PORT TOWNSEND — When she’s asked what she hopes her art will give people, Shirley Scheier distills her response.
“Joy,” the artist says.
Scheier, who lives in Port Townsend, loves to snorkel, hike, garden and sail. She finds inspiration for her paintings and printmaking in the ocean, the woods and in the flowers in full bloom now outside her studio.
“I have an intimate relationship with nature,” Scheier says.
She revels in the energy and constant change she sees in the natural world.
Sometimes these days, this artist uses a net, soaked in color and cast across a surface.
Her show, “Sifting the Silence,” gathers works from the past four years and adds a number of older works for a little history. The show will fill Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery from Thursday through Aug. 18. There are etchings, intaglio prints, and, from more recent days, images of shape-shifting nets.
Her paintings include “Untethered Breeze,” “Sun Shawl” and “Sway,” while the older works range from “Hymnal” to “Avian Stream” to “Listening.”
The gallery is open from noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays. “Sifting’s” opening celebration comes during the first Saturday Art Walk this weekend from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Jeanette Best Gallery is at 701 Water St.
More information can be found at https://northwind art.org.
Scheier will give a free artist talk at 7 p.m. July 18 at the gallery. It will be an interview format with plenty of time for audience questions about materials and style.
There’s plenty of symbology around those nets in her art, Scheier says.
“But for me, what it’s all about is the collecting of sustenance,” including the spiritual kind.
Nets, for her, gather food for body and soul.
In her “Sifting the Silence” title, Scheier refers to sensations and feelings that appear, via paint and ink, in her art. These paintings and prints are a kind of translation of her inner experience, she says.
Working in her studio, Scheier lets the images unfold. She follows the feeling of being guided, into a stream of consciousness, a conversation with the art as it takes shape.
The Surrealists were an important influence for Scheier, who holds degrees from the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
As an art student, she recalls, Scheier felt excluded from the dominant art community. So she concentrated on exploring materials and methods and went her own way, finding her own voice.
Scheier later won a MacDowell fellowship among other awards, and she has seen her work included in collections at the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the University of Oregon in Eugene and the Peacock Printmakers Workshop in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Now a professor emerita, she taught at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1986 through 2016.
Today her immediate surroundings — the Salish Sea, the Pacific Northwest forests and mountains, her vegetable and flower gardening — are Scheier’s core inspiration for netting the wind, for “Sifting the Silence.”
Martha Worthley, a Port Townsend artist and Northwind Art’s executive director, was immediately struck by Scheier’s work when she first saw it years ago.
“I find it so thoughtful and beautifully crafted and evocative,” Worthley said.
Meg Kaczyk, who will interview Scheier at the July 18 gallery talk, is another local artist who knows Scheier well. Her painting and printmaking evoke transcendentalists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Pelton, Kaczyk said, while Scheier’s art has her own signature markings — subtle and deep.
“I look forward to seeing them within the gallery experience,” Kaczyk added, “where I can just immerse myself and fall into these paintings.”
“Gouache #21” is among the works in “Sifting the Silence: Painting and Printmaking by Shirley Scheier” at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery.
