A relatively new NWCS member, Judy Chapman Björling, will brighten our spring by regaling us with stories about her 60 years as an artist, during which color and texture have never ceased to amaze her. From an early age, Björling was fascinated with portraits, often drawing images of her classmates. While studying painting and sculpting at the Art Institute of Chicago (on a National Scholastic Art Awards Scholarship), Björling began to better understand and appreciate the human figure -- the history of a face, the story of a gesture. She would abstract the form, while trying to preserve the essence of a gesture or an expression. Björling still incorporates figures in her work, which usually begins with an abstract painting featuring rhythm and complex coloration, followed by continual adjustment of both the figure and the painting until she perceives that one could not exist without the other.
After a three-decade hiatus from art, during which she received a Masters in Management, taught graduate school and college, and managed a successful consulting business with many Fortune 500 clients, Björling returned to painting in 1989 and sculpture in 1993. She moved to Washington in the summer of 2022, and is now a member of Woodinville Arts Alliance, the Northwest Watercolor Society, Evergreen Fine Arts Association, PaperWorks, and the Northwest Collage Society, as well as the National Collage Society. Björling has received numerous awards, including the NWCS Fall 2022 Award for Where They’re From: St. Petersburg, which was exhibited at the Rosehill Community Center Art Gallery in Mukilteo, and a Purchase Award for Underwater Dreams, which was part of the 2023 CVG Show at Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton, Washington. Her work is in collections in the United States and abroad.
Erika Bass is a painter and printmaker who uses the collagraph printing technique as a foundation for her mixed-media paintings. Through her botanical imagery, she explores the intricate connections within the natural world, building organic pieces that weave together color, form, and pattern.
Originally from upstate New York, Bass has spent most of her career as a teaching artist in Seattle. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is also a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Her work has been showcased in exhibitions both locally and nationally. She currently teaches fine arts at Forest Ridge School in Bellevue. Bass will share some of her artwork and describe her artistic journey before leading a short workshop in her collagraph technique, which will conclude by 1:30 p.m. All supplies will be provided. Mark your calendars now and be sure not to miss this fantastic make-and-take event!
Visit her website and instagram.
Carletta Carrington Wilson’s work has been described as “decorative with a message.” In her exploration of the “text of textiles” through poetry, artist books, mixed-media collage, and installations, Wilson has evolved along a path in which cloth is a visual and literary medium. She states that, “by encountering cloth as a constellation, as a geographical expanse and translator of time, I expand the potential and possibility of engaging with fabric and its fabrication in unexpected ways.” Wilson’s collages and artists’ books can be found in the collections of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, the Allen Library at the University of Washington, the University of Puget Sound’s Collins Memorial Library, the McCabe Library – Swarthmore College, the James F. Holly Rare Books Room at the Evergreen State College, and UCLA’s libraries as part of the Judith A. Hoffberg Artists’ Books collection.
Visit her website.
Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based visual artist who received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, and many private and rare archive collections. Fu’s numerous awards and grants include a Forman Arts Initiative Art Works grant, Philadelphia Cultural Treasures grant, Joan Mitchell Painter’s & Sculptors Fellowship, the Meggendorfer Prize, Leeway Transformation Award, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China. She exhibits widely and teaches pop-up courses and community workshops internationally.
Watch Noodle Mountain unfold here: website.
Grounds for Sculpture website
Shoreline Conference Center
18560 1st Ave. NE Shoreline, WA 98155
Meetings are held in the Mt Rainier Room
at the North end of the building. There is ample parking outside the North entrance door.
Join us at 10 am for Meet & Greet before the program begins at 10:30 am.
