SEQUIM – Laurie Yarnes’ mind overflows with ideas. A conversation with her pounces, catlike, on one passion and then another.
But Yarnes, an artist and engineer, says that these days she has trouble carrying her notions through to fruition, be they new watercolor paintings or architectural designs.
Yarnes is recovering from a traumatic brain injury suffered on May 11, 2007, when an irrigation pipe cover exploded in her face.
Then an inspector for the Cline, Clallam and Dungeness irrigation districts, she was checking a pipe’s air vent near Hogback Road north of Sequim when the cover blew off and struck her forehead.
Though treated and discharged a day later from Olympic Medical Center, Yarnes has traveled a curving road to recovering her long-term memory and ability to see colors.
But this spring, Yarnes passed a milestone.
She created — from bamboo, wood and sculpted koi swimming above the backrest — an art bench, a work sponsored by her mother, Helen Gilchrist.
Yarnes’ bench is one of 11 — embellished by local artists and sponsored by local individuals and business owners — that will be auctioned at Olympic Theatre Arts’ Gala dinner and dance Tuesday night at 7 Cedars Casino to raise money for the community theater troupe’s new main stage.
It bears two expressions, written in Japanese and English: “compassion” and “mind-heart-spirit.”
“To keep it simple was my goal,” Yarnes said — though for an artist with so many ideas, that’s complicated.
But Yarnes said the bench took just a week to finish; she was inspired by her backyard koi pond, a place she goes for tranquility.
“I think [the bench] came out really well, actually,” she said.
Gilchrist added that she knew her daughter would produce something special.
“I told her, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll back you.’ I thought she needed that little push, to do something, especially with what she’s had to go through,” she said.
Yarnes, 55, describes herself as a self-taught wildlife artist.
She painted the winning image, of a pair of blue-winged teals, for the Kentucky state postage stamp of 1996.
And a gallery of snow geese, swans, sea lions, African elephants and zebras, plus fields and studies of flowers, unfolds on her Web site, www.LaurieYarnesArtist.com.
Yarnes now works in her studio in a light-filled, upstairs room of the home she shares with her husband, Todd Yarnes, a Clallam County sheriff’s detective. She designed both the house and the elaborate fountain out front.
Todd likes to kid his wife about her ambitious approach to creative endeavors.
“He jokingly said that someone once asked me to design a wall around their garden,” she recalled, “and hence we now have the Great Wall of China.”
Irrigation project
In another of the house’s many nooks is the server for www.CCDIrrigators.org, the Web site on which state officials and local farmers can monitor water use in the Clallam, Cline and Dungeness irrigation districts.
Some 120,000 feet of pipe run through ditches serving the fields on the west side of the Dungeness River. The monitoring system, Yarnes said, provides data showing whether the users are staying within their water rights.
She finds the interface of agriculture and technology endlessly fascinating.
“I just love this,” she said, checking the site’s minute-by-minute reports.
Al Bruck, manager of the Clallam-Cline-Dungeness piping project completed last year, calls Yarnes “amazing.”
Not only was she “a tremendous asset” during the years of construction –and now the districts’ Webmaster – she is an extraordinary artist, he said.
Yarnes painted an image of a kingfisher on a river, with a flyfisherman in the background, for Bruck’s daughter one Christmas.
“She put it in a beautiful environment,” he said.
Yarnes’ ardor — for birds, water, the luminous blue of lake and sky — radiates from her paintings.
She grew up in Iowa, surrounded by the wildlife she loves, but after more than a decade in Western Washington she considers this home.
“This county means everything to me. I had thought many times of running for county commissioner before my brain injury,” Yarnes said. “I know this county and people so well that I thought that with my ambitions and knowledge it would be a perfect fit.
“For now, I am happy to have made a bench, and I hope it brings needed money to OTA.”
She’s embarking on another big art project: a 5-by-10-foot canvas depicting members of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe plying their canoes before Sequim was dominated by white settlers. Yarnes has begun a search for historical photographs and other images to work from.
But just last week, “my neuro-ophthalmologist told me to wait two years before painting,” Yarnes said.
“I’m one of those people who’s got to keep trying.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
