Between a rock and an art place
Through December, Lincoln City’s Chessman Gallery is featuring “Between the Tides,” an inspiring new exhibit by acclaimed local artists Sandy Roumagoux and Liz Fox.
Celebrate with wine, appetizers and the artists at the opening reception, from 5 to 7 pm this Friday, Dec. 1. A virtual gallery tour will be posted on Facebook on Saturday.
The exhibit includes two prominent Oregon Coast artists who have created work that interprets the estuaries and tidal flats in the Lincoln County area, making statements about the bounty, beauty and fragility of these places.
Roumagoux’s oil paintings, all completed in 2023, are of the estuaries and tidal flats along waterways in Lincoln County, including the Siletz and Yaquina rivers and Beaver Creek.
She painted these places during high tides, low tides and in-between tides. She is fascinated by the areas where freshwater and seawater meet and the life it fosters. Capturing the essence of this magical space in painting has been an adventure that she has thoroughly enjoyed.
Painting for more than 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.
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 has been a full-time potter ever since.
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 local estuarine and marine environments. Her “creature feature” sheds light on the importance of key species that can help turn the tide of ecosystem degradation.
Fox and her marine biologist husband, Dave, live on a former tideland between Newport and Toledo with their two kids and three unruly dogs.
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Also opening on Dec. 1 in the Fiber Arts StudioGallery is an astounding exhibit of skilled fabric work by Janet Webster.
Webster finds that working with fabric exercises her intuitive side as well as the more logical. 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. Because she was never very comfortable with the precision of traditional quilting and preferred to follow her own approach to working with color and form, she prefers curved lines to straight and organic shapes to the rigorously geometric.
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 experimented with mono-printing, creating backgrounds for stitching.
The work in this exhibit includes Inspirations from certain fabrics such as silk and cotton kimono cloth that came from a friend’s old jacket, explorations of basket weave patterns and ruminations on family using old photographs transferred to fabric.
Webster was born and raised in Portland and has lived in Lincoln County since 1976. She worked for more than 25 years as the librarian at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. She lives on the Newport Bayfront and enjoys the spatial layers of the water, the town, the boats and the sky.
Also on display in the Fiber Arts Studio Gallery are the magnificent gourds painted and adorned by Jane Wilson.
Both the Chessman Gallery and Fiber Arts Studio Gallery are located inside the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 540 NE Hwy. 101, open from 10 am to 5 pm, Wednesday through Sunday.
For more information, go to lincolncity-culturalcenter.org or call 541-994-9994.