, the motions of making art are the same as the motions of everyday living,” says Grinnell. “Buttering a piece of bread is the same as gluing paper onto a square of silk.”

She frequently hangs freshly painted collage pieces on clotheslines to dry - just “like doing laundry.”

The “laundry” hanging this month is a body of work called “Dependence” - more than a dozen pieces of transparent silk organza, layered with woodblock imprints, collages and paints. The work features strong vertical and horizontal lines of varying widths, imaginative shapes and a riot of color.

To add another dimension, Grinnell suspends her work a short distance from the wall so that a shift in air currents can play with the delicate constructions.

Grinnell lives in Seattle and is a featured artist this month in the Distinguished Alumni Art Exhibit at the University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery. Last year her installation “Out of Whole Cloth” was exhibited at the Spokane Art School.

Meet the artist at a reception Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery, 523 W. Sprague. Regular hours are Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

In other galleries

Opening down the street from the Lorinda Knight Gallery at the new “E” Gallery and Coffee House is the first public showing of work by abstract artist Robert Clark. Influenced by Picasso, Clark is showing drawings and paintings on both paper and canvas.

An opening reception takes place Friday from 6 to 10 p.m. at the gallery, 410 W. Sprague. The exhibit runs through Aug. 6; regular hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

There’s only a couple of weeks left to catch a glimpse of a few oils on canvas by Gonzaga University’s master painter Robert Gilmore. A GU professor of art since 1968, Gilmore is showing at the Cat’s Eye Gallery, 225 W. Indiana, through mid-July. Summer hours are from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Sculptural forms by David Govedare are on display during July at the Entree Gallery at Priest Lake, Idaho.

Best known locally for his sculpture “Joy of Running Together” in Riverfront Park, Govedare has installations and public art pieces across the country.

For this showing, “Rockin’ and Weldin’ in the New Millennium,” Govedare teamed with his son, Forest, to create stone and steel objects.

A second gallery display is of sculptural works by Spokane artists Kay O’Rourke and Craig Brudnicki. “Wake Robin Sculptures” features colorful, whimsical garden gates, birdhouses and functional artwork for the home and yard.

Open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, the gallery is located at 1755 Reeder Bay Road, two miles east of Nordman, Idaho.