This month, the Gallery at the Park in Richland is celebrating a diverse array of media with three unique and disparate artists — Paul Lewing, Loren Lukens and Adam Sims. With these artists, the gallery exhibit features landscape painting, pottery and photography.

Painting

Paul Lewing began his career as a clay artist after studying with Rudy Autio, one of America’s best-known clay artists and muralists, and earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a master’s from the University of Montana. For more than 20 years, Lewing made his living as a potter, first making functional pottery before working exclusively on ceramic tile starting in 1986. But he was always a painter at heart.

Several years ago, Lewing’s wife bought him water-soluble colored pencils for proposal drawings of tile commissions. Doing this reminded him of the joy of making finished two-dimensional artwork, and he began drawing landscapes and animals in pencil and in tile. He has recently started using acrylic paint for his paintings because he enjoys “trying to make acrylic paint do things it doesn’t really want to do.”

“It’s hard to describe the pure visceral joy of making marks,” Lewing says. “But part of it is the joy of returning to exactly what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old.”

Lewing is also the author of China Paint & Overglaze, published by the American Ceramic Society in 2007, and articles of his have appeared in numerous magazines and textbooks. In 2018, the University of Montana honored him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Pottery

Loren Lukens creates pottery for everyday use, combining form and function to construct beautiful works of art that also serve a purpose. He discovered the beauty of clay in the early 1970s as an undergraduate art student at a small, midwestern liberal arts college, and he has loved pottery ever since.

Lukens describes his work as “extensions of traditional pottery with contemporary variations.” He enjoys making strong, sleek sculptures with bold surfaces and rich glaze treatments. His pieces are dynamic from a distance and have an intensity of detail up close. He describes painting as an “increasingly important” facet of his work, and he enjoys the challenge of painting in three dimensions while maintaining the form of the piece.

Lukens’ studio and showroom is Brace Point Pottery in Arbor Heights, a beautiful neighborhood in downtown Seattle. The showroom is filled with a variety of pots and is always changing.

Learn more by visiting Lukens’ website at lorenlukenspottery.com.

Photography

Adam Sims first became interested in photography in the spring of 2007, when he attempted to photograph lightning during the occasional thunderstorm. He had purchased his first digital SLR camera by the end of that summer, and he spent the next four years practicing and perfecting his photography skills. In March 2012, he had his first public showing at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.

Sims appreciates the difficulties that arise when photographing scenery and nature. Aside from having to figure out how to compose his shots, he says, “I am at the mercy of things that I cannot control,” meaning the weather, tides, location of subjects in the night sky and other unpredictabilities of nature. He will often revisit the same place or subject multiples times and stand in the same spot for hours at a time to try to capture that perfect shot.

But, according to Sims, “It’s these challenges that make this craft so exciting for me.”

The exhibit for Paul Lewing, Loren Lukens and Adam Sims will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from June 4 through June 27. The reception will be held on June 14 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Each May, the Gallery at the Park in Richland celebrates students with an exhibition featuring the recipients of the Allied Arts Association’s student scholarships. To help support visual arts in the community, Allied Arts awards annual scholarships to Columbia Basin College students and students working toward a master’s degree in fine arts.

This year, scholarships went to Li Wang, a student attending CBC, and Todd McKinney, a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Li Wang

Li Wang grew up in Jiangxi, a small city in southern China known for its rivers and lakes, and has lived in the United States for seven years. Before moving to the U.S., she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology. She became interested in medical illustration when one of her classmates mentioned some difficulties he’d run into while writing a paper: He could not find a professional medical illustrator to draw an accurate, polished diagram.

This was the first Wang had ever heard of medical illustration, since Chinese universities do not offer this degree. After doing some research, she decided this career would be a perfect fit for her due to her biological background and love of drawing. Now she is studying at CBC to improve her art skills with the goal of eventually applying to a graduate program in medical illustration.

Todd McKinney

Todd McKinney, the other scholarship student, is from the Bay Area in California. His father was an industrial painter who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps — but McKinney went into the fine arts instead.

As an undergraduate, he fell ill with pseudo-tumor cerebri, a rare degenerative disease of the brain, which changed the course of his life. He writes on his website, “As my ability to function deteriorated I began to question the nature of existence. I began my investigation of chaos, which led me to this road.”

Though McKinney has learned many forms of art, painting is his passion. Currently, he uses random drips, tape, mops and brooms for his paintings, which results in experimental, abstract works of art. Because he can never fully control the outcome of paint drips, his paintings organically evolve on their own. He continually adds layers until the painting is complete, demonstrating his idea that “chaos eventually blossoms into a pattern.”

For more information or to view McKinney’s work, visit his website at toddraymondmckinney.com.

The student scholarship show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from May 7 through May 31. The artist reception will be on May 11 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the gallery.

The Gallery at the Park’s April exhibit features beautiful works of art from the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society.

The Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society is an organized group of artists that formed in 2015 with the purpose of encouraging watercolor in the Mid-Columbia region and promoting their members’ work. The group meets on the second Tuesday of every month at Yellow Dog Studio, located at 214-B Torbett Street in Richland.

Watercolor refers to a method of painting in which the paint is made of pigments in a water-based solution. Using water rather than oil gives the colors a more translucent look, resulting in a gorgeous palette of pale colors.

Membership for the Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society costs $20 a year, and paying members are given the opportunity to showcase their work at Mid-Columbia Watercolor Society exhibitions. To learn more, or to view some of their amazing work, visit facebook.com/groups/mcwcs.

The show will be on display at the Gallery at the Park from April 2 through April 26. The reception will be held on Friday, April 5 from 6 to 8 p.m.

This March, the newest exhibit at the Gallery at the Park in Richland features works by Harley Cowan and Nathan Robles. This show displays a combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, with Cowan presenting his photography and Robles his sculptures.

Cowan is a photographer and architect based in Portland. He studied large-format photography with Ray Bidegain and became a research fellow in architectural heritage documentation and preservation, with work in the Historic American Buildings Survey collection at the Library of Congress. He has also lectured for the Portland Art Museum, the Society of Architectural Historians, Docomomo Oregon, the University of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School.

The photographs featured at the Gallery at the Park are in a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Manhattan Project. Though Cowan had to work hard to get the necessary permissions to document the Hanford Reservation, he believes in the importance of archiving and recording history. Eventually, he was given authorization to spend a week at the site, which he took full advantage of by photographing everything he could.

Cowan’s Manhattan Project is a unique blend of photography, architecture and history that uses stunning artwork to pay tribute to a significant event in our city’s past. See more of Cowan’s work by going to harleycowan.com.

SCULPTURE

Along with Cowan’s photographs, the exhibit features contemporary sculptures by Nathan Robles. Robles has been interested in sculpting for many years. Growing up, he would receive modeling clay and woodcarving tools as birthday and Christmas gifts. He studied art at Columbia Basin College in Pasco for three years, and in 2014 he graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with a degree in art.

To create his sculptures, Robles often uses scrap metal and other materials that would otherwise be thrown away. He has a remarkable talent for taking what could essentially be trash and transforming it into something wonderful and inspiring, making figures, monuments, robotics and fish that appear dynamic and convey a sense of motion. Visit Robles’ website at wroblewskistudio.blogspot.com.

The Cowan and Robles’ exhibit will be on display at the gallery from March 5 through 29. The artist reception will be held on March 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. Then, on March 9 at 2 p.m., Cowan will have a demonstration and talk on silver gelatin photography methods and equipment. Both the reception and the demonstration and talk are free and open to the public.

If you haven’t had a chance to stop in at the Gallery at the Park yet this holiday season, don’t worry—the gallery will continue to feature its Gallery Aglow exhibition through December.

In November, local and regional artists submitted hundreds of paintings and fine crafts to Gallery Aglow, a show that has been an annual tradition at the gallery for more than 30 years. Now, you can visit the Gallery at the Park to see beautiful decorations and to purchase unique, handmade gifts.

You can also buy wreaths, trees and other holiday décor made by Allied Arts volunteers. All proceeds from these items go towards funding the Allied Arts Association and its various community outreach programs, like Beads Behind Bars and Empty Bowls.

Lucy Dole, a jewelry artist for the Gallery at the Park, started Beads Behind Bars in 2008 as a way of helping young people incarcerated at the Benton Franklin Juvenile Detention Center. Every Sunday, Dole brings beads, clasps, wires and other jewelry pieces to the detention center and teaches beading classes to eligible youth.

These classes give participants the chance to explore their creativity and experience a greater sense of their own value. They see the result of their good choices in designing their jewelry pieces, and each person ends up with creative, artistic, wearable works of art. The classes also allow the youth to have a positive connection with the community.

Fundraisers such as Gallery Aglow are one of the ways in which Allied Arts is able to offer plenty of quality supplies for the Beads Behind Bars program.

Another program these fundraisers benefit is Empty Bowls, a national movement that aims to promote awareness and raise money for the fight to end world hunger. As part of our community’s contribution to this project, the Gallery at the Park displays and sells handmade bowls to raise money for the Tri-Cities Food Bank.

This December, you can view beautiful works of art, finish up your holiday shopping and support your local community all in one trip by visiting the Gallery at the Park, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year.