Frank Coble and his Bad Kitties joins Lady Nin's Art Festival

About the Artist.

Frank Coble tries to combine his sense of humor with his art as much as he can. He attributes his sense of humor to growing up a middle child in a big dysfunctional family. He says, “The older I get, the more I feel like Rodney Dangerfield.” He hopes to someday have his own depression hotline for people who are depressed about getting old. (Using humor of course.) His biggest claim to fame is that he had his cartoons syndicated with King Feature Syndicate in New York for nationwide distribution to every newspaper editor in the nation. Frank’s other artistic projects include having his art licensed by Recycled Paper Greeting Card Co. His art has also been distributed internationally through the “What on Earth” Catalog and American Arts and Graphics. Recently, two of his paintings were in Edmonds Art Festival which is rated in the top 100 art festivals nationally.

How did I get my start as an artist?

Frank began drawing and competing with his older siblings in art contests at the age of three. Through his school years, he became know as the class artist (besides being a juvenile delinquent.) Later, he earned a degree in Illustration and Design from Seattle Central Community College. A big influence was his drawing instructor Bill Ryan is listed in Who’s Who in American Artist. Frank’s other big influence was painting instructor Ron Lukas. Lukas is now a scenery artist for DreamWorks Film Studio. Frank is greatly indebted to the high caliber training he has had. (His indebtedness also shows in the student loans.)

Notariety . . .

Frank’s artwork has been in over a dozen Northwest galleries from Seaside Oregon to the LaConner. One of his sailing paintings was used as the cover for 48 degrees North Sailing magazine. Frank’s artwork has been collected by many business owners, the Port of Everett and the Virginia V Restoration Foundation and comedian Robin Williams. His paintings are also displayed at the Everett Art Center, Lakeshore Gallery in Kirkland, Affishionado Gallery at Fisherman’s terminal, Serendipity Gallery in LaConner and also represented by three art galleries in Hawaii. Frank has been represented by Kirsten Art Gallery in Seattle and Kenneth Behm Galleries. Frank also has done mural work in Spain, Japan, Oregon and California. He also does 3D animation, standup comedy, songwriting, singing and guitar playing.

Click here to visit Frank Coble and his Bad Kitties!

Artist Jules Anslow joins Lady Nin's Art Festival

Meet Jules Anslow, Visual Artist from the Pacific NW

I didn't always live in a century-old house in the Everett neighborhood of Lowell, nestled among the other artists by the bend of the Snohomish River and midnight train whistles. I grew up in Ohio, the baby of five children, feeding on the creativity flowing from my father and his advertising agency. I've drawn, painted, and created all my life, but my daughter's birth in 1991 inspired me to pursue my passion more directly. I work primarily in acrylic on wood I cut out with a jigsaw, to make three-dimensional paintings, portable mural components and furniture, the style of which could be described as neo-Dada-surreal-pop-cartoon . My daughter, also an artist, continues to inspire me.

I was honored in 2007 to participate in Seattle’s “Pigs On Parade” event. I completed two pigs, one sponsored by and located at the Space Needle, the other sponsored by 4Culture and located at the Pike Place Market.

Click here to view Jule's Work

Cheri O'Brien, Pacific NW Artist joins Lady Nin's Art Festival

Cheri O'Brien is a Pacific Northwest native secretly residing and painting in her humble studio down the banks of the lazy Snohomish River. A self-taught professional artist of seventeen years, her art is inspired by travels with her small family of cohorts, the antics of her dog Jimmy and her many muses both real and imagined. She lovingly brings them to life with a vivid palette and a passion for story telling.

Cheri's work is collected throughout Washington State. As the world sits up and takes notice of this eclectic artist with a unique voice, her paintings are making their way across the whole Continent and eking into Europe and Japan. To this Cheri answers bemusedly “Inconceivable!”

Gallery Exhibitions:
Fountainhead Gallery, Seattle
Jeffrey Moose Gallery, Seattle
Everett Center for the Arts, Everett

Collections:
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle
Washington State Arts Commission 1% for the Arts
Pacific Coast Feather Company, Seattle
Lombardi’s Cucina, Everett

Artist Residency:
Centrum, November 2002, Port Townsend, WA

Public Arts Commissions:
King County Metro Transit
“Pigs on Parade”, Pike Place Market Foundations, Seattle

Awards:
Daniel Smith Art Catalog Cover 2005
Snohomish County Artist of the Year 1998
Cover of the NW Artists and Poets Calendar 1989

“Each painting is a contained one-act play. O’Brien’s figures convey real emotion. Pernicious humor, loneliness and boredom are revealed in bold vividly colored paintings.”
Joe Heim, Seattle Times

Click here to view Cheri’s Work

Lisa Telling Kattenbraker, a Contemporary American Batik Artist, Joins Lady Nin's Art Festival

Meet Lisa Telling Kattenbraker

There are lots of things, some of the things go like this: I grew up outside of Chicago, I've lived lots of places since, they all hold an integral part of me. As do my husband, my children. Other stuff looks like this:
Recently I have been moving a lot - relocating with my family: Down the road, across the country. I keep hoping to look down one day and find my home on my shoe. Nonetheless, my kids encourage me to bring snacks and to remember that this is all a great adventure…even when the cat poops in the car and our house decides that the time has come to shift off its posts. We do a lot of drawing in our little family unit… I adore my children so much (and believe them to possess the utmost artistic talent) and they are graciously sharing their drawings. I put them in my own picture drawings. They make me smile. Quite possibly, they are my home.

We just moved again, this time to Olympia, WA with the 2 children and artist husband and cat. We moved 2 years ago from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. And now twice since then. Nestled nicely in the northwest, we may be content...maybe.

I travel, we travel, we go to art shows, we make stuff, I pretend to be a normal little family and try to keep the place relatively clean. The kids are 5 and 7, I live in a kid house. On bad daysI want to clean this kid house and not step on legos. On good days I think that this chaos reigns supreme, and why the heck not? Our little family is thriving in this vein. The in between reality of it is that most of the time this is tricky...working from home (mooooom! Stella hit me!),supporting ourselves with our art, trying to maintain an element of business savvy, remembering that drum lessons are on Monday, and did Maia do his homework? and we are out of cat food, and there's broken glass on the studio floor. Aren't we all juggling our millions of things? But really, I couldn't have it any other way. And yes, it is chaos, and yes I do like it here.

The process of batik is, in many ways, a contrast to my daily life. Its slow going, it’s meditative. I'm drawn to that process part of it...the journey. I still use the electric frying pan that was given to me over 15 years ago by a high school art teacher. I still use some of my first brushes and tjanting tools. The process and the tools hold history, and time stops while I’m in the midst of it.


Click here to view Lisa’s Work

Art by Norm joins Lady Nin's Art Festival

Art by Norm, a smirk in a world of sighs.....

Norm is trapped somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the seriousness of adulthood. Observing Norm in his environment fills one with whimsical mischief. Disciplined ideals of traditional art are often broken, creating tension in a seemingly peaceful world. Norm will speak to your inner child while eliciting more complex thoughts.

Norm is a smirk in a world of sighs. He rarely alters his appearance – remaining the same while the world revolves around him.

Click here to see Norm's art

Zef Rose, a Pacific NW Artist Joins Lady Nin's Art Festival!

Meet Zef Rose, Pacific NW Artist

Living by the ocean has been amazingly inspirational. I can hear the waves lapping the shore, and the rushing sound of the tides from my back yard, which is really a wooded dune. And I walk the beach behind my house nearly every day. No surprise that my fantasy driven work has turned to the sirens of the sea, the Mermaids and Sea Devas that exist in that veil-thin world between our waking life and our dreams.

I work with concrete. The stuff of sidewalks and skyscrapers, yes, but in my hands it becomes an ectoplasmic medium that takes on infinite living personalities.

The Mermaids and the Devas seem to swim in the garden, or rise out of the ground to shake the water from their beaded and dredded hair. Their glass scales and ornaments glow in the light

of the sun. Their eyes seem alive, truly human, with a propensity to look right into yours. Yet they never fail to express the true nature and texture of the material they are made from. And, as sculptures, they are just as durable.

I am in love with color. So I invented a special formula of concrete that is color-infused. I cast it in color, then I apply it in burnished layers onto the work, so it seems to glow from within with a rich pastel palette that takes its colors directly from the rocks and minerals of the earth.

The human form has been the primary focus of my work since I was a child. Early in my youth I developed a love/fear attraction to human eyes. There was a time when eyes would be the subject of my nightmares. I saw them everywhere -- in the ripples of water, in the knots of trees, in the swirls and soft wrinkles of fabrics -- everywhere. So I spent a lot of time drawing them. Soon they became my friends, and now I absolutely love to sculpt and paint eyes. Lips too are a favorite. So sensual and soft, to make them out of concrete is a feat of contradiction.

Combining the sensuality of human features with the glistening, floppy bodies of fish also serves to remind me of the unity of life on Earth. The theory of evolution notwithstanding, human life would be impossible without the life of the sea. We are all one. I try to remember this unity throughout all areas of my life. I believe that our growing consciousness of the human connection to all things will be the saving grace of our species and the key to our continued survival on this beautiful planet.

To view Zef's work, please go to: http://ladynin.com/zefrose1.html

Seattle Art Museum opens sculpture park on downtown waterfront

Story Updated: Jan 19, 2007 at 2:34 PM PST

By Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) - The Seattle Art Museum opens its Olympic Sculpture Park on the downtown waterfront Saturday, bringing a free cultural experience to local residents and a new attraction for the city's many visitors.

"I like to think of Seattle as a place that is very open - a place that encourages innovation and
creativity, and I think the park has that feeling to it," said museum director Mimi Gates. "It's a park like no other."

The 9-acre park stretches down a hillside between a pavilion a few blocks from the Space Needle and a newly re-created beach on Puget Sound.

A 2,500-foot path zigzags over a four-lane road and railroad tracks, taking visitors past 22
contemporary sculptures. There's not a single general-on-a-horse among them.

The biggest is "Wake" by Richard Serra - five rust-colored steel slabs in 14-foot high curves that make people standing next to them feel as if they fell overboard.

The 39-foot-tall "Eagle" by Alexander Calder perches on a prominent spot in the middle of the park on reddish-orange scythe-like legs that cut through the gray of a winter day.

People driving by can look out their window and see the 19-foot tall "Typewriter Eraser, Scale X," by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Drivers might wonder, what next - a giant bottle of Wite-Out?

The art competes with views of green-and-white ferries crossing Elliott Bay, the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains and Mount Rainier looming over downtown skyscrapers.

Museum director Gates says putting a bit of the natural environment back in the city was one of the park's goals. She says the grass and trees that surround the sculptures create an oasis of calm even as trucks rumble past on Elliott Avenue and freight trains blow their whistles on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks.

"I think it says that Seattle is a forward-looking place ... a place that is going to incorporate the
environment into the heart of the city," Gates said. "It's a marriage of art and ecology."

The city can thank the museum for turning an eyesore into a tourist attraction. The site had been a tank farm where fuel was stored and transferred - not very cleanly. After the facility closed in 1975 the soil was contaminated and the cleanup took years in which passers-by saw only ugly empty lots. A fresh cap of soil, concrete ramps and bridges have transformed the site into an art pedestal.

The park demonstrates the effect of Microsoft money on the city. Only about a fourth of the $85 came from taxpayers. Private donors - many with Microsoft connections - made the park and the display of some of the major works possible.

Former Microsoft president John Shirley and his wife Mary gave a $20 million endowment that allows the park to open to the public free of charge.

Some money also came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.

Mimi Gates is married to Bill Gates Senior, father of the billionaire Microsoft co-founder.

A fountain at the park, "Father and Son" by Louise Bourgeois, is a story in itself. It was commissioned with a $1 million bequest from Stu Smailes, a retired Safeco computer analyst who died in 2002. He stipulated that it be spent on realistic nude male figures. The life-size figures of a father and son will be cloaked in waters that rise and fall, giving the figures only a glimpse of each other.