Stanwood-Camano News, 5/24/05:
By Sarah Arney
The Arlington Times Weekender
Photographer
Mark Dodge captured this image, “Foggy Mount Baker” from his home, Camano
Island. Dodge and his wife Vicki Dodge will speak about the new age of
photography Thursday, May 26 at the Gallery in the Loft.
CAMANO ISLAND — The science of photography is undergoing rapid changes and the technical transformations are revolutionizing the art of photography, according to Camano Island photographer Mark Dodge.
“The new digital medium is unlocking a painterly realm of creativity and archival longevity previously unavailable to photographers working in the analog world of film and chemistry,” Dodge said.
Mark and his wife, Vicki Dodge, of Quacky Studios will speak about the changes in photography in “The Appearance of Magic— A fine art photography revolution” at 5 p.m. Thursday, May 26 in the Gallery in the Loft at Camano Commons. The presentation is part of the Fine Art & Wine Art Lecture Series that features artist talks amid an exhibit of fine art with samples of fine wine at Blue Heron Cellars downstairs, beginning at 4 p.m.
The women who run the wine shop, Blue Heron Cellars, wine steward Sara Klise, of Arlington, and her assistant Mary Swindell, of Stanwood, share their well-learned knowledge of wine and grapes and they are also both artists as well. Klise creates wine and grape decorated plates, dishes, coasters and various other items of fused glass and makes wine bottles into cheese trays, while Swindell creates delicate beaded jewelry using gemstones and precious metal.
Also at Brindle’s Bonnie Zeigler offers casual clothing at Bonnie Z’s Place and there are books from Snowgoose Bookstore.
Brindles Marketplace is one of several attractive barn-like buildings at Camano Commons, 848 N. Sunrise Blvd., at Terry’s Corner on the north end of Camano Island.
The art talk begins at 5 p.m. sharp. Admission is free but reservations are required because seating is extremely limited. Reserve your spot at 360-722-7480 or e-mail to galleryintheloft2@hotmail.com.
For more information about the photographer and other art by Mark and Vicki Dodge see www.quackystudios.com
copyright © 2005, Sun News, Inc.
Try
running at top speed with a camera at your eye at an elevation of 14,000 feet,
chasing a herd of panicked animals — and breathe at the same time.
Mark Dodge managed to do just that to shoot his photo "Vicuña Chaccu," which depicts the ritual herding of vicuñas every three years in Peru, an ancient Inca tradition that has been revived in recent years.
In his picture, the vicuñas — related to llamas and alpacas — are being herded into a catch pen by a human chain nearly a mile long, converging on a fence line. The animals then are sheared and released. The village sells the fiber, nearly as fine as cashmere.
Shooting with a long lens, Dodge captured the expression and the thunderous speed of these creatures 100 yards away.
"Having been there, it seemed other-worldly," he said. "You had the feeling you were doing something done for hundreds of years, a primitive approach to a problem that still works."
Dodge and wife Vicki, a photographer, painter and ceramic and textile artist, will have a double booth at Art by the Bay, the Stanwood-Camano Arts Guild's annual festival Saturday and Sunday on Camano Island.
Featured artists this year are Roger Cocke, an architect and ceramic artist, and Helen Lueken, an oil-and-watercolor artist whose painting "High and Dry" is this year's poster image. What started as an art show has moved into a full-fledged arts festival, with 115 arts-and-crafts booths, entertainment, food vendors and a children's art area.
"It's a social event for all the people who come together, not just the artists but the public," Dodge said.
After all these years, Dodge likes photos that project a quality of motion and mystery.
"One definition of photography is 'the decisive moment,' and it's definitely that," he said. "I'm always looking for that decisive moment that evokes a feeling."
Dodge and his wife are former owners of alpacas, and they saw the Incan ritual first in 1997 at the International Conference on Peruvian Camelids (camelids are a family of animals that includes camels, alpacas, llamas, vicuñas and guanacos). They returned to photograph three years later, and they were among the first outsiders to see the herding ritual known as chaccu.
The photograph won first place at the Coupeville Art Festival on Whidbey Island and best of show at the Stanwood-Camano Arts Guild's spring invitational.
There's an entertainment lineup at the festival, as well.
Stay Tuned, an acoustic fiddle-and-guitar trio, will perform from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday; and at noon, Village Theatre's Kidstage will join with Sky Theatre to present numbers from "Footloose," "The Wizard of Oz" and other musicals. At 1:30 p.m., singer-songwriter Carol Ann Hunner will perform, and the Papa Murat Band will play "tropical electric folk jazz" from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Saturday.
On Sunday, Cathy Tibert and Friends will play at 11 a.m.; flamenco-blues guitarist Patti Vail at noon; folk-country singer-songwriter Steve Harris at 1 p.m.; and the South End String Band, a "fiddle-tunes big band," from 2 to 4 p.m.
Diane Wright: dwright at seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
From The Everett Herald
Story by Debra Prinzing, special to The Herald
Photos by Stephanie S. Cordle, Herald Photographer
Gallery hopping is great fun, but it's a pleasure to view art for the garden in a natural outdoor setting. Visitors to the fifth annual Camano Island Studio Tour will have a chance to see the work of several talented island artists who use the landscape for both inspiration and display. The free tour, which encompasses 23 Camano Island and Stanwood studios and galleries, begins Friday and continues through Sunday.
Showcasing clay, stone and metal creations in a compatible venue such as a garden appeals to many Northwest artists. Far more than making garden ornaments, these artists consider factors such as proportion and scale, sun and shade, and exposure to the elements when they design for an outdoor setting.
We visited three of them to preview the diversity of styles and materials used in creating art for the landscape:
James
Nehl: On 2.5 wooded acres named Barefoot Park, sculptor James Nehl and his
wife, Ruth, are surrounded by stone inhabitants. Nehl named his home, studio and
outdoor sculpture gallery Barefoot Park, explaining, "I had the idea that it
might be weed-free some day -- there were so many nettles and thistles here," he
deadpanned. The property is at 2077 Paradise Road, Camano Island.
Nehl has worked as a carpenter and landscaper, but his true passion is holding a piece of stone in his sturdy hands and studying it for "faces" that might emerge. Once he sees a likeness, Nehl uses a variety of tools to confidently carve a three-dimensional expression into the solid rock.
Mainly self-taught, Nehl began carving about five years ago; he has also studied with a number of artists through the Northwest Stone Sculpture Association.
Working with marble, granite, limestone and basalt, Nehl's work has been described as a primitive style. "I see primitive faces in every stone," he explained. Many pieces are anthropomorphic reflections of Nehl's own intense expression. There's "Rebel," one of his first stone men, carved from fieldstone. There's "Stone Man," a self-portrait that's as tall as Nehl. He stacked three pallets worth of countertop granite to build the free-standing carved body.
Each year, Nehl challenges himself to create a singular piece to unveil at the Camano Island Studio Tour. "I've produced a lot of work and last year, I sold most of everything I made," he said. But he's fiercely protective of his pieces, confessing to have changed the price of a $300 granite-and-quartz fountain to $1,200. "I'd rather keep it unless I get a fair price for it," the artist explained.
Nehl's newest creation is "Eve," a 7-foot, 2-inch tall stone woman, wrapped by a serpent. Nehl spent six months working on the towering, pillarlike sculpture, which stands like a column in the landscape.
Debbi
Rhodes: Metal fabricator by day at Edco Inc. in Mount Vernon, Debbi Rhodes
can construct any type of steel or aluminum piece for commercial and residential
customers.
She's equally competent as an artist, designing and welding sculptures using ordinary bits of steel and discarded machine parts.
"That's the beauty of being a fabricator," Rhodes said. "I know how to work the metal. It's very hard, dirty work, but it's very satisfying. You can bring me a pile of metal and blueprints, and I can make it into something that lasts forever."
Rhodes was recently part of a team that repaired huge sections of La Conner's Rainbow Bridge: "Every time I look at Rainbow Bridge," she recalled, "I think, 'For the next 50 years, that bridge is mine.' How cool is that?"
The welder-artist has a fondness for personable, three-dimensional icons and characters she creates, many of which are on display at James Nehl's Barefoot Park outdoor sculpture gallery.
Rhodes turned to welding and fabricating 12 years ago while living in Illinois as a single parent with a young child. She was recruited into a training program for women in nontraditional fields and soon more than doubled her prior salary as a baker with a union-level welding job.
Five years ago, after living and working around the country, Rhodes moved to the Northwest, settling first in Anacortes and now on Camano Island.
She decided to just "go for it," using her industrial skills for artistic purposes and winning a best-in-show for a table design in the first art show she entered. You can frequently see her outdoor sculptures at History of the World Gallery on Camano Island.
Rhodes often uses "drop pieces," the leftover steel scrap from a commercial job. She fashions characters from these throwaway pieces, like "Ray," whose body comes from part of a bicycle frame and sections of tire tools. She just completed an ice skater, designed to gently rock in the wind. A woman talking on the telephone was aptly named "Gabby."
The
creative side of metalwork appeals to Rhodes: "The guys at work will say, "How
can you work with metal (creating sculpture) after you work with metal all day?'
This should be trash, but I don't see trash -- I see potential," she said.
Vicki Dodge: The term multidisciplinary artist describes Vicki Dodge, an artist who works in fiber, clay, paint and beads. Vicki Dodge and her husband, photographer and music producer Mark Dodge, own Quacky Studios. The couple moved to Camano four years ago from Monroe, where they ran the Quacky Alpacky Ranch, an alpaca farm.
They were looking for a drier place and discovered on a map that Camano Island's north end was outside the rain shadow, Mark Dodge explains. "We seem to change our professions every seven years. We decided that animal husbandry wasn't our 'bliss,' so we sold our herd and moved here."
The Dodges renovated a one-story ranch house with fabulous views, adding a suite for Mark Dodge's 93-year-old mother. They converted a four-bay RV garage into studios for music, painting and ceramics.
The
couple has also transformed the property into an inviting haven. A low
cedar-sided wall topped with an arbor for vines spans the entrance of the
three-acre site. The wall shelters an ornamental entry garden and gravel
courtyard, the ideal setting for displaying Vicki Dodge's popular clay leaves.
In varying organic shades of fired clay, the playful leaves are grouped in small
vignettes with blown glass balls, made by an artist friend, Mark Ellinger. They
also rest in the base of a small pond, serving as both ornament and shelter for
fish.
Elsewhere, stacked stones look like diminutive monoliths, adding a symbolic richness to the garden. Vicki and Mark Dodge created these vertical rock sculptures after returning from a trip to Peru. "There, people stack rocks for stamina and strength," Vicki Dodge explained. "They believe one's lineage and history are stored in rocks."
The family vegetable garden is protected from hungry deer and raccoons by a
tall enclosure. The cedar posts offered Vicki Dodge another place to channel her
creativity:
Using
the potter's wheel, she throws decorative stoneware finials. After glazing the
whimsical pieces, she screws them to the top of each post. "To me, the garden is
another palette," she said.
Vicki Dodge said she first fashioned a giant leaf from clay for her own garden. But once friends and customers began seeing the life-size foliage, she soon had requests for more. "Now I have to go out and find big leaf maple and cardoon leaves," she said and chuckled.
Called "Vicki's Fresh-Pressed Ceramic Leaves," the one-of-a-kind pieces are suitable for laying in the garden or hanging on a wall. Vicki Dodge uses actual leaves as patterns to cut out shapes from sheets of wet clay -- even pressing the veins and stems into the clay to create an authentic design. The firing method adds a shiny glaze to highlight the recessed veining.
While Vicki Dodge is equally comfortable taking brush and paint to a 4-foot tall canvas or blending alpaca and wool fibers into felted hats, scarves and caftans, she likes the stoneware leaves because they're accessible: "It's very important to produce reachable art," she said.
From The Everett Herald
 Vicki Dodge's life is as colorful as her art. [Click photo to enlarge] |
What makes Vicki Dodge willing, at 54, to be called the Quacky Lady? She's a potter. A weaver. An alpaca rancher. A painter of cabbages, melons, artichokes and ripe tomatoes. A baker: She once ran a company called Great Cakes and Edible Monuments. She and husband Mark Dodge have lived on Camano Island for the past three years, turning a former garage into Quacky Studios. Duck imagery has pervaded their lives for the last 20 years. There's where the "quacky" comes in.
"We're sort of into whimsy here," Vicki Dodge said. The studio, where Mac, the rust-colored gallery cat, sleeps in a straw basket by the window, overlooks Skagit Bay. "This is our commute, right here," said Mark Dodge, gesturing to the pathway between the house and the studio. Call it a compound, not a house. They share it with Mark's mother, Regina. It's such a sanctuary that it's harder and harder for them to leave the island. What's to compare with a sweeping view of the bay and 78 herons on a sand bar at low tide?
Mark Dodge, a contract writer doing documentation for software companies, also records music there. "We bounced around looking for home, and this felt like it the day we drove in," he said. "We had been looking for a place we could live and work, and we found it here."
"We like choices," Vicki Dodge said. "We thrive on choices. I had said, 'Mark, when you marry me, you need to understand. I want to change professions every seven years.'"
And they've had a lot of professions.
Vicki Dodge ran Mukilteo Mudworks pottery in the mid-'70s, then opened the Riverside Gallery in Everett. After she met Mark, they founded the Everyman's Fair, which became the Equinox Arts Festival. In the early days of the duck theme, they started Duck-Fest. They also had a fiber business called Mother Duck Fibers. For a few years, they went on the road as part of Mark Dodge's music career. Vicki Dodge would tuck a spinning wheel in with the sound equipment. After resettling in the Northwest, Mark Dodge created Great Cakes and Edible Monuments in Bellevue, baking everything from wedding cakes with white chocolate leaves to a tuba cake for a Harley-driving, symphony tuba player. After selling the company, they went into the alpaca business, The Quacky Alpacky Ranch and Studios. They've just sold the herd, and are now going back to their true love, the arts. Mark Dodge, who plays bass and lead guitar, has his own label, Big Quack Records, and has just recorded a new CD, "Giza."
Vicki Dodge probably isn't done yet.
"I'm still the person who goes around with the stick and stirs up the anthills," she said with a laugh. "I'm that person. I'm one of those people who wants to go out there and get others moving."