21 December 2012

Featuring fine art prints by Flatcolor

Group Open Studio!

Come by for some holiday cheer!

Kari Westphal creates original paintings using encaustic (wax, resin & pigments) and acrylic paints.

The medium is not as important as what I am trying to capture or express.
I work in both paints and photography.

I started photography in high school as a photojournalist, working freelance for our community’s newspaper. At the same time I was also doing various styles of art including painting.

I would use photographs to inform my paintings or drawings at first. Photography also documented my work but I was primarily interested in the art.

Reclaimed and Reprocessed comes from the fact that some of the painting are on reclaimed wood and discarded artifice. The Reprocessed part comes from the various forms of “shopping” I do to manipulate my photos to capture the feel and emotion I am looking to express. The photos are not meant to be accurate “documents”. They are impressions of how I view and feel the world.

Gargoyles Staturay presents:

“Healing Harm: Renewal Through Plant Medicine”

New art by Dominique Cilento, Black Camellia Designs

Trabant presents:

A collaborative show featuring visual works by a handful of your baristas at Trabant, as well as contributions from other local Seattle artist’s. This show will display a wide range of mediums with a recurring theme of darkness, celebrating the Winter Solstice and the longest night of the year.

Lomography (or analogue photography) is my medium for creation. I currently shoot with a Diana F+ plastic camera using medium format 120 film. I typically use slower speed films, less than 100 ISO, this tends to lead to shooting for long exposure times to capture images on the film. Along with the cheap plastic lens on the Diana, the images become ghostly and other worldly. This causes me to feel I don’t truly take a picture as discover one.

“Ghosts of Seattle”
Everyday we pass among ghosts. Forgotten architecture built to highlight archways or walls. Decaying buildings caught between once standing mightily in the sky and not quite dust. Lost souls wandering in the rain. Store fronts meant to capture our eyes fade to the background over the days and weeks as we stare at the screens of our smart phones rushing from one place to the next. All of these make up of the ghosts we walk past but do not see. The ghosts I have attempted to capture before they disappear and the next new one arrives.