Yaquina Art Gallery Spotlight Show featuring the artwork of Sherrie Powell and Eric Paukstaitis–May 26th to June 8th
In a two week Spotlight Show from May 26th to June 8th, the Yaquina Art Association will be featuring the artwork of photographer Sherrie Powell and wood artist Eric Paukstaitis . The Yaquina Art Association Gallery is located in Nye Beach at 789 NW Beach Drive. Summer Hours are 11 am to 5 pm every day.
Sherrie Powell became interested in photography while assisting her father in his photography business and working in his darkroom years ago. She misses the magic of working with film and developing it in the darkroom, but she still enjoys processing her own images in her digital lightroom. “The digital age has given us more opportunity for creativity in our photography”.
Her joy is found in nature and the beauty and mystery of the world around us. Most recently she has been experimenting with creating fine art images from from the raw images she has captured with her camera. When you view her images she hopes to take you into the moment she clicked the shutter and at other times evoke a sense of wonder. If you feel drawn into them that purpose has been achieved.
Recently, Sherrie has been busy up and down our coastline capturing high tides and minus tides through her lens. She’s been photographing our local ghost forest to the north to the stormy rocks of Shore Acres and the sea stacks at Bandon to the south. Her work has earned numerous awards, has appeared in various publications, been shown in galleries throughout the Pacific Northwest, and adorn walls around the world.
She is currently a member of the Yaquina Art Association, Yaquina Art Association Photographers, Nature Photographers of the Pacific Northwest, PSA, and The Itinerant Artists Marketplace at the Outlet Mall in Lincoln City.
Eric Paukstaitis is relatively new to the Oregon art scene, in fact he is relatively new to the art scene in general. Eric has been actively creating and selling his art for just over a year since retiring to Otter Rock. He previously worked for 40 years as an environmental geologist/hydrogeologist. Upon retirement he wanted to try something totally new, something creative. While taking a printmaking class at the local community college, he became fascinated with not only the beauty of woodblock prints but with the woodblocks themselves. He started engraving wood panels as art objects and his unique art form was created. Eric developed a process for texturizing the surface of the piece to be used as his “canvas” which is then hand painted to create a quasi 3-dimensional art panel.
Whether it is his creative spirit or an inability to focus, Eric continues to experiment with his art form. He has recently combined his engraved images with an acrylic flow technique to create dynamic images of our beautiful shoreline. He is also experimenting with a heavier impasto technique on engraved images to capture the grandeur of some of our rugged bedrock formations along the coast. Examples of these techniques, along with some new woodblock images, can be seen in Eric’s current spotlight show at the Yaquina Art Association (YAA) gallery in Newport, as well as the Artists’ Co-op Gallery in Lincoln City, and the Pacific City Gallery in Pacific City.
“Ghost Forest” by Sherrie Powell
“Yaquina” by Eric Paukstaitis
