studio tour Archives - SAM Stories

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Enid Smith Becker

Seattle Art Museum on Jul 3 2024

In the Studio highlights the private workspaces of local artists represented by SAM Gallery. For more than fifty years, SAM Gallery has supported artists from across the Pacific Northwest and provided private and corporate clients with a wide range of services, from purchasing their first work of art to building extensive collections. To browse a featured artist’s entire catalogue of artwork available for rent or purchase, visit SAM Gallery on the lower level of the Seattle Art Museum.

Artist Enid Smith Becker creates semi-abstracted landscape paintings that capture a mood or an emotion. Her cozy, sun-filled studio sits in the middle of a forest on the outskirts of Seattle. When we visit, the unfinished artwork on her easel depicts a beach scene with blue skies. At the bottom, the ocean’s waves are layered atop the primary scene. For Becker, this painting evokes hope. Her works serve as a bridge between viewers and the natural world.

Becker begins each new artwork by searching through her source photographs, selecting a photo, and making a quick sketch. She paints the background landscape first and then incorporates panels or layers that overlap the landscape, offering multiple views of the same subject. Her painting process begins more loose and abstract, but becomes more intricate as details emerge. Some paintings begin with a certain location and change as she paints. For example, when she began a painting from a photograph of the Skykomish River Valley, she decided the mountains in the photograph were too angular, so she softened them. Becker wants the viewer’s eyes to continuously move and explore the space in her paintings. She works to capture the nuance of color as it is seen in the world, most recently blending five colors of green to accurately capture the color of some trees she was painting. As she paints, she steps back or rotates her paintings, to see the sense of movement and balance in the work.

Becker’s creations focus on nature and the environment. She believes that art can remind people of their connection to the natural world and encourage them to protect the beaches and forests they love. See new artworks by Enid Smith Becker online or by visiting SAM Gallery.

Stay up-to-date on all that’s happening at SAM Gallery by following us on Instagram @atSAMGallery.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Alborz Kamalizad.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Nichole DeMent

Seattle Art Museum on Mar 6 2024

The sun shines into Nichole DeMent’s beautiful West Seattle studio on the winter day of our visit. DeMent has spent eleven years in this space, creating mixed media encaustic works. Her encaustic artworks are characterized by their intricate layers, producing depth and complexity.

“I really fell in love with layers because life is complicated,” she said. “Layers portray my understanding of the world in a way that I hope helps bring peace.”

Nearly three decades later, DeMent’s process still begins with photography. When she is taking photographs, there are instances when she has a clear plan and others when she is open to wherever her intuitive process leads. She most commonly photographs people, animals, and botanicals.

After printing her photographs, she fuses them to wood panels using the basic ingredients of the encaustic medium: beeswax, resin, and pigment. She then brushes layers of the encaustic over her photographs, incorporating layers of organic materials including rust, tea, and mica flakes. Once there are enough layers of encaustic, she affects the layers using heated carving tools, creating texture and movement. She wants the surface to “have its own history with scars that are representative of the image and very organic.”

One artwork that illustrates her multi-layered process is part of a series titled Inner Sanctum of Pech Merle (25,000 BCE). Hanging on her studio wall, this large-scale work depicts a horse in profile, in the midst of a step forward. DeMent took the photo of the horse on a colleague’s farm in Snohomish, WA. When the owner let all of the horses out, DeMent took photos while standing in the center of the field. The horse depicted in this work, she said, ran straight toward her before turning to its side to avoid colliding. DeMent views the horse as a strong, powerful, and beautiful animal who carries others when needed.

In closely examining this artwork, its intricate details and layers begin to reveal themselves. The complex artwork’s deeper layers incorporate pages from books embedded in the wax. Meanwhile, sepia drawings inspired by prehistoric cave paintings are set amongst the layers. DeMent studied prehistoric art and architecture in college, visiting many caves during travels abroad. She brings the inspiration from ancient paintings of spotted horses seen in Pech Merle, a prehistoric art site in France into this work. These subtle details, she said, “leave little treasures for the attentive viewer.”

View Nichole DeMent’s available artworks at SAM Gallery or online. Stay updated on all that’s happening at SAM Gallery by following us on Instagram at @atSAMGallery.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Chloe Collyer.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Joe Max Emminger

Seattle Art Museum on Nov 13 2023

In the Studio highlights the private workspaces of local artists represented by SAM Gallery. For fifty years, SAM Gallery has supported artists from across the Pacific Northwest and provided private and corporate clients with a wide range of services, from purchasing their first work of art to building extensive collections. To browse a featured artist’s entire catalogue of artwork available for rent or purchase, visit SAM Gallery on the lower level of the Seattle Art Museum.

You can find artist Joe Max Emminger painting in his studio in Magnuson Park every day. His studio is located in Building 30 in the park’s campus. This building lives a new life as SPACE (Sand Point Arts and Cultural Exchange), after its construction in the 1930s for the Navy administration. The commander of the base once visited Emminger, who now paints in his previous office.

Sunlight enters the studio through large windows, shining onto Emminger’s wall where he has mixed, tested, and blended paint for the last seven to eight years. He considers the wall a big palette, where he can mix paint while he’s working on paintings that are attached to the wall. He works close to the paintings, believing that “creating things is a messy business, it leaves the debris of creation behind.” The large painted wall contains hundreds of patches of bright colors in splotches, circles, shapes, and drips. It serves as a beautiful archive of Emminger’s artworks and process.

Emminger’s artworks are based on things he sees, things he cares about, and stories in his head. Each painting has a story with characters that show up. He puts the characters into paintings, then creates new characters to add in and expand the story he wants to tell. He “starts throwing some color at the work, adds it, and adds more until it makes some sense.” He says his process is like moving furniture, a continuous cycle of balancing colors to bring something new to life. Many of his artworks include recurring characters, cats, birds, butterflies, and familiar sites from around Seattle such as Pike Place Market or Gasworks Park.

View Joe Max Emminger’s available artworks at SAM Gallery or online. Stay updated on all that’s happening at SAM Gallery by following us on Instagram at @SAMGallery.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Chloe Collyer.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Elizabeth Gahan

Seattle Art Museum on Aug 1 2023

In the Studio highlights the studios and private workspaces of local artists represented by SAM Gallery. For nearly fifty years, SAM Gallery has supported artists from across the Pacific Northwest and provided private and corporate clients with a wide range of services, from purchasing their first work of art to building extensive collections. To browse a featured artist’s entire catalogue of artwork available for rent or purchase, visit SAM Gallery on the lower level of the Seattle Art Museum.

In the heart of Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood sits artist Elizabeth Gahan’s intimate art studio. There, hyper-saturated paintings of layered natural and built environments line the white walls. With translucent and fluid colors, crisp architectural lines, and dense textures of organic forms, Gahan’s paintings display the delicate relationship between cities and neighborhoods as ecosystems and the balance they need to thrive.

Gahan’s works are a puzzle as she develops the foreground and background separately before mashing them together. In the background, each work begins with recognizable urban imagery. To Gahan, these images serve as “a jumping off point for a creative conversation.” The images are then edited and manipulated through layers of artistic elements that effortlessly illustrate the intricacies of our natural environments. At this stage, the works look fluid and ephemeral, composed of bubbles that she said, “act as the first domino, impacting the rest of the painting.”

From these beautifully imagined atmospheric forms, Gahan adds the foreground: architectural elements drawn from existing environments. In her most recent series, the structural forms are inspired by buildings found in the Bay Area and Seattle. These added elements are familiar with their simplistic building block forms and clear lines that emphasize the geometry found in both nature and human-designed architecture. Plants, trees, and organic forms are layered atop these structures in a variety of media and textures, including acrylic gel and enamel.

When we stopped by her Georgetown studio for a visit in June, Gahan was in the process of experimenting with spray paint, an artistic medium new to the artist. This additional layer, she explained, serves to further blur the distinction between the natural and built environments emphasized across all of her paintings. No matter how many layers Gahan chooses to incorporate in a work, the final result always makes clear the interconnected nature of our urban ecosystems.

View a few of Elizabeth Gahan’s available artworks at SAM Gallery or online. Stay up to date on SAM Gallery by following @atSAMGallery on Instagram.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Alborz Kamalizad.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Kalina Wińska

Seattle Art Museum on May 1 2023

Brightly colored artworks draw in and engage visitors in Kalina Wińska’s art studios. She works in a sunny room in the Equinox Building in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood and focuses on larger installation projects in a studio in Capitol Hill. In each of these spaces, Kalina’s colorful artworks create imagined worlds that explore our rapidly changing climate.

Kalina begins by pouring brightly colored media and water on yupo paper on the floor of her studio. The free-flowing quality is essential, as the media dries naturally, leaving beautiful patterns. Kalina covers areas with blocks of flat color in gouache, creating a juxtaposition of organic forms and hard edges. Kalina then begins a labor intensive and time-consuming process of layering small handmade marks. Through this meditative process, the marks accumulate to create larger shapes that resemble clouds or imagined landforms.

In creating these imagined worlds, Wińska explores how climate change is impacting our weather and adding unpredictability. She works to make this invisible concept visible for viewers, through her swirls of color and obsessive layering of marks. The tiny marks began as concentric circles of targets and have evolved into the repeated chemical symbols for the greenhouse gases methane (CH₄) and carbon dioxide (CO₂). The symbols are repeated thousands of times within a single work, creating larger shapes that resemble clouds, toxicity, or pollution. Each work unfolds into something unpredictable, as Wińska allows the materials to speak for themselves and develop their own layers of meaning.

See artworks by Kalina Wińska in person at SAM Gallery or online. Learn more about SAM Gallery on Instagram @atSAMGallery.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Chloe Collyer.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist Joseph Steininger

Seattle Art Museum on Mar 2 2023

Most visitors to Seattle artist Joseph Steininger’s Pioneer Square studio are mesmerized by his walls of spray paint. On one wall, the full cans are sorted by tone and color in an organized grid system. On the opposite wall, empty cans fill open spaces, surrounding completed works. Like Joseph’s artworks, the studio’s colors are vibrant and draw attention.

Steininger’s artistic process begin with a photograph. All of his paintings originate from photos he has taken in cities around the world. Many capture landscapes in Seattle and New York City, but others include scenes from cities such as London, Florence, and Portland. For his next big trip, Joseph plans to travel to and photograph Tokyo, Japan.

Once he has decided on a photograph, Steininger digitally designs stencils based on his selection. Each artwork typically requires 14–24 stencils. He digitally color matches the stencils, prints them, and cuts them by hand with an exacto knife. Cutting the stencils is time intensive, taking up an approximate 95% of time it takes to complete a single canvas. He spray paints the stencils on panels, one layer at a time, to build an image with depth and intricate detail.

Steininger’s work is inspired by street art culture and his background in printmaking. He began his art career as a relief printmaker and implements these methods across his artworks. His art often shows urban scenes, including graffiti, infrastructure like bridges and water towers, and rail yards or train stations. Up next for the artist? Commissions for the Washington State Convention Center and Avenue 55. Plus, he’ll be participating in the celebration of SAM Gallery’s 50^th Anniversary in November 2023.

Check out his artwork in person at SAM Gallery or online and discover more featured gallery art and artists by following @AtSAMGallery on Instagram.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Specialist

Photos: Chloe Collyer.

In the Studio with Anthony White

Lily Hansen on Sep 12 2022

Hiding within the busy city streets of Pioneer Square sits an intimate artist’s studio unlike any other. In this small, square room, SAM 2021 Betty Bowen Award winner Anthony White creates mesmerizing paintings crammed with products, name brand logos, and digital icons that assess our increasingly intertwined analog and digital lives.

“It’s my happy place,” says White. “It’s nice to have a space that’s reserved only for creating art.”

White spends most of his days in this space. It’s quiet and personal, with an ever-rotating array of his creations adorning the walls. It’s here that many of his completed artworks sit before they’re delivered to their next—or final—destinations. In the back corner sits a small desk, a focused space where White first sketches his paintings. Pink, brown, blue, green, purple, yellow, and more, endless rolls of polylactic acid—White’s medium of choice and the same material used in the 3D printing process—occupy the other corner, adding a pop of color to the room. A black leather couch hides next to the door, a place for guests to sit, talk, model.

“I don’t have many guests,” says White. “It’s only when I’m collaborating with someone or asking a friend to model that someone else is in here with me. Otherwise, it’s just me and my art.”

Where White spends the most of his time, however, is in the center of the room. With an unfinished canvas sitting on a sawhorse, it’s here that White paints. With his headphones in, White will work anywhere from eight to 10 hours a day. Circling the canvas, he is precise and careful with each line of polylactic acid he paints.

From his studio to museum walls, experience Anthony White’s breathtaking artwork on view in Anthony White: Limited Liability at SAM’s downtown location through January 29, 2023. Meet the artist and hear from him in SAM’s galleries on Thursday, September 15 at 6:30 pm as we celebrate the opening of White’s first solo exhibition at SAM. There’ll be a public reception in the Susan Brotman Forum with a bar and music by Seattle’s own DJ Housepartysea. Reserve your tickets to this free event—space is filling up fast!

– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator

Photo: L. Fried.

In the Studio with SAM Gallery Artist James Ellingboe

Seattle Art Museum on Aug 29 2022

In the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, artist James Ellingboe has built a beautiful artist studio in his garage. The studio is filled with a wide array of machines and tools, custom-built to create sculptures inspired by math, science, and the natural world from a variety of materials.

Ellingboe has always built things, initially starting with found materials. He learned to weld during high school and created his first metal sculpture in 2004. He now commonly works with mild steel, stainless steel, bronze, and wood, and just recently began creating artworks with clay. He is constantly seeking new ways to manipulate materials in order to give form to his ideas.

Ellingboe’s sculptures explore botanical and scientific themes, often relating to cellular structures and cellular organisms. Examples of this can be seen in the sculptures in his Diatom series. The rounded sculptures in this series are a geometric manipulation of an abstracted form inspired by single-celled organisms called diatoms. The large-scale sculptures from this series are unique, while the smaller-scale sculptures are created in a limited edition of five works and sold at SAM Gallery.

Another series of artworks, titled Fractals, is created from the repetition and manipulation of a simple shape to describe the space inspired by molecular geometries. An artwork from this series, Emergence, is inspired by perennial plants breaking dormancy. The green leaves of the plant are formed by repeated triangles, reaching upwards. He creates artworks like Emergence as a unique monumental sculpture at seventeen feet tall, as well as a limited edition of five smaller sculptures standing at eight and a half inches tall. Another artwork from this series, Nebula, is inspired by nebulous cloud formations in space. Blue triangles are repeated to echo the giant clouds of dust and gas. The large-scale sculpture is fifty-two inches tall, while the limited edition smaller-scale works stand small at thirteen inches tall.

Added in January 2022, James Ellingboe is one of the most recent additions to SAM Gallery’s artist roster. See his artwork on view at SAM Gallery or browse his SAM artist page.

– Pamela Jaynes, SAM Gallery Exhibition Manager

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Muse/News: Studio Time, Singing Stories, and Russell’s Legacy

Rachel Eggers on Aug 1 2022

SAM News

Following up on their review of the “captivating” Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure, the Seattle Times makes a very cool connection to the exhibition’s focus on Giacometti’s studio space by going behind-the-scenes into the creative spaces of five local artists, all of whom have connections to SAM: Marita Dingus, Romson Bustillo, Barbara Earl Thomas, Aramis O. Hamer, and Jake Prendez. Thanks to Jerald Pierce for the peek into their practices!

Just opened at the Seattle Asian Art Museum: Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog’s Alex Garland captured photos at the press preview of the dynamic exhibition and KNKX’s Grace Madigan reported on its connection to a University of Washington class taught by the exhibition curator, Foong Ping.

“What’s up with all these rabbits everywhere?” asks Brendan Kiley for the Seattle Times’ Pacific NW Magazine. For the story, he met up with Bobby McCullough, Facilities and Landscape Manager at the Olympic Sculpture Park, to go in search of King Bunny, a resident bunny who may be responsible for a good number of the 500+ rabbits who make the sculpture park their home. P.S. Check out our video series Botany with Bobby for more stories from the park.

Dhyana Levey for Tinybeans with “The Ultimate Guide to Seattle’s Free (& Cheap) Museum Days,” including the downtown museum and the Asian Art Museum, both of which welcome children 14 and under for free—all the time!—and the Olympic Sculpture Park, which is just plain free to everyone.

Local News

“Nick Garrison, a theatrical force in Seattle and beyond, dies at 47”: For the Seattle Times, David Schmader writes a fitting tribute for a beloved star gone too soon.

The Stranger’s Charles Mudede wrote a visual arts story! Everyone gather round! Here’s his take on the Romare Bearden exhibition now on view at the Frye Art Museum.

Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies project, which launched in June, is still delivering. Here, project editor Jasmine Mahmoud writes about singer Ernestine Anderson, who had a voice like “honey at dusk.”

“Ernestine was jazz and blues personified — she musically participated in both worlds,” daughter [Shelley] Young says of her mother’s musical impact. “Singing the blues involves storytelling,” she continues, “and she loved telling a story.”

Inter/National News

Speaking of studio visits: it’s a recurring series at Artnet.

Beat the heat with this listicle: “ARTnews’ 10 Best Art Books for Summer Reading.”

The world lost several important artist-activists last week: actors Mary Alice and Nichelle Nichols and N.B.A. legend Bill Russell. Explore Russell’s legacy in several articles from the New York Times, including this one on his pioneering activism.

“[Former Seattle SuperSonic Spencer] Haywood said in an interview on Sunday that he and Russell would often dine at a Seattle restaurant called 13 Coins after road trips, and Russell would regale him with stories about the civil rights movement.”

And Finally

Michelangelo Matos on the sources of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Alberto Giacometti working on the plaster of the Walking Man, 1959, Photo: Ernst Scheidegger, Archives, Fondation Giacometti, © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLiterris, Zurich.