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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Art Break Day today in Vancouver

Event coinciding with First Friday artwalk lets everyone release inner artist

By , Columbian staff writer
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Painters Lynn Nadal, left, and Mary Alred hang their work at the North Bank Gallery in downtown in Vancouver on Monday.
Painters Lynn Nadal, left, and Mary Alred hang their work at the North Bank Gallery in downtown in Vancouver on Monday. Photo Gallery

Kevin Weaver, director of the downtown Vancouver gallery Art on the Boulevard, loves being able to “encourage and support and promote Northwest artists. There is a lot of talent around here.”

He’s talking about you, you know. Today’s the day to prove it — or just have some free fun along the way.

Today’s First Friday art walk dovetails with a burgeoning international event called Art Break Day, started in 2011 by a couple of Corvallis, Ore., artists who are determined to reject the idea that fine art is somehow exclusive and rarefied, the purview only of trained professionals and academics.

Art of the Boulevard is beating back that notion with free crayons and markers, colored pencils and pens, paints and stamps and lots of paper. It’s all there today in the Evergreen Marketplace courtyard adjoining Art on the Boulevard, for anyone who wants to take a break from routine and get creative.

Art Break Day

• What: A free, fun “art break” for everyone.

• Featuring: Free art supplies and tables to work.

• When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. today.

• Where: Evergreen Marketplace and Art on the Boulevard, 210 W. Evergreen Blvd.

• On the Web: www.artbreakday.com

“Why Art?”

• What: New show at North Bank artists’ gallery.

• Featuring: New works and reflections on art and motivation by Mary Alred, Lynn Nadal and other North Bank artists.

• When: Reception with the artists 5-9 p.m. today.

• Where: 1005 Main St.

First Friday Artwalk

• What: Open art galleries and studios.

• Where: All over downtown Vancouver.

• When: 5-9 p.m. today.

• On the Web:http://vdausa.org/first-friday-downtown

• Tip: Print out the “hot sheet” for this month’s details.

“We believe a healthy, vibrant and well-balanced society is one in which everyone regularly participates in the arts,” the Art Break Day website says. “We created Art Break Day to make art accessible to a wider audience and to connect communities through art. Art Break Day is about everyone.”

So don’t be shy — and don’t be self-critical, said Art on the Boulevard volunteer Deb Veach-White, who organized Vancouver’s first Art Break Day at the gallery last year.

“What I saw last year was so cool,” she said. “We had 70 people came by during the day. Most of them were taking a break from work. We had a couple on their honeymoon. We had several families. There was a woman who said she didn’t want to make anything, she just wanted to watch — but by the end she was drawing too.”

Few of these folks were experienced artists, Veach-White said — and that’s the point.

“Just for the joy of it,” she said. “No formal instruction and no pressure, no right or wrong. It’s great to watch people’s inhibitions just fall away. It’s great fun.”

This year, Veach-White added, she’s enlisted 10 volunteers who will act as “art break waitresses,” keeping the supplies coming so the artists can focus on their art — not to mention their accompanying chitchat.

“One of the nice things that happens is, people who are sharing a table start talking,” Veach-White said. “They open up and get to know each other. They inspire each other.”

Several of last year’s participants commented that the last time they’d done any artwork was in elementary school, she said — drawing a picture of their family home or a simple landscape. It’s too bad, Veach-White mused, that we all tend to “outgrow” uninhibited creativity, instead of nurturing it across the years.

“A lot of people were very nostalgic about crayons,” she said.

Seeking answers

Around the corner and down the block, North Bank Artists gallery’s September show asks the essential question behind Art Break Day: Why art?

North Bank member artists Lynn Nadal and Mary Alred discussed the riddle earlier this week while getting new and favorite works ready for display. Nadal, a mixed-media artist, creates whimsical landscapes and vividly colorful characters — women dancing among the stars, fish flying through the sky, curvy houses, windy trees — while Alred specializes in sharper, more realistic oil and watercolor paintings of animals, still lifes, rustic scenes.

The finished artworks themselves — and viewers’ reactions to them — are surely one answer to the question why. What’s especially rewarding and fascinating for any artist, Nadal said, is when people find meanings and motifs the artist didn’t even realize were there. She’s come to better understand her own art — and her own mind — because of the unexpected things others have discovered in it, she said.

But there’s never a final answer. Visual artists are often asked to provide written statements about their work, but not all are adept at cranking out “long flowing intellectual explanations,” Nadal said; others grasp for words that seem to say anything meaningful about a completely different medium.

“I’m a grasper,” Alred said. “I never know what to say.”

“It can be hard to share in words,” said Nadal. “A lot of artists do it because they love the process.”

As they prepared for the “Why art?” opening, Alred and Nadal asked fellow North Bank artists to provide more answers; these will be posted during an interactive part of the gallery opening today. Visitors are encouraged to record their own answers too.

Alred wondered: What motivated cave-wall painters who made their marks thousands of years ago, and who probably had a greater concern in simple survival? Clearly, she said, the impulse to make art somehow became important even in that primitive day and age.

“Whatever it is, wherever it came from, it’s been inside of us forever,” she said.

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