Port Townsend Artist Opens New Exhibit at Northwind

PORT TOWNSEND — When asked what she hopes her art will do for people, Shirley Scheier is succinct.

“Joy,” says the artist.

Scheier, who lives in Port Townsend, enjoys snorkeling, hiking, gardening and sailing. She finds inspiration for her paintings and prints in the ocean, the woods and the flowers blooming outside her studio.

“I have an intimate relationship with nature,” Scheier says.

She delights in the energy and constant change she sees in the natural world.

Sometimes, nowadays, this artist uses a net, soaked in color and projected onto a surface.

Her show, “Sifting the Silence,” brings together work from the past four years and adds a number of older pieces for a bit of history. The show will fill Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery from Thursday through Aug. 18. It features etchings, intaglio prints and, most recently, images of shape-shifting nets.

His paintings include “Untethered Breeze,” “Sun Shawl” and “Sway,” while older works range from “Hymnal” to “Avian Stream” to “Listening.”

The gallery is open from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Monday. The opening celebration for “Sifting” will take place during the first Saturday Art Walk this weekend from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The Jeanette Best Gallery is located at 701 Water St.

More information can be found at https://northwind art.org.

Scheier will give a free lecture at 7 p.m. on July 18 at the gallery. It will be an interview with plenty of time for audience questions about materials and style.

There's a lot of symbology around these nets in his art, Scheier says.

“But for me, what matters is the food collection,” including the spiritual nature.

The nets, for her, gather food for the body and the soul.

In her title “Sifting the Silence,” Scheier refers to the sensations and feelings that come through, through 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 in a stream of consciousness, a conversation with the art taking shape.

The Surrealists were a major influence on Scheier, who graduated from the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As an art student, Scheier felt excluded from the mainstream art community, so she focused on exploring materials and methods and following her own path, finding her own voice.

Scheier went on to win a MacDowell Fellowship among other awards, and her work has been included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. She has been an artist-in-residence at the 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 to 2016.

Today, his immediate surroundings—the Salish Sea, the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, his vegetable and flower garden—provide Scheier's primary inspiration for capturing the wind, for “sifting the silence.”

Martha Worthley, a Port Townsend artist and executive director of Northwind Art, was immediately struck by Scheier's work when she first saw it years ago.

“I find it so thoughtful, beautifully designed and evocative,” Worthley said.

Meg Kaczyk, who will interview Scheier at the July 18 conference, is another local artist who knows Scheier well. Her painting and prints evoke transcendentalists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Agnes Pelton, Kaczyk said, while Scheier's art has its own subtle and profound characteristics.

“I can’t wait to see them in the gallery,” Kaczyk added, “where I can just immerse myself and fall into these paintings.”