LINCOLN CITY – Ring in the holiday season with joy and beauty at the Cultural Center, where we will be celebrating new works by three Oregon Coast artists: Sandy Roumagoux, Liz Fox and Janet Webster. Please join us for a festive artists’ reception on Friday, Dec. 1, from 5-7 pm. Combine your trip with a visit to the partner reception across NE Sixth Street, at the Pacific Artists Alliance and Artists Studio Association.
Chessman Gallery: “Between the Tides”
This exhibit features two prominent Oregon Coast artists creating work that interprets the estuaries and tidal flats in the Lincoln County area, making statements about the bounty, beauty and fragility of these places.
This collection of paintings by Sandy Roumagoux were all completed during 2023, exploring the estuaries and tidal flats along the Siletz, Yaquina, Beaver Creek and 10 Mile rivers in Lincoln County. She painted these places during high tides, low tides and moments in between. She is fascinated by this area where the fresh water and sea water meet and the life it fosters. Capturing the essence of this magical space in painting has been an adventure that she has thoroughly enjoyed.
All of the paintings are oil and are on stretched canvas. After painting for over 50 years, Roumagoux continues to be fascinated by the process of putting paint on a canvas to interpret what she sees and feels about the landscape. Her love of the Oregon Coast and especially Lincoln County continues to be a source of inspiration.
Liz Fox has lived on the Oregon coast for most of her life and has navigated a sea of careers since graduating with a Soil Science degree from OSU in 1980. Retiring as a high school librarian in 2020, she’s been a full-time potter ever since — diving into the riptide she’s waded in for over 40 years. Liz and her marine biologist husband, Dave, have two amazing children and three unruly dogs, and live on a former tideland between Newport and Toledo.
Her work is driven by a desire to connect and communicate. She has chosen sculpture and functional forms to convey the wonder and fragility of our ecosystems. Pieces created for this show focus mainly on our estuarine and marine environments. Her “creature feature” sheds light on the importance of key species that will help us turn the tide of ecosystem degradation.
Fiber Arts Studio Gallery: “Pieced Observations”
Janet Webster finds that working with fabric exercises her intuitive side as well as the more logical; construction requires thought while design needs inspiration. She started as a weaver years ago and then moved to quilting as she found she wanted to work more directly with color and fabric. She’s never been comfortable with the precision of traditional quilting, preferring to follow her own approach to work with color and form, choosing curved lines and organic shapes to the rigorously geometric.
Fabric is multi-faceted in terms of texture, color, weight, and reflectivity lending itself to combinations that are not quite collage but also not quilts. Inspired by the work of Nancy Crow, she has taught herself how to work with curves and created fabrics. In recent years, she has also been experimented with mono-printing creating backgrounds for stitching.
The work in this exhibit falls into several groups:
-Inspirations from certain fabrics such as silk and cotton kimono cloth that came from a friend’s old jacket;
-Explorations of the basket weave pattern in pieces (the artist adds: “perhaps I’m the only one that sees the pattern”);
-Variations on a landscape created from the same four pattern pieces in different colors and stitching; and,
-Ruminations on family using old photographs transferred to fabric.
Janet is an Oregonian, born and raised in Portland and living in Lincoln County since 1976. She worked for over 25 years as the librarian at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. Currently, she live on the Newport Bayfront and enjoy the spatial layers of the water, the town, the boats and the sky.
Also on display right now in the shelving area of the Fiber Arts Studio/Gallery are the magnificent gourds painted and adorn by Jane Wilson.
Both shows will be on display through the end of December at the Lincoln City Cultural Center, at 540 NE Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City. Galleries are open from 10 to 5 Wednesday through Sunday, and by appointment. For more information call 541-994-9994, head to lincolncity-culturalcenter.org, or become a friend on Facebook.
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