New library panels highlight flora, fauna of Washington (includes photo gallery)

Bell Fox has worked with many Gorge area schools as an artist in residence as one of the teaching artists with Arts in Education of the Gorge. She also created a mural in Odell with artist Michelle Yamamoto on the Diamond Fruit Company building.

“My first resident artist job turned out to be a ginormous 64 plywood panel mural painted with the students at Mid Valley’s summer school program,” Bell Fox said. “I absolutely fell in love with the energy and excitement of the students, and after that first collaborative mural, I’ve continued leading student mural collaborations for the last 10 years.” Those murals can be found at many Gorge area schools from Cascade Locks to Centerville.

Primarily these student murals can be found from Cascade Locks to Centerville.

For the CHS project, inspiration came from a student brainstorming session that highlighted the flora and fauna particular to the Washington side of the Columbia.

“It took a little bit to encourage the students to start brainstorming, but once they got going they came up with so many great ideas along with so many native highlights I wasn’t as familiar with living on the Oregon side,” she said.

The panels highlight each season, beginning with spring (balsamroot and lupine wildflowers), and continuing with summer (salmon, and deep river shade, orchards and the White Salmon River), late summer (sturgeon, dipper birds and poppies) and inti fall (bruin bear, huckleberries and changing leaves).

Spring break occurred right in the middle of the project, so Bell Fox took the students’ ideas and pulled together sketches for each of the seven panels; later, the students helped enlarge the images to 3-feet by 8-feet and transferred them directly to the silk using a line of gutta — a water based, wax resistant substance — to create line divisions that helped control the placement of the silk dyes.

“Once painting began, everyone fell in love with the way the dye rolls across the raw silk and stops at the gutta lines,” she said. “It is a very calming yet energizing form of art, and the way one color flows into the next is marvelous!”

Additionally, each student had a nine-inch silk ring to create a personal artwork serving as another opportunity to explore using dye and playing with water, alcohol and salt to create variations in pigment, as well as to play with color mixing, she said.

It was a new experience for her as well. “After 10 years of working with latex paint, I was so excited to have the opportunity to try a brand-new medium,” she said. “Luckily, Shelley Toon Lindberg (Arts in Education in the Gorge) has experience with silk dye and was able to provide guidance and expertise when ordering supplies and starting the process.”

Lemon said the most rewarding aspect of the project was “giving these students the opportunity to make a lasting mark on CHS was the most rewarding part of the project. Our silk painting panels will be a fixture in the library for years and years to come.”

The school’s last artist in residence was Jane Pagliarulo, who collaborated with students in 2019 on a collaborative printmaking project that was part of The Exquisite Gorge steamroller printmaking project at Maryhill Art Museum, she said.

“I am incredibly grateful for all of the support we received to make this project happen; we have had a lot of community support from the White Salmon Arts Council, Arts in Education of the Gorge, and the White Salmon Valley Education Foundation,” said Lemon. “The project would never have happened without generous funding from the Washington State Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.”