Fall 2012
Video: The making of Pat Siler’s Pullman mural
A video of Pat Siler and his downtown Pullman mural.
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Fall 2012
Mural, mural, on the wall
Pine Street Plaza Mural, 2009-2012
Artwork by Patrick Siler
Pullman, Washington
Artist and WSU fine arts faculty member for 32 years, Patrick Siler’s outdoor wall mural “Pine Street Plaza Mural” holds a prominent position in downtown Pullman. He completes the third and final panel this summer.
The WSU Museum of Art presented an exhibition this summer—Curator’s Choice: Patrick Siler Mural—showcasing the sketches and finished drawings that were a part of the project.
Read about the artist and project in “Patrick Siler ’61—On the wall.” Or watch a video about Siler.
Fall 2012
Patrick Siler ’61—On the wall
Patrick Siler points to a crack in the wall he’s about to paint. He points to another, and another. He has to fill those. And there’s that slanted place in the concrete he has to deal with. He can’t push his lift onto the sloped surface. Maybe he’ll build a wooden platform to roll the lift onto. And the tree in front of the wall, well, he’ll figure that out when he gets to it.
“I still have quite a bit of preparatory work on this wall,” Siler says, sitting in the Thomas Hammer café where the mural is located. “I’ve done a lot of … » More …
Summer 2012
Dog Days, Raven Nights
John and Colleen Marzluff, illustrated by Evon Zerbetz ’82
Yale University Press, 2011
Using field notes, personal diaries, and beautiful linocuts by Evon Zerbetz ’82, the Marzluffs chronicle their three-year endeavor to research the common raven, while raising and training sled dogs to help them with their work in Maine. Zerbetz is an artist in Ketchikan, Alaska, and illustrator of six books for children and young adults.
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Spring 2012
A delicious dilemma: Ingredients for a photographic still life
With Washington’s abundance of food, we struggled to limit the still life photo for our feature “A Feast of Good Things” to just a few ingredients. Besides the native, naturally occurring foods like shellfish and salmon, our state rates second in the nation in sheer number of crops produced. Here’s a sampling:
Olympia oyster While clams and other oysters reach market size in two years or less, the Olympia can take four to five years. Even then, it’s still quite small. Native … » More …
Spring 2011
An art history
Worth D. Griffin stepped off the train in Pullman in the fall of 1924 to find Washington State College’s art department barely four years old and with just one other full-time faculty member. Prior to that, the only art instruction offered was painting lessons for students with the pocket money.
But Griffin had come to help teach design and creative composition and build a program. The Indiana native had studied commercial and fine art in Indianapolis and at the Art Institute in Chicago. In addition to working as a magazine illustrator, he trained among American realists, artists focused on rendering unidealized scenes of daily life. … » More …
Fall 2010
Spiritual landscapes
Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings
From the Collection of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan
WSU Museum of Art, October 1–December 11, 2010
Ngamaloo, 2008, acrylic on linen by Elizabeth Gordon (Balgo Hills region)
Although the details and relationships vary amongst Australian Aboriginal groups, in the beginning the landscape of the world was formed by mythical ancestral beings. Every action of these ancestors had landscape consequences. According to the fine … » More …
Summer 2010
World of Mateo
Anaheim Vacationland by Matthew Leiker, 2007, acrylic on board
The work of Matthew Leiker
WSU Museum of Art, May 18–July 2
The World of Mateo is filled with images of an American subculture known by no particular name but seemingly related to road culture, California style, album jacket graphics of the 50s and our affinity for Hawaiian island iconography. Mateo celebrates a time of Tiki lounges, drive-in theater refreshment cartoons, and a plethora of music that bubbles vibrantly with the hypnotic tones of the ukulele, inspiring his imagination to create … » More …
Video: Michael Schultheis '90 talks about his art
View an exclusive slide show of Michael’s paintings and to listen to him talk about the way he uses mathematical concepts in his work. Photos of Michael are by Matt Hagen. Photos of the paintings are by Frank Huster.
Winter 2006
An equation for beauty
The painter spends his days on the third floor of an ancient biscuit plant in a seedy section of industrial Ballard. The building, just a block from the Ballard Bridge, houses a collection of artists, mostly ceramicists whose main-floor kiln warms the warehouse through the winter.
But acrylic paint is the medium for Michael Schultheis, 39. A climb up steep wooden stairs, and we’re welcomed by Cesaria Evora’s alto voice singing in Portuguese from a paint-spattered boom box. “Ah, she’s wonderful,” says a similarly paint-spattered Schultheis standing at the door to his bright studio.
He is in the midst of creating paintings for a fall … » More …