‘Where I live’

MOSES LAKE — Jan Cook Mack covers a lot of ground with her art.

“She has such a wide range of talent,” said Angela Hunt, a staffer at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center. “She can paint people, landscapes, through rocks, anything and make it look good.”

Mack’s current exhibit at the museum, entitled “This is Where I Live,” features a wide cross-section of her work. There are enormous sweeping landscapes, portraits of people she knows and still lifes of fruit.

Mack, who lives in Wenatchee, grew up in the U.S. and Taiwan, according to the mini-biography posted at the museum. She established herself as an artist in New York City and moved to Eastern Washington in 1986.

The show opened on Aug. 19 and runs through Sept. 23. A reception was held Friday, but it was unclear at press time whether Mack would be present for it.

As the title suggests, much of Mack’s work on display showcases the unique beauty of her adopted home, the Central Washington coulees and palisades. The first painting that grabs the eye from the door of the museum is the six-by-eight-foot oil painting entitled “Stuart Lake,” depicting trees and snow-capped Cascades around a mountain lake. Farther down the wall is “Pliocene Meets John Deere,” in which an ancient basalt cliff looms over a farm and tractor.

“I really appreciate artists who can find the beauty in eastern Washington,” said Dollie Boyd, the museum’s director. “And she really, obviously has a love for the landscape and the people and just the whole deal over here in eastern Washington.”

Mack also has a sizable body of work involving people. Not just people posing, but people doing things. The show is replete with paintings of people Mack knows. One, “Plumb to the World” shows two construction workers marking a straight corner on a building. Another, “Sara Hasslinger and Nosario at Deep Lake,” is a painting of a painter painting with her seven-month-old son in a chest harness.

“There's a group of painters that go out to Deep Lake every year and they get cabins and they all paint, then they go back and have a potluck and they talk about their paintings,” Hasslinger explained. “And one day I went there, when I was newer to the area. I’d just become a mom and I was trying to get painting back into my life again. So she took a picture and then took it home and painted it in her studio and called me years later and told me she had done it. She had been doing a series of different artists doing art, I think it was, portraits of artists that she knew. So I was honored to be on that list of her people. Because I adore her.”

Unlike many art exhibitions, the original work in Mack’s show isn’t for sale, as it’s from private collections, both Mack’s and others’. Mack herself suffered a stroke in April that affected movement in her right side, Boyd said, so she’s in the process of teaching herself to paint left-handed. The show was organized by her friends and family, Boyd added.

“She had a show on the books for a couple of years; we've booked ourselves pretty far out,” said Boyd. “So when this happened, her friends really rallied around to pull a bunch of her pieces out of private collections and go through her studio and pull the show together for her so it could still happen. So we're very thankful that they were able to do that.”

The original art won’t be for sale, but there are prints and cards available to purchase, said museum staffer Natalia Zuyeva.

“We're very happy to have her come forward to a successful show,” Boyd said. “I think anyone who comes in is gonna find something to enjoy.”

“People know her, people love her, people want to support her,” said Zuyeva.

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.