Perfect Platters Karen Mobley’S Ceramic Pieces Take Center Stage

Karen Mobley wears three hats: visual artist, poet and director of the City of Spokane’s Arts Department.

Her talents as a visual artist will be under the spotlight at the Spokane Art School Gallery beginning Tuesday.

More than 30 of her most recent paintings, collage drawings and ceramic platters are featured in “Maps, H2O, Trees.”

The hand-painted platters are a new addition to Mobley’s body of work.

“I had so much fun painting the ceramic backsplash in my kitchen recently that I wanted to keep working with commercial glazes,” she says.

“For this show I purchased a dozen 22-inch pre-cast platters and decorated them using a similar vocabulary of shapes and maps that exists in my drawings and paintings.”

The platters feature plant and animal motifs, and abstract images of water and its energy.

“I’m using more of a Caribbean pallet that comes from sailing in other parts of the world,” Mobley says. “No bodies of water in Eastern Washington have those shades of turquoise.”

Mobley approaches her collages technically, as if they were paintings.

“The collage elements are selected partly because they are wood or piece of map, but more importantly they are fields of color and texture,” she says. “I am using it more like red out of a tube than as the object itself.”

Mobley refers to her series of large map collages as “Teaching Geography.”

“It’s a goofy name,” she says. “There is really no way you could learn anything about geography from looking at them because they involve taking pieces of maps from unrelated places and putting them together to make a formal or visual connection.

“They are a stitch because quite often South America is juxtaposed against Cameroon, which is juxtaposed against someplace in the Idaho wilderness,” Mobley says. “I call them `unstable cartography.’ I wanted to answer the question, `What if one took all these places and jammed them all together, what would that say?’

“It’s about geography and abstraction, and a little bit about the idea that all places have similar things in common.”

Last year Mobley exhibited her work at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyo., and at Eclectic Electric in Spokane.

The Spokane Art School Gallery is located at 920 N. Howard, across from the Arena. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday.

The free exhibit runs through June 30. An artist reception June 22 from 5-9 p.m. is part of the Live After Five summer happening, when many downtown galleries are open and special music events take place.

In other galleries

* Continuing through May 31 at the Riverbend Art Gallery in Post Falls are works by metal artist Quint Norlander and expressive oil painter Dianne Munkittrick. The gallery is located at 4069 Riverbend Ave. Summer hours are 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. on Sundays.

Painter Robert Gilmore is the featured artist through June 16 at the Cat’s Eye Gallery, 225 W. Indiana. Referred to as a “colorist,” Gilmore creates primarily in oils on canvas. A variety of other regional artists can also be seen at the gallery from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Husband-and-wife artists Lisa Nappa and Roger Ralston are featured guests at the next First Friday Salon, June 2, 7-8 p.m. at the Cheney Cowles Museum Art at Work Gallery, 123 N. Post.