Emily Somoskey is a 2-D mixed media artist and painter living in Walla Walla, Washington. Her work explores the complexity of perception through the layered use of oil paint and collaged photographic imagery. Somoskey’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, most recently at Chatwin Arts in Seattle and Hanson Howard Gallery in Ashland, Oregon. She pursued a BA in Art Education at The University of Akron and her MFA at Michigan State University. Somoskey is currently an Assistant Professor at Whitman College. Her mixed-media paintings use a balance between representation and abstraction to explore the ways we simultaneously experience physical and mental space. In combining photographic imagery with the language of abstract painting, she weaves together moments of clarity and ambiguity that both articulate and disrupt, as well as complicate, a singular understanding of the work, akin to our own perceptions of the world. Along with the discourse of historical and contemporary methods of image-making, her work branches into areas such as psychology, anthropology, material culture, humanist geography, cosmology, and the natural sciences. In reaching into these varied aspects of our world, Somoskey’s work reflects the complexity of what it means to live in our current world.
Visit Emily's website.
SAVE THE DATE! Come join us for a day of collage with NWCS members! We will exchange ideas, demos and a share table. We've reserved a great room at the Sunset Hills Community Clubhouse in Ballard for this fun summer meet-up.
Registration is open.
Kathy became interested in kites while walking through Gasworks Park in the late 1970s. After seeing a beautiful silk butterfly kite flying in the air, Kathy started researching and devouring all she could about kites. Kathy began with an eight-pointed star kite (originally a fighter kite), enlarged it and added a rainbow circle, as well as long ribbons on the three lower points. This Rainbow Aerial Star was on the cover of the local Bon Marche’s spring linen catalog. Kathy and her son made thousands of these kites, (barely keeping up with the orders), before arranging for a commercial manufacturer to provide them. Kathy started a small kite shop called Suspended Elevations in a co-op in the University District. In the early 1980s, she opened The Gasworks Park Kite Shop, a retail shop in a small house in Fremont, just one block away from the place where she first became enamored with kites. She created a dimensional kite known as the Starflake, which was a huge hit and kept her team busy into the 2000s. Her kite shop expanded and had four different locations in the Gasworks Park area. At the time, Kathy was one of only four women in the United States who were making a living by manufacturing and selling kites. She was invited to kiting events all over the world. Her adventures came to a crashing halt in 2001, right after the attacks of 9/11. She was able to stay in business for a while by supplying kite-making materials to shops all over the country, but in 2014, she shut everything down and retired because she could not match the prices offered by Amazon.
International and local festivals, including the Long Beach Kite Festival, which is held at the end of August each year, are showrooms for incredible kites and amazing kite artists. Please come to the NWCS meeting in September prepared to learn about different types of kites and methods for decorating them. Kite kits will be available for purchase, (we will accept cash, check, or Zelle, or proof of advance payment via PayPal), so that you can try your hand at collaging onto these fabulous substrates in time to submit your creations for possible inclusion in the NWCS Spring 2027 Show at the Cascadia Art Museum.
Cathryn Miller has been playing with paper intermittently since childhood. After post-secondary education in both Fine Art and Commercial Art, she was side-tracked into weaving for twenty years. Her award-winning fiber works are in provincial, national, and international collections.
Miller returned to playing with paper in the mid-1990s, founding Byopia Press with her husband David. Works from Byopia Press — both artist’s books and artworks — have won awards, been shown in over one hundred exhibitions (local, national, and international), and are held in more than sixty public collections, as well as in private collections worldwide. Visit Byopia Press.
In the same fashion as MARBLE-OLOGY (2020), TEXT-OLOGY (2021), and SCROLL-OLOGY (2023), the February 2027 workshop will explore a particular subject, namely “glue.” NWCS Program Chair Kathryn Kim and NWCS member Colleen Monette will guide participants as they investigate a variety of adhesives and other methods of combining or fastening ephemera to create two- and three-dimensional collages. Please gather your supplies (a list of suggestions will be distributed closer to the date of the workshop) and join us on Zoom for some fast-paced and fun exercises.
Kathryn uses individually cut and pasted letters to create “eponymistic colletry,” which are artistic pieces containing poetry and/or prose that refers to or reflects the image in which the words appear. 
Colleen works with found and salvaged vintage and antique materials. She balances her time between a studio in her Magnolia home and a beautiful space at Fogue Studios and Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood, where she teaches encaustic painting.
Join us at 10 am for Meet & Greet before the program begins at 10:30 am.
